Chapter 75
By the time she returned to the house, the urge to call Bethany hadn’t really passed, but it was usually too late now to do anything about it. Phoning someone at midnight wasn’t unheard of, but Dana couldn’t in good conscience pick up the phone at three in the morning, not when she knew Bethany had to be to work in a few hours. So she’d collapse into bed, exhausted, and drift into a thin sleep haunted by dreams in which she tried calling but every time she picked up the phone, she could never remember the number.
In the morning after nights like these, she woke up feeling disoriented and heartbroken. Would she neverget over Bethany?
Would she ever want to?
* * * *
November 1999
After Halloween, Dana was pleasantly surprised when one of her applications struck gold. Well, no, not exactly—she got a call from a possible employer, yes, but it wasn’t for any sort of real career position, nothing she’d been hoping for, nothing that would pay rent or bills or let her move out on her own any time soon. It was a seasonal retail position at the downtown mall after hours, unloading trucks and restocking shelves, maintaining inventory, that sort of thing. But it was a paycheck, at least, and though she avoided the mall like the plague—particularly during the holidays—she didn’t have to be into work until ten o’clock at night, after the customers were already gone.
By her second week of work, though, she was bored. The overnight shift seemed longer than it probably was, and as the hours dragged by, the boxes she had to move from the trucks out onto the sales floor grew heavier. Even if the ones filled with only fluffy sweaters and underwear weighed a ton. Dana didn’t particularly like any of her coworkers—they were all older women her mother’s age, at least, who had been doing the same job for years and already knew each other well. She felt like an outsider barging in, or worse, the new girl at school. When they snuck off for smoke breaks, Dana was left behind still working, and during the half hour they all took at two-thirty for “lunch,” she sat by herself in the break room, eating a microwave frozen entree with her nose in a book, trying to ignore the others more than they were ignoring her.
It’s only through Christmas, she told herself. Less than eight weeks away. I’ll find something else when the new year starts. Just get me through Christmas, that’s all I ask.
Her shift ended at six-thirty. The mall’s food court wasn’t open that early, but the nearby Denny’s just off the interstate operated twenty-four hours, and Dana had acquired a taste for their food during exam weeks while in college. Whenever she and Bethany needed an energy boost while studying, they used to head off campus in the wee hours of the night for a Grand Slam platter, or the Moons Over My Hammy sandwich, and they both had smuggled Denny’s coffee mugs back to their dorm rooms afterward. Once Bethany even tried to get a free breakfast by claiming it was her birthday, but the waiter asked for ID and she said she didn’t have it on her so he wouldn’t know she was lying.
Ah, good times, Dana thought as she pulled into an empty parking spot in front of the Denny’s near the mall. The sun was just barely peeking over the horizon; in another week or two, it would be pitch black when she got off from work. She knew she should save her money and not splurge on breakfast every morning, but those Lean Cuisine meals she ate in the middle of the night just didn’t cut it. Sure, her mother had eggs and bread at home, but why make her own breakfast when someone at Denny’s could do it for her?
Plus, they had bacon at Denny’s, and Dana’s mother didn’t keep bacon in the fridge. End of story.
There were a few other cars in the parking lot besides her—Denny’s was popular with the older crowd, people who were normally up at six A.M. and came out for coffee and the cheap senior menu, then hogged the counter to gab and chatter while sipping free refills. So she didn’t pay any particular attention to the other vehicles, and it was only when she opened the door that she caught the reflection of a familiar car in the polished chrome handle.
No. It couldn’t be. Was that…?
Taking a step into the diner, Dana turned and frowned out at the parking lot. She couldn’t see the license plate from where she stood, and there had to be hundreds of dark blue Toyota Corollas on the road, right? Millions, even. Bethany wasn’t the only person who owned one.