Chapter 17: Nineteen Bags

Waylon's POV

We got to the yellow duplex at two in the morning.

I parked the truck across the street and left the engine running.

Her things were on the lawn in trash bags, the black kind with the yellow drawstring.

A high chair lay on its side in the grass.

Samantha got out first.

She stood at the edge of the sidewalk looking at it, and I watched her recognize it.

Brent's wife sat on the porch steps in a coat over her pajamas, holding a sleeping boy against her shoulder.

"He didn't even do it himself," she said. "He sent two guys from the car wash. They told me he'd call."

"Did he?"

"He texted. He said, Sign what my lawyer sends, and the locks go back."

Samantha sat down on the step beside her without a word.

I started on the bags.

There were nineteen.

I counted them into the truck bed one at a time.

I kept my hands busy because my hands wanted to do something else.

I had spent a week thinking I was the one man in this story who was in the right place.

I had been the one sitting in a cab.

Forty minutes, I had sat there, with a camera running and a clear view.

Now a stranger's belongings were going into my truck, and I was moving fast, and nobody had to ask me to.

When the bed was full I covered it with the tarp and tied the corners.

Her boy woke up halfway through, looked at me, and said, "Truck."

"Truck," I agreed.

"Big."

"Big," I said. "Want to see the engine?"

He wanted to see the engine.

Samantha looked at me over his head and smiled for the first time all night.

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