understand. “Not when we can get it fixed for free. And besides, I can’t keep track of the money he owes me.” He opened his palms in a little helpless gesture. She studied that hundred-dollar bill. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he said.
“I mean why would I want to drive out to Lake Waccamaw?” she said. It was just too strange that Lake Waccamaw was exactly where she was heading as soon as she changed into that new underwear. He waved the money again, then shrugged, made a move to get out of the truck. But he didn’t leave. He paused, looked back at her.
She reached for her purse. It lay open between them.
“Look,” he said, “nothing funny is going on here. We just need you to go along in case the car dies. We can fix the car for nothing if we get out there. Ronald’s granny, she’s waiting, and if we don’t hurry, that milk in the trunk is gonna turn. I need a ride, that’s all.” He dropped the hundred dollars into her purse, zipped it tight, and tossed the purse into her lap. “There and back,” he said. “And tonight you and your fiancé, or Randy, can go have a steak dinner on me.”
“I don’t eat steak,” she said.
“Tofu, then.” He smiled. “Go have twenty tofu-bean-sprout suppers on me.”
He was really good-looking when he smiled. Like some rock star. Flashing eyes, sandy hair that fell in his face. He had country-boy good looks, the kind of face that promised wild rides in fast cars though green hills. Definitely the type she liked. “Come on,” he said softly. “My friend over there, his granny’s waiting, and she doesn’t have a phone. All you gotta do is start the engine and pull out, follow that car.”
She clutched her keys and took in his clothes, Polo shirt, good jeans, Nikes that looked brand-new. At least he had good clothes. And he was polite for a guy who’d jumped into her truck. She sat back. It was a risk. But it would make a great story to tell her friends. And Randy, he’d love it that she’d taken such a risk and made money doing it.
“A hundred bucks. How else you gonna make a hundred bucks so fast?”
“All right,” she said. “There and back.”
“There and back.” He laughed.
She started the engine, glanced over and saw the nod he gave the other guy, not happy but intent. She wished she could call Billy, tell him where she was. If she could call Billy, she wouldn’t go to Randy’s. If she could call Billy, she’d get rid of this guy and head straight home.
Katy backed out and pulled in behind the Datsun. Jesse cracked his knuckles and sighed. She saw the batting gloves. She mashed the brakes, kept her eyes on her hands gripping the steering wheel.
“What’s wrong?”
“Why are you wearing those gloves?”
He opened his hands. “Yeah, not exactly sexy, right?”
She nodded, watched his face for a lie. He glanced at her, embarrassed. “I’ve got this skin condition. My palms sweat, get these bumps that open up.” He gave a little shake of his head. “Not pretty, kinda like poison oak. I have to keep hydrocortisone cream on when it acts up. Keep a bandage on them. These gloves, they protect the sores.”
“That’s awful,” she said.
He shrugged, put his hands on his thighs. “It’s all right. It clears up. Just flares up with the heat.” He smiled. “Now you know my secret weakness. What’s yours?”
She felt herself blushing, shook her head.
He gave a little laugh. “That’s all right. I can guess what your weakness is.”
She smiled at him, liked that little secret game of flirting, not flirting, just working that line between yes and no. It wasn’t her way of mixing drinks that made her the best bartender in town, it was her way of mixing up the men, keeping them guessing. She looked away from him. “You think you know who I am?”
“Yep.” He settled back, buckled his seat belt. “Don’t you buckle up for a ride? You really ought to.”
Katy reached for her belt. “My mom made me have these installed. It’s an old truck.”
“I know,” he said. “We’d all be better off if we listened to our mommas more often.”
“Yeah,” she said. She started to press the gas, waited.
“But mommas aren’t right about everything, are they?”
“No,” she said. Her momma had never approved of any guy she’d ever dated. What did she want? For Katy to marry some professor like her dad?
He nodded, looked ahead as if they were already moving. “You got to trust me on this.” He reached out the window and motioned for the guy in the Datsun to move on.
“Trust you?” She laughed and pressed the gas and followed the car into traffic on the highway that would soon have them all heading out of town. She had a sick feeling in her stomach, knew what she was doing was dangerous. But she’d done dangerous before. Frank had pushed her into doing things way past anything like safety. And Randy, hell, Randy was nothing but a risk. But she liked to take risks, liked that jangling feeling in her belly and something sparking behind her eyes.
She told herself not to panic, just the way she told herself not to panic when her daddy played his hunting games with guns. They lived in the country, so nobody really worried about guns going off. Boys were often out shooting cans off logs, road signs, possums. Her daddy was just another one of those boys grown up. He would sit at the open window of what he called his office but was really his gunroom. He’d keep his eye on the garbage cans out back, just waiting for the scent to draw some roaming dog. He hated those dogs getting in his trash, making a mess in his yard. Then he got to where he liked to play a shooting game to keep them away. He’d call Katy in to test her. “Let’s play a little game. I can shoot that dog there or let it go. What do you want? If he gets in the garbage, it’s your job to clean it up. Or I could just shoot him. What do you say?”
Sometimes he was just testing her. He would show her sometimes that there were no bullets in the gun. He was teasing. “Let’s see how much my tough little Katy can stand.” But lots of times he did shoot. Sometimes the dog yelped and ran off. Sometimes it dropped to the ground. “If you cry, I’ll shoot.” She’d stand frozen beside him. Katy learned to chew her lip until it was bloody, but in time she learned not to make a sound.
Katy glanced at Jesse, sitting easily and looking out the window as if he were just a guy on a road trip. She told herself she’d been through much bigger dangers than this. She was a bartender, had walked to her car in the back alley hundreds of times, had talked guys out of raping her more times than she could count. The key was to make yourself human—she’d read that in a psychology class.
It had worked once when her car had broken down and she’d hitched a ride with a man who kept saying it’d be easy to rape her, leave her, and be long gone before she told. She looked him in the eye and said, “You won’t do that.” She told him she was on the way to the hospital, where her daddy was dying from a tumor in his head. She made the facts of her daddy’s suffering real in the air. And the guy believed her. He went silent and drove. He dropped her off at the hospital door and sped off before she thought to check his license plate. She was amazed. She had spun a story of her daddy’s pain to save herself when her
