approached the counter, a small smile still in place in spite of my efforts. “It was a bad idea. I gave him the store’s number. I’m just going to cancel when he calls. It isn’t safe.” I said all of these things with a great conviction that I didn’t actually feel.
“You most certainly are not going to cancel, Anne,” Kate declared authoritatively. She had a pen tucked behind her ear alongside her short brown hair and an inventory clipboard in her hands.
I sighed. I had been hoping that Kate would actually be the one to talk me out of it, because I already knew how I felt. I wanted to go. “He’s a stranger, Kate.”
Kate shrugged, sitting her trim 45-year-old body down on an ancient wooden stool. “I was a stranger too, Anne. Look how well that turned out.”
“That’s different,” I argued weakly.
But it was different. I had met Kate at a small diner on the outskirts of Denver, rather close to the outlying bus station that Murphy and I had arrived at only two days prior. I’d managed to secure a “pay by the day” single bedroom at a run-down motel, giving us, at the very least, a roof over our heads. But it was a small victory, because the sheets were stained, the shower had only let out a trickle of lukewarm water (if it let out anything at all), and I’d killed a dozen cockroaches within the first hour that we’d “settled in”.
It wasn’t that I was too good for it – I hadn’t grown up in anything close to grandeur, and the room was actually quite reminiscent of one of the foster homes I’d been placed at after my grandparents were both dead. But I wanted better for Murphy. I didn’t want him to have the same memories that I did – the same sense of shame and basic self-loathing that followed me everywhere I went. Randall’s trailer hadn’t exactly been The Ritz, but it was quite a few steps up from the place that we found ourselves in.
The diner had been within walking distance – just a mile or so down the mostly abandoned highway. I’d carried Murphy there on the first day, not knowing anywhere else to get food and not wanting to ask anyone either. I had hoped to avoid any and all attention that I possibly could.
But apparently a 23-year-old with a toddler wasn’t a common sight for this particular area. Everyone – from the motel clerk to the waitress to the truckers sitting nearby, plates piled high with grease-laden food – had stared at us. Most of the stares were benign. Some seemed curious. Others were undoubtedly judgmental – disapproving. What exactly they were so disgusted by, I couldn’t really tell, but it only added to the fact that I didn’t belong anywhere – not even there, in a nearly non-existent diner and a run-down wayside motel.
I could deal with all of that, though. I was used to being considered “less than”. What I hadn’t learned about my own worthlessness in my teens – shifting from foster home to foster home – I'd more than realized in all of the years spent with Randall.
Trash. I was trash. Nobody appreciated the presence of garbage – that's what garbage cans were for. There were several points in my past where living in a trash bin – alone, unbothered – would have been an appealing upgrade, actually. So they could stare, they could judge – it was fine. Murphy was my only concern – keeping Murphy safe.
The second day that we trekked to the diner had seemed substantially worse than the first. Now we weren’t just sticking out, we were sticking out in the same place, and the attention was being drawn regardless of my attempts to disappear to Nowheresville, USA.
I also realized that some of the truckers who couldn’t seem to keep their eyes away from us had more than simple curiosity in their eyes. They looked hungry. They looked hungry in a wild, foreboding way that I recognized immediately. It was the same way Randall had looked before he did whatever the hell he wanted to me.
We hadn’t found a safe place at all.
Murphy was focused on the ice cream sundae I’d ordered him, and I was focused on staying alert – aware – while also racking my brain, trying to think of our next move. Trying to think of any move.
There hadn’t seemed to be one.
The circumstances that had brought Kate