Chapter 4: Two Lines

Six weeks later I was carrying plates at a truck stop forty miles from Howling Bay, and I threw up in the walk-in cooler.

I told myself it was the eggs.

It was not the eggs.

I had been sleeping in a weekly motel room that smelled of other people's cigarettes.

I had been working double shifts so I could pay for it in cash.

Almost no pack member I knew ever drove this stretch of highway, which was the only reason I had chosen it.

The video had gone around the whole coast in two days.

People stopped me at the register to say they had watched it and were sorry.

One man said the badge in the glass was the best thing he had seen all year.

Then they asked for extra ketchup.

Nobody asked me where Dashiell Crane had gone that night, because nobody knew I had left with him.

I did not know either.

He had not called, and he had not written.

I had stood on the landing outside my old apartment holding my mother's teapot.

There I had decided I was not the kind of woman who waits for a phone to ring.

Then the cook caught me gagging at the sink for the third morning in a row.

"Honey," he said, not unkindly. "When was your last time of the month?"

I opened my mouth, and then I did the math.

On my break I walked to the pharmacy across the lot and bought a box with two tests in it.

I took the first one in the staff bathroom with the door locked, and I watched the little window with my whole body.

Two lines came up, dark and certain.

I took the second one anyway.

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