insurance agency to ease his way in with his box.
“Tyler! Where have you been?” It was Mrs. Campbell. She was a big, broad-faced blond woman who sat at the desk closest to the door. She went to the same church his family went to, and she seemed to think it gave her a special right to criticize.
He said, “I had to put your orders together, then drive over here from the restaurant.”
“At Domino’s, if your order doesn’t arrive in twenty minutes, it’s free.”
“At El Taco Rancho they don’t have that,” said Tyler. “I’d have to pay for it myself.”
“Maybe if you had to, you’d be faster.” She was up from her chair, blocking his way and opening each of the five bags, looking inside them at the food.
Tyler began to sidestep. “Where can I put this down?”
Mrs. Campbell glared at him, but she pointed at a long table nearby, where there were a couple of coffee cups. He set the box down and stepped back while she continued to paw through the bags.
The four other women had heard her voice. They came out of the back offices and pulled chairs to the table where Tyler had set the food. Two of them were old, nearly retirement age, but the other two were young, and one was pregnant. The other young one gave him a smile as she passed close to him, and he watched her as she went to the table to identify her lunch. Tyler had written on the bags with a marker what was inside, so she took only a second.
The pregnant one said, “Whose turn is it to pay for lunch?”
“Julie’s,” said one of the older women. Nobody disputed her.
Julie was Mrs. Campbell. “How much is it?” she asked.
“Thirty-four eleven,” said Tyler. He held out the cash register slip. He was sure that she had been the one he had told on the phone when he had taken the order. None of the others sounded anything like her.
“I’ll get a credit card,” she said. She took her purse from her desk and reached in.
“We don’t take them,” he said. “I mean, we do at the restaurant, but I can’t do that here. I asked on the phone if it was cash or charge.”
Mrs. Campbell took out her wallet. “All I have is a hundred-dollar bill.” She held it out, sensing a victory.
“I don’t have that much change.”
Mrs. Campbell looked triumphant. “Then you’ll have to come back for the money tomorrow.”
“But I’ll have to pay when I go back. The managers count the receipts against the orders every night, and everything has to add up.”
Mrs. Campbell took a breath, but the pregnant woman said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get it this time, and Julie can take my turn tomorrow.” She walked over to a desk, opened a drawer, and took out a purse. Tyler waited, avoiding Mrs. Campbell’s eyes while the pregnant woman counted out the money, hesitated, then added three dollar bills. “And that’s for you.”
“Thanks.” The amount of money didn’t matter now. She had saved him.
Mrs. Campbell snapped, “I wouldn’t tip him. He didn’t bring extra salsa or extra hot sauce, or even enough extra napkins.”
Tyler clenched his jaw and turned toward the door. He could feel his cheeks burning in anger and humiliation. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to go to the trunk of his Mazda, take out the tire iron, come back in, and swing it through her skull. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even say anything back to her. She was in his parents’ church.
As he reached the door, she called, “I’ll be talking to your parents about the way you do your job, and the way you treat your elders.”
As he opened the door and stepped out, he heard a voice say, “Oh, Julie.” He closed the door behind him, walked quickly to his car, got inside, and started it. In the car it was quiet, and a stream of cool, breathable air surrounded him. The car was a place of sanctuary. He put the transmission into drive and moved ahead a few feet, but he saw Mrs. Campbell come out the door and step toward him. He quickly pulled out into traffic and moved up the street away from her.
Tyler drove around the first corner, then came along the back of the bus station, turned right again and looked at the front entrance. The pretty young woman he had seen was gone. He wasn’t sure why he had felt he needed to look at her again, and then he knew. At that moment he had felt reckless enough to offer her a ride. It was probably a good thing that he had missed her, instead of suffering the embarrassment of having her look at him with contempt.
Tyler charged that loss against Mrs. Campbell too. She had held him up until the pretty woman had disappeared, as though Mrs. Campbell was acting on behalf of the church. He knew the young woman was nearby, probably waiting inside the station out of the sun, but he had no more time. Already he was going to have to apologize to the other people who worked at El Taco Rancho for taking such a long time. The worst part was that what he really hated was not Mrs. Campbell. It was the way his parents had put him in the power of all of the people like Mrs. Campbell.
He knew that she really would corner his parents after church next Sunday and tell them that he was lazy and slow and disrespectful, and hint at causes for it that were worse. She would tell other people too, and he would see them looking at him with suspicion. His father and mother wouldn’t defend him. They never did, and never had. They would believe Mrs. Campbell. Even if all four other women in that office said he was a good person and a responsible worker, it would make no difference, because Mrs. Campbell was saved, and the others weren’t. They were members of false churches.
Tyler was sixteen years old and working full-time by himself while his parents went on vacation. He always got good grades at school and had competed all winter on the wrestling team and started all spring at second base, but they would believe that rotten old bitch instead of him. They would punish him, take something away from him. It would probably be his car, because they knew he loved his car. It had been his mother’s for several years, but now it was his on the condition that he worked all summer for it.
Maybe they would even have a conference with Pastor Edmonds. Then he would have a chance to add on new punishments for Tyler too. They had done it when he had gone with Diane O’Hara to that party, because she was a Catholic. And then they had searched his room and found that magazine. Tyler’s parents were gullible and weak and more worried about what a lot of people in the church thought than they were about their son. They had never protected him from anything—unfair teachers, the older guys who beat him up after school, people who said things about him.
He wished he could kill Mrs. Campbell and get away with it, but he knew he was being foolish to think about it. He was only concentrating on her because he didn’t quite want to face the fact that the ones who most deserved to die were his parents. They had done what Joseph’s brothers had done to him in the Bible—delivered him into the hands of his enemies—only they had done it over and over again all his life. He wished he could kill all of them, all of the tormentors and the betrayers who told him what to do and never left him alone.
Tyler made it back to El Taco Rancho, swung into his space near the dumpster, and trotted inside. It was already one-thirty, and the lunch rush was over. Nobody seemed to care that he was late. Danny and Stewart were busy scraping the griddle clean, and the girls were all refilling salt shakers and napkin dispensers in the space beneath the television set on the wall. Maria stepped up on a chair to change the channel to a station where a woman dressed up as a judge shouted at people who wanted a divorce.
Tyler started wiping down the tables and chairs with a dirty rag. A few customers straggled in while he worked, but most of them only wanted cold drinks, so one of the girls would leave the television set to draw the drinks and take the money. After a while, when Tyler was mopping, the sound of the television changed. Instead of voices there was urgent music. He looked up and saw the words “Breaking News” in red on an orange background. He stopped and watched.
There were two pictures of the pretty woman he had seen at the bus station. One had long blond hair, and the other much darker brown than she had now, but it was definitely the same woman. The news man was calling her a fugitive, armed and dangerous. Tyler’s chest expanded with excitement. He had seen her. He knew where she was. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was two fifty-three, almost time for the three o’clock break, when half the staff took off for a half hour. The others would go at three-thirty and be back at four to prepare for the dinner rush.
Tyler thought about the woman, and he felt that she was his, in a way. If he wanted to be a good citizen, he simply had to take out his cell phone and call the police. If he wanted to be a hero, he could drive there and make a citizen’s arrest. He had seen her, and he knew that she wasn’t really dangerous. Knowing about her was power,
