Clay couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted to rip the damned cast off his leg himself. The doc said six weeks and it had already been five—what was one week in the grand scheme of things? It was just a few hours short of being fully mended. Plus it itched like hell and was cumbersome making it hard to bathe, sleep, and forcing him to walk wherever he needed to go. He couldn’t wait to drive again, couldn’t wait to get back to work.
Clay was a solitary man by nature but that didn’t mean he enjoyed being cooped up all day and night in his house. Despite the cold he made his way to the diner daily walking the mile from his house into town. He was burly, the cold tried to take a bite out of him but he’d lived in these mountains all of his life and was accustomed to the stark winters and the brutal summer heat. Clay was a country boy, hard working, hard sleeping, hard eating and when he was in a relationship he was also hard loving. But the latter hadn’t been for months and months and so now he kept to himself and minded his business.
“Hey Clay, you want a ride up to the diner?” Bobbie Bodeen pulled his car up alongside Clay as he made his way down the road. Yeah, in this little town everyone knew everyone’s business and habits. Bobbie knew that Clay made his way each day to the Last Stop Diner for lunch. But Clay looked at Bobbie’s little Prius and knew that it would be more trouble than it was worth to pull his big body into the little car.
“Nah. Thanks anyway. I need the exercise.” That was no longer quite true. In the weeks since he’d broken his leg in a fall on an ice patch Clay had dropped an astonishing twenty pounds. Daily walks and lack of access to fast food had spearheaded a weight loss that he’d needed to do for years.
At six feet two inches, Clay had always been football player large, but in recent years he’d put on too much and his stomach had begun to take on the shape of Sue’s from the diner. With the weight loss and the free time at home Clay had taken up weight lifting again. He felt and looked better than he had in years.
“Alright, I’ll see you up at the diner. Hey what do you think about that black girl just showing up out of the blue?”
Clay shrugged. “She’s better at waitressing than Sue. Least she keeps my coffee cup filled without me having to ask about it.” Sue was always too busy gabbing and gossiping that sometimes people just got up and get their own re-fills.
“Well she ain’t bad to look at.” Bobbie continued, seeming to forget that while he was sitting in his warm car, Clay was standing on a semi-healed leg out in the brisk cold.
Clay couldn’t disagree with Bobbie’s assessment but she was young, too young for either of them to be concerned about her looks. Besides, women came with baggage and after his divorce Clay had determined that romance would only be brief encounters with people he didn’t want to see again.
“I’ll catch you up at the diner,” Clay said while continuing his walk.
“Alright, Clay. Later man.” Bobbie disappeared down the road. Clay hoped he wouldn’t want to sit and gossip about the girl. There wasn’t much to talk about other then what you saw on the television. Once the gossip about Jake and Bonnie had died down people were fiending for more topics to mull over. Now with this girl coming to town it stoked the gossip mills. Why was she in town? Was she running from something? Was she a criminal, a drug dealer scoping the mountain for new prospects, a prostitute, and why Cobb Hill Mountain of all places?
The last black woman to show up on the mountain had caused all kinds of ruckus with some of the fellas that considered themselves part of the Klan, only they were so poor-dunk that even the Klan didn’t want them. There was only one black family in town and Clay didn’t think the new girl belonged to them.
A while later he showed up at the diner.
“Hey Clay.” Both Mr. and Mrs. Janson greeted in unison.
“Morning.” Clay replied while shrugging off his coat and hanging it on one of the hooks by the door. He shoved his hat into his coat pocket and ambled to the counter.
Several other people greeted him. “Hey Pauline. Morning Sue.” He didn’t know the new girl’s name so didn’t greet her. But she looked up from where she was making coffee and gave him a welcoming smile and he nodded his head in response, took his usual seat and waited for someone to bring out his meal.
Jeb clanged the bell. “True.” He called.
She went to the pass through. “Take this to Clay. He’s the big burly S.O.B watching the soap operas.”
True was working the counter while also helping Jeb with prep. She glanced at the meal which consisted of soup, a double decker sandwich and hash brown potatoes instead of fries. He hadn’t even ordered so she surmised that he had the same thing each day.
“And get him an unsweetened ice tea with light ice.” Jeb said before disappearing to his fryer and grill.
True delivered the food to the big man. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Just coffee, but not until later.” He replied barely pulling his attention from the television set.
Bobbie came over and sat down next to him while he was eating. The man looked around in a conspiratory manner. “Nobody knows where that girl came from.”
“Huh?” Clay asked thinking Bobbie was talking about one of the characters from the soap opera that he had found himself becoming addicted to. He certainly would not have ever tuned into one of these damned women shows had he not been laid up with his broken leg. And he refused to watch them at his house like he was a housewife. He only watched them while at the diner and would become grumpy if he missed any portion of it…like now when Bobbie was involving him in gossip that he could care less about.
Bobbie gestured to the back where True was. “She lied to Sue and said she was staying at the motel but Caroline said she came in and then turned right around and left without getting a room. So I bet she’s laid up with someone in town. Who do you think it is?”
Clay scowled. “Good God Bobbie Bodeen, you ain’t wrapped up in all that gossip, are you?”
“Well Sue says it’s awfully suspicious that she keeps carrying around that back pack. She ain’t staying nowhere if she can’t leave it. Sue said she’s going to find out more stuff about her.”
Clay turned his attention back to his stories. “Well keep me out of it. I don’t care one way or another.”
“Aw come on Clay, last time a black girl showed up alone in these parts a white man turned up dead.”
Clay didn’t even look at him. “Only men around these parts happen to be white men. Now let me get back to my stories.”
Bobbie grumbled and took his cup of coffee and slice of pie back to another table where he could continue his gossiping. The girl in question returned carrying a fresh pot of coffee and walked around refreshing everyone’s cups. Clay took a moment to look at her this time. She was a small little thing, no taller than probably five feet two or three. She was brown, her skin kind of on the lighter side like that singer Beyonce, the one that had caused all that ruckus at the award show for doing that dance. But this girl had dark brown eyes that looked sharp and observant. Her hair was done up in those braid things that ran down over her shoulders in light brown strands. She was pretty especially her lips which had a perfect heart shape.
She hesitated while pouring his coffee. “Can I get you anything else?”
He shook his head, embarrassed that he had been staring. “No, just the check.” Maybe she was down on her luck. He left her a bigger tip than he had ever left for Sue.
Pt 2
“Why is that truck parked out there?” True asked Tiffany when she came in that evening to relieve her.
Tiffany was putting on an apron. “Oh that’s Clay’s truck. He can’t drive it and it’s too big to park on his property so the owner lets him keep it here. They used to bump uglies,” she whispered. “You won’t see her around now that she’s got enough money to move off this mountain.” Tiffany gave True a long look. “Why in the world would you want to come to Estill County? This place is deader than dead. The most important thing that ever happens around here is the mushroom festival and one of the Back Street Boys was born here.”
True brushed invisible limp from her apron. “Well I wasn’t planning on coming here. I was making my way down south and this is where I ended up.”
Tiffany didn’t say anything for a moment and then she gave the younger woman’s arm a gentle pat. “Well I hope you plan to stay around for a while. Since you came to town we got more people coming in just to get a look at you. Sorry, sugah but we don’t get many new people around these parts and hardly any black people.”
True nodded. “I figured that was the case. And I have no plans to go anywhere anytime soon.” She had a job and if she left how easy would it be for her to get another one? At least this way she could save some money until she decided on her next step. It felt good not to worry about money or Carlos and how to keep him happy. It felt good to be on her own even if she was basically homeless and destitute.
That night she washed out her undies in the bus stops bathroom and carried them back to the truck where she had kept one of the doors unlocked for ease of entry. She hung them up on the various shelves hoping they would dry by morning. She didn’t want to keep returning to the bus depot. The workers there watched her suspiciously and she didn’t want them knowing that she went there to bathe.
True liked the little sleeper compartment of the truck. Her body heat kept the small space comfortable and she had blankets to snuggle under. She saw that there was a plug that led to the television set and microwave but didn’t dare try to use those things. She didn’t know if there was a generator but didn’t want to waste the owner’s fuel or drag down his battery, plus what if it set off some alarm? She wanted to make as little contact as possible so that hopefully her presence would go undetected but she did place his papers in the drawer so that her drying undies didn’t ruin them and she set about trying to fix the things that she had broken when falling through the window.
True felt good and rested the next morning when she went in to work. It was Friday and she would get paid. She planned to do some exploring about town, find a laundromat and a store where she could pick up some personal items and buy glue to fix the molding she’d broken. It was time for her to make Cobb Hill her home, at least for the time being.
But when she looked at her paycheck she was disappointed when she saw that it was less than even the tips that she’d collected. In all she had only made eighty dollars this week and when she went to cash the check at a corner grocery store she was forced to spend a good chunk of her earnings on her personal items. Although it had been a short week and next week’s check would be better that didn’t help her now. She would just have to work more doubles. She knew Tiffany wouldn’t mind.
Instead of returning to the motel, that night True went back to the truck. She needed to stay there another week.