“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 again, held on until she pushed me away.
“Just do me a favor,” she said. “Make this an honest-to-God rebirth. Figure out who you want to be, and pour all of it into Michelle. No more letting men set your course for you. Michelle’s a shitkicker who takes no guff.”
“I promise,” I said.
“Good. Now let’s go feed some hungry truckers.”
Up until then, I’d made no effort to check in on my old life. Not by phone or text or email or postcard. I’d been dying to hop on Doris’s laptop and google “Hunt for Sarah Roberts-Walsh,” but I didn’t dare: even search items can be traced these days. But that afternoon, Michelle decided to skip target practice and head to a nearby laundromat, pockets weighted down with quarters. Doris had a machine of her own, but what I wanted was a good old-fashioned pay phone, and the Happy Laundry Laundromat had one of the few remaining public phones in the state.
I smiled at the attendant, headed straight for the back wall, started feeding coins into the slot.
“Hello?” Aunt Lindsey said.
“Aunt Linds?”
“Sarah?”
“Listen,” I said, “I can’t talk for long, but I need to know if you’re okay.”
“Me? What about you? Are you calling from—”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Oh, thank God.”
Inside, I felt as though I might dissolve just from the sheer comfort of hearing her voice, but I stuck a smile on my face for the sake of the laundromat’s patrons, tried to make it look as though I was sharing good news. And in a way I was.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Better than fine. I’ve landed in a good place.”
“Of course you have,” she said. “That’s just your style.”
“Anyone been asking for me?”
“Oh, yes, a steady parade. I think there’s even a cop parked down the street.”
I hoped it was a cop.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t tell them anything more than I told Sean: ‘Ain’t seen her.’ And now that’s been true for too long. God, I miss you.”
“Me, too, Aunt Linds,” I said. “I love you.”
And then I hung up.
I thought I’d feel homesick to the point of breaking, but driving back to Doris’s place I was nearly bouncing in my seat. Hearing Aunt Lindsey’s voice reminded me that there were people out there who could be trusted. People worth loving. It made me believe that Doris was real, that she wasn’t on the internet right now, checking to see how much she’d get for turning me in.
That night, I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow. I dreamed of lazy beach days with Aunt Lindsey, when I was a child and she was still young. Sloping sandcastles and rainbow ices and the tide carrying us backward. The kind of days that dropped by the wayside once I hit my angry teenage years.
And then I woke up. I couldn’t say what it was that woke me. Maybe a truck had backfired? Maybe Doris had taken a midnight bathroom break? The plumbing was about what you’d expect from a hundred-year-old home on the prairie.
I glanced over at the clock, then rolled onto my side. That was when I saw him, standing in the doorway, the right side of his blazer tucked behind his gun. I knew who it was before that tall, lean frame came all the way into focus.
“Hello there, Sarah,” Sean said.