“Easy as breathing,” I said.
She thought it over.
“I’ll give you three hundred a week to start, plus room and board—board being whatever you want to fix for yourself here at the diner. It’s not the best deal in the world, but it’s what I can afford.”
For the second time that day, I thrust my hand across the counter.
“Deal,” I said.
Chapter 25
“SO GLAD you found your place in the world,” Haagen said, looking at her watch, “but can we speed this along?”
“You’re the one who asked for every detail.”
This was the closest I’d come to talking back.
“Every relevant detail,” she said.
“I thought the relevance was for you to decide?”
She didn’t have anything to say to that. Her interruption only made me want to go slower. Detective Haagen, with her ramrod posture and her smug little frown, was becoming someone I seriously disliked.
“So can I continue?” I asked.
She nodded and snarled at the same time.
It took me a couple of days to get settled, a full week to make every item on the menu my own, but from there it was smooth sailing. I added ginger and lemon to the roast chicken, pepper and a touch of paprika to the cheddar burger. I got rid of the powdered mashed potatoes and started from scratch, adding a healthy dose of onion and garlic. Once we sold out of the frozen pies, I replaced them with my own homemade recipes: almond flour and vanilla extract in the key lime, Granny Smiths and a touch of sour cream in the apple.
The customers weren’t increasing in number, but they were eating more, coming back for seconds and sometimes thirds. I even got the line cook lingo down:
“Two Ts on the hoof, sticks in the alley, and my radio’s waiting,” Doris would yell.
“On it,” I’d yell back.
Still, every time the little Liberty Bell above the entrance rang, I’d feel a quick jolt of fear, like maybe it was a state trooper or a fed or a plain old cop come to haul me away. This fear meant that, as much as possible, I kept to the kitchen, out of sight of the customers.
When I did venture through the double doors, I seemed to get noticed. Once, as I was on my way to the restroom, a trucker at the counter stopped me to say how much he’d enjoyed his flapjacks. Then he gave me a long once-over.
“Your name’s Michelle, right?” he said.
I nodded.
“You’re her, aren’t you?”
“Her?”
“You were in that movie? What’s it called? The one where you drown at the end?”
I’d started to claim mistaken identity when a customer two stools down said, “Michelle! That’s Michelle Brown. You researching a role? Gonna be in one of those trucker serial-killer flicks?”
By now, every head at the counter was turned toward me.
“Give us a little Shakespeare,” yelled a man in a Texas Rangers cap seated at the far end. It sounded like a catcall.
“I don’t act anymore, fellas,” I said, and walked away.
The fellas was me playing to my audience, trying out a word Sarah Roberts-Walsh would never use. I liked it. It felt like something Marilyn Monroe or Mae West might say. I thought, Maybe this is my cover story. Michelle Brown, failed actress. Maybe that’s who I am now.
Meanwhile, life as Doris’s housemate was going just fine. At first I had trouble sleeping in the palatial but rickety spare bedroom, where I made a nightly roundup of spiders and moths before switching off the light. The ancient windows that looked as though they might disintegrate if you so much as tapped them did nothing to block out the not-so-distant hum of the highway, and the sound of a car driving past Doris’s property would have me sitting bolt upright in bed. Little by little, though, I calmed down. The highway became white noise. I stopped noticing local traffic. And fourteen-hour days on my feet had me falling asleep before my head hit the pillow.
Doris and I were so busy at the diner that just about the only socializing we did outside of work was during target practice. Every day, between lunch and dinner, Doris had me out on her meadowlike lawn, shooting at cans.
“Someday you might actually hit one,” she joked.
The problem, for me, was the recoil. I couldn’t pull that trigger without being knocked backward, without the bruise on my shoulder turning a new and darker shade. Day after day, I looked like a comic practicing her pratfalls. Until the day I didn’t. Until the day—which at first didn’t feel any different from any other day—I found my balance and cleared the field.
“Well, I’ll be,” Doris said. “We’re going to have to find you smaller cans.”
Roughly three weeks into my new life, Doris announced that she had a gift for me. She was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, before sunup, as I came stumbling down in my all-white line cook’s outfit. I could smell coffee in the background—about the only thing Doris made at home.
“Here you go,” she said, handing over a small box meticulously wrapped in shiny polka-dotted paper, a red bow sitting on top.
My morning fog lifted. I felt half-giddy, half-embarrassed: shouldn’t it have been me giving Doris a gift? I hugged her, then took the box and carefully peeled away the wrapping. Inside, beneath a bed of yellow rose petals, I found a forged driver’s license featuring my photo and borrowed name: Michelle Brown. Michelle was thirty (a generous guess on Doris’s part), weighed 120 (another generous guess), and lived on Serpentine Road in Phoenix, Arizona.
“How did you…”
“I may be a hick,” Doris said, “but I’m a hick with resources. Consider it a housewarming. And don’t ask any more questions.”
I’m not ashamed to say that I got a little teary. Doris put herself at risk. She committed a crime on my behalf. More importantly, she believed me. I hugged her
