when Scott was driving,” she said. She could still smell his cologne on her hair, in her throat. She could admit now that she’d been scared.
Rebecca nodded. “A lot longer.”
Driving through the second time was like watching a movie you’ve already seen, Billy the Kid still glaring down from the museum sign, the banner flapping outside the high school. When they passed the gas station, Cait saw a figure hunched against the wall of the shop and the red glow of a cigarette cupped between hands.
Cait heard Rebecca mutter the word “prick” under her breath and turned to see that she was giving the attendant the finger, so Cait laughed and stuck hers out, too, not that he’d be able to see them in the dark. In the rearview mirror, she saw him toss his cigarette and head back inside, oblivious. “That guy was such an asshole.”
The two women started to laugh, gently at first and then harder, until they were near-hysterical, and the atmosphere between them suddenly lifted.
Cait looked at the woman next to her wiping tears from her eyes and wondered, for the first time, if maybe they would have been friends had the circumstances been different. If maybe she liked this woman after all.
She brushed away the thought. It didn’t matter if she liked Rebecca or not. She wasn’t here to make friends.
She was here to take what she was owed.
Five Months Earlier
Cait pulled into the Rite Aid parking lot and killed the engine. It was 8:32 on a Saturday morning, and the streets of downtown Austin were deserted except for a few exhausted parents wheeling their babies to coffee shops and ponytailed women carrying organic tote bags and yoga mats.
Cait wiped the sleep out of the corners of her eyes. The Dark Horse had closed at two a.m., but by the time she’d broken down the bar and tipped out the barbacks, it was closer to three. She’d had four hours of sleep, tops, but most of it had been junk, her precious few hours in bed spent checking the time on her phone and worrying about missing her alarm. Lisa promised that she was ready for a Saturday, but Cait was less convinced. She’d had nightmares about the guy who’d thrown a pot of red paint over her a few Wednesdays before, screaming that she had blood on her hands. The cops had taken him away—the protesters weren’t allowed to touch anyone, though you wouldn’t know that by how close they got, so close she could tell what they’d eaten for dinner the night before, so close their spit peppered her face as they shouted—but it had rattled her, and he was just one of a handful that day. On Saturdays, Lisa had told her, they could have upward of a hundred protestors. How was she supposed to manage them all?
But she also knew that this was what she wanted. Doing this work over the past month had been more rewarding than anything she’d ever done. For the first time in her life, she felt like she was doing something that made a difference, as cheesy as that sounded. It was true, though: she saw it in the relief on the women’s faces as she helped them from their cars and steered them into the clinic, the way they held her hand right up until the last moment, their nods when she blasted Pink or Madonna through her iPhone to drown out the protesters’ screams.
So when Lisa told her that she’d been tapped for a Saturday shift, she’d jumped at the chance, despite her nerves and the fact that she’d be coming off a Friday double. Sisters of Service thought she was ready for it, and she wanted so badly to believe them.
She tugged the tabard over her head and walked the few blocks to the clinic. The protesters were already starting to gather out front, handing around thermoses of coffee and Tupperware full of muffins like they were in line for Antiques Roadshow rather than waiting to shout abuse at a bunch of frightened women.
Cait pushed past them, ignoring their jeers, and checked the barrier positions. The patients would have to drive past the protesters to park in the lot and would then walk the twenty feet to the entrance. A few volunteers would stand by the barriers to make sure the protesters stayed on the other side while the others—including Cait—would escort the women from their cars to the door.