Three days after Christmas, Eve drove through a snow flurry to the University Diner for her first evening at work. Holiday decorations hung from the lamp posts along Main Street and the town was dark and quiet. She was glad she was starting back to work during winter break. The diner would be less crowded, letting her ease into the transition from warming bottles to making milk-shakes.
Cars lined the curb in front of the diner and she groaned. Parallel parking. The one driving skill that nearly destroyed her chance for a North Carolina driver’s license. There was a single tiny opening between the parked cars, about a block from the diner. She struggled with the gear shift, rolling the car backward and forward until her palms grew sweaty on the steering wheel and she finally gave up. Already five minutes late, she drove several blocks away to find a spot she could pull into nose first, then ran through the blustery snow toward the diner. This was not a good start.
She was breathless by the time she reached the diner. As she opened the front door, a gust of wind tore it from her hands and sent it crashing against the exterior wall with a bang. Customers, some seated at tables, others at the counter, looked up at the sound, and a tall, young waitress stopped pouring coffee to gawk at her.
“Damn,” the waitress said. “Make an entrance, why don’t you.”
Eve felt herself blush at the sudden attention. The customers, most of them students, smiled and went back to their conversations as the waitress set down the coffeepot and walked toward her.
“Are you Eve?” she asked. “Please tell me you’re Eve.” She had very short blond hair and enormous brown eyes, and she wore a white bib apron over a red jersey and jeans.
“I am,” Eve said.
“Hooray and hallelujah!” The woman grabbed her arm and walked with her through the diner at a quick pace. “We’re so short today,” she said, her accent almost Tar Heel thick. “There’s five of us in the evenings, but one has a bug and another’s on vacation and even though we’re not as busy as we could be, I swear I’m about to quit. I’m Lorraine, by the way. I’m, like, your supervisor, but don’t sweat it, ’cause as long as you work your butt off, I don’t care what else you do.”
Eve smiled. “I can do that.” She liked Lorraine already.
“You have experience?” From beneath the counter, Lorraine grabbed an apron like the one she was wearing and handed it to her.
“Uh-huh.” Eve pulled the apron over her head. “In Chapel—” Damn! “In Charleston,” she said.
“Anywhere near a college?”
“Right near one,” she said, wondering if there were any colleges in Charleston.
“Cool. Then you know waiting on students is the least rewarding, most degrading and best possible job there is.”
Eve laughed. “Right,” she said. She glanced toward the far corner of the diner as if expecting to see Tim there, waiting for her to pour his coffee, but the corner booth was empty.
Lorraine followed her gaze. “It’s winter break, now, so don’t start thinking it’s always this leisurely in here.”
“Are we close to the campus?”
“Very,” Lorraine said. “But don’t call it the ‘campus.’ No one does. It’s the grounds.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You and I have the counter tonight,” she said, “so let’s get to it.”
Working felt good. Once she learned what a “grills-with” was—a doughnut cooked on the grill, then topped with ice cream—she had the job down. She was quick and efficient behind the counter, and it had been over a month since she’d felt that sort of confidence. The students were friendly to her, and she had the same feeling she’d had in Chapel Hill—a longing to be one of them.
Except for the times she imagined Tim coming to find her, she was glad she’d cut her hair. Marian’s hair-dresser had created a soft, chin-length bob with deep bangs that were a challenge to keep straight, but she felt freer and lighter as she moved around the diner, and she knew the shorter hair made her look at least a year or two older.
The only hard part of the evening was being away from Cory. If she hadn’t realized how attached she’d become to the baby, she certainly knew it now. Halfway through her shift, she used the phone in the diner’s kitchen to call Marian to check on her.
“Everything’s fine,” Marian said. “Now go back to work.”
Lorraine chatted with her as they set plates on the counter and scooped ice cream onto fried doughnuts. She was a third-year student at the university, a twenty-year-old journalism major from Galax, wherever that was, and she’d worked at the diner for two years. She was irreverent, straightforward and unpretentious, all qualities Eve appreciated in her.
“Steffi said you have a baby,” Lorraine said as they stood side by side, cutting whole pies into wedges.
“Uh-huh,” Eve said. “Cory.”
“Did your boyfriend give you that crap about withdrawal working or what?”
Eve laughed. “Exactly,” she said.
“My girlfriend got that line, too.” Lorraine licked a bit of cherry-pie filling off her thumb. “Her little girl’s four now. I live with them.”
“How old was your friend when she had the baby?”
“Nineteen,” Lorraine said. “And you’re…?”
“Seventeen.”
“Ouch. Marian’s taking care of her while you work, huh?”
“Yes. You know Marian?”
“Everyone knows Marian. She’s saved my butt once or twice.”
Eve wanted to know how Marian had helped her, but it felt like prying.
“As a matter of fact,” Lorraine continued, “Shan—my girlfriend Bobbie’s little girl—is one of her day-care kids.”
“Oh!” Eve held the knife in midair, thinking of the well-behaved four-year-old who came to the house every day. “She’s adorable,” she said.
“Yeah, she is.” Lorraine smiled as though picturing the little girl. “So, is your boyfriend still around?”
She had to come up with answers to questions about Cory’s father, and she had to learn to keep her story straight. “No, we broke up when I was about six months’ pregnant.”
“Bastard,” Lorraine said. “What was his name?”
“Patrick.” She pulled the name out of the air, but it was a good one. Patrick sounded like a redhead.
Lorraine stopped cutting to look at her. “You’re seventeen, working as a waitress, and raising a baby on your own.” She shook her head. “Girl, you have my admiration,” she said. “I knew I was going to like you the moment you crashed into the restaurant.”
“I felt the same way when I saw you,” Eve said shyly.
“I’m taken, though, so don’t get any ideas.”
“What?”
Lorraine laughed. “Teasing you, Eve.” Under her breath, she said, “Bobbie—Shan’s mother—is my girlfriend.”
It still took Eve a moment to understand. Then her eyes flew open. “Oh!” she said. She’d known a couple of lesbians in North Carolina, but only as acquaintances. And she’d even met Bobbie, a conservative-looking accountant with a thick New England accent. She never would have guessed.
“I’m not gay,” she said. She thought she should make that clear.
“Like I couldn’t tell.” Lorraine laughed again, then grew serious. “I hope we can still be friends,” she said. “That it doesn’t make a difference.”
For the first time all evening, Eve saw something other than cocky abandon in Lorraine’s demeanor. There was a line between her eyebrows, too deep for someone only twenty. What was it like to realize you were different, that you liked girls better than boys? Did everyone have some burden they had to carry?
“Of course we can still be friends,” she said. She wanted that very much.
Cory was asleep when she got home, and Marian wanted to hear everything about her first night at work.
“You’ve got pink in your cheeks,” Marian said when Eve sat down on the sofa. “I think you had fun.”
“I did.” Eve smiled. “It’s not hard work. And one of the other evening waitresses, Lorraine, is a lot of fun. You know her, I guess.”
Marian set down the book she’d been reading. “Oh, sure. And Shan is Bobbie’s—her partner’s—daughter, did you know that?”
“She told me,” Eve said. She liked how easygoing Marian was about everything and everybody. “She said you saved her butt once.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Marian said. “She came out of the closet while she was in high school, and her parents made her life a living hell, so I let her live here.”
“That was nice of you,” she said, although she felt an unexpected twinge of sibling rivalry that Lorraine had also enjoyed Marian’s care and attention.
“So, it’s not hard, huh?” Marian asked. “Are the students a pain?”
“It was on the quiet side since it’s winter break, but I actually like being around students. I was planning to go to Caro…to college when everything happened.”
“Really? Majoring in what?”
“Social work.”
“You’d be a good social worker,” Marian said.
“Maybe someday.” She couldn’t see how she’d ever get to college now.
“You could go to school while you’re living here,” Marian said.
“I want to spend my nonworking time with Cory, though.”
“I understand. But you could get started. Take a class here, a class there. That’s pretty much the way Lorraine started out.”
Marian made it sound like a real possibility. Just one class. She could almost envision it. Except…how did you apply to college without a high-school transcript?
Two in the morning found Eve downstairs, heating water to warm Cory’s formula. Cory lay just below her breasts in the sling, making her “I’m going to cry any minute” whimpering sounds. Eve opened the cabinet beneath the sink to throw away a paper towel and noticed a newspaper in the garbage can. She’d gotten into the habit of reading the paper over breakfast, hunting for updates about the kidnapping, but Marian had told her the paperboy missed them that morning. Eve read the headline as she pulled the paper from the can, and knew she’d caught her landlady in a lie.
Gleason’s Girlfriend Commits Suicide
She read the article in confusion.
Timothy Gleason’s girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Jones, who led investigators to the Gleason brothers’ hideout in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was found dead of an overdose in her Chapel Hill apartment yesterday.
Elizabeth Jones? Who was that?
Jones’s roommate, Jeannie Parker, said that Jones had been distraught lately. “The cops were hounding her and she couldn’t take it anymore,” Parker said. “She didn’t want to be involved in that whole mess, anyway, and now she was getting dragged into it. Plus she missed Tim and was afraid she’d never see him again.” According to Parker, Jones had been stockpiling sedatives from several different doctors over the last week.
Eve suddenly realized that the photograph of a young woman on the right side of the page accompanied the article. She stared at the stick-straight blond hair and pouty lips, while the water boiled over on the stove.