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The waitress refills my coffee. The bell over the door jingles. A man in a gray jacket walks in, and I track him to his booth, and June watches me do it with an expression far too old for her face.

“Not anymore,” I say.

It’s almost true. Four years of night shifts and split rent and cheap apartments with thin walls, and I’ve grown a whole life around her. I have a library card. A dentist. A plant that’s stayed alive through two moves. I make plans that reach past the end of the month. I catch myself wanting things, and the wanting no longer feels like a trap.

“Can we get pancakes for dinner tomorrow?” June asks. “Like a real dinner? Not a snack?”

“Ask me tomorrow.”

“You always say that.”

“And I always say yes.”

She grins, syrupy and triumphant. She’s right, and I know it, and I wouldn’t change a single thing about her.

October

The rain starts on the drive home.

I remember the wipers. I remember June in the back seat, narrating a story about a dragon who’s allergic to fire. I remember the light going yellow, and my foot easing off the gas, and the strange, slow way the headlights bend across wet asphalt.

I don’t remember the truck.

I remember a doctor.

“Ms. Archer.” He has kind eyes and a coffee stain on his cuff. “Ms. Archer, can you hear me?”

“Where’s June?”

He sits on the edge of the bed, which is how I know. Doctors only sit when they’re about to take something.

“I’m so sorry.”

My left hand won’t stop bleeding through the gauze. A nurse keeps pressing at it, and I keep pulling away, because the pain in my palm is the only thing in the room I can understand.

“You were lucky,” he says.

I stare at him.

“Say that again.”

He doesn’t. He has the decency to look at the floor.

Eleven stitches close the cut across my palm from a piece of windshield. I count them in the mirror over the sink the next morning. The fluorescent light above it hums, and I stand there and count and count, and the number never changes.

I never eat pancakes again.

Twenty-Four

Motels. Truck stops. A fish plant in Louisiana, a hotel laundry in Reno, six weeks of hauling scaffolding for a man who never learned my last name. I stay in every town exactly long enough for someone to learn how I take my coffee. Then I leave.

In Amarillo, at a county fair with more mud than sawdust, an old man in a fringed vest stands beside a spinning wheel, swearing at a young woman who is walking away from him with her purse.

“Forty years,” he shouts after her. “Forty years, and a girl half my age can’t take a little criticism⁠—”

“She’s not walking out over criticism,” I say. “You threw one an inch from her ear.”

He squints at me. He has a face like a boot left in the rain. “You saw that?”