She drove to the gas station and filled her tank before walking inside to buy a bottle of iced tea.
As she stood at the glass doors, surveying the drink options, a reflection appeared in the glass beside her.
She considered apologizing, promising them she’d only be a minute, but Bette wasn’t feeling friendly. They could wait.
As her eyes scanned the labels, her gaze drifted to the figure, expecting an adult man or woman. Instead, a child stared back at her through the glass. Not only a child, but a child dressed inappropriately in a pale nightgown, her hair in tangles.
Bette blinked at the girl and quickly opened the door, grabbing a sweetened black tea.
She turned, expecting the girl to be standing behind her, but the aisle was empty.
Standing on tiptoe, she searched for the girl but didn’t see her. Rather than heading for the counter, she walked along the backs of the aisles and glanced down each one. Who took their young daughter out in a nightgown in the middle of the day?
Every aisle stood empty. She’d either gone to the bathroom or walked out the door.
At the cash register, Bette peered into the parking lot, but hers was the only car at the pumps.
“Where did that little girl go?” she asked the man who scanned her drink.
He was tall and slim with a dark goatee and wore mirrored glasses pushed up on his head.
“Huh?” he asked, glancing past her. “Dollar even.”
She handed him a dollar.
“The girl in the nightgown. I just saw her back there.” Bette pointed toward the cooler of drinks.
He lifted an eyebrow and smirked. “You might be imagining things, Miss. I see every person who walks through that door and not one of them today, yesterday, or even this month was a little girl in a nightgown.”
Bette frowned, tempted to argue with him. The girl must have slipped in unnoticed. And back out again too.
She reached into her purse and pulled out a flier.
“Have you seen her?” She held up an image of Crystal, long red hair flowing over her bare shoulders.
He nodded. “On the news a couple nights ago, but she’s been in here a few times. She came in around Christmas time. I remember because she was wearing a sweater with a big snowman on it.”
Bette smiled. She knew the sweater well.
“You’re welcome to post that on the bulletin board,” the man told her, pointing at a large corkboard near the restrooms.
“Sure, thanks.”
Bette hung the flier and left.
Bette found Wes eating eggs at a sunny little table by the front window in Luna’s Cafe, the place where Crystal had insisted they shared a fated coffee only months before.
She wanted to flip his table over.
Bette stopped and gazed down at him.
He glanced up and his face paled.
“You’re married?” she hissed.
He blinked at her, setting his fork down slowly as if sudden movements might cause the whole place to blow up.
“Bette,” he said. “I… I was going to tell you. I was going to tell her. I just—”
“You just what?” she demanded, and her voice boomed across the small, quiet cafe.
“Please, sit down,” he said. “Please, let me try to explain.”
As she sat, he stood. She reached out and grabbed the hem of his button-down shirt.
He looked at her hand, surprised.
“I’m refilling my coffee,” he assured her, nodding his head toward the coffee station. “Can I get you a coffee or a tea?”
“No,” she snarled, releasing his shirt and not letting him out of her sight as he walked to the counter and filled his cup.
When he returned, some color had come back to his face.
“I was lost for a long time, Bette,” he told her sitting down. “The black hole, I call those years now. I mean it, blackouts. It started when I was young, the drugs. I don’t know how much Crystal told you about my past, but I was a wreck for a long time. I was a musician, a poet. I started drinking a lot, smoking reefer, nothing major. And then I met a guy in California and…”
He stopped, picked at his eggs, and not looking her in the eyes, released the next words in a rush. “I got hooked on heroin. I got high during the day, played music at night, got high some more. By the time I left California, I needed a fix every day. I was convinced I’d be a terrible musician without it, a terrible writer. I’d lose my vision, my edge. I chased the dragon and lost myself.”
Bette’s mouth had fallen open at his words. Crystal had told her things about Weston, but heroin sure as hell hadn’t been one of them.
“Are you trying to say my sister is aware that you used to be a junkie?” she demanded.
Weston looked like he might cry, and Bette was tempted to push further, to say the cruelest, most hateful things she could imagine until Weston Meeks was sitting across from her blubbering like a child.
He looked down, gazing at his half-eaten eggs. “Hillary, my wife, found me in Detroit. I had passed out on a mattress in an abandoned building, been robbed of everything except my book of poetry. I had track marks up and down my arms. I was twenty-one and looked forty. She was in nursing school down there. She shoved me into a cab and took me back to her place, detoxed me for two weeks. Hillary fought for me. A perfect stranger who saw something in me my own parents hadn’t seen, that I hadn’t seen. I think that’s what I fell in love with most of all. And I did love her.” He paused and looked Bette in the eye.
She glared at him, not moved by his story. It sounded like an excuse. As if he genuinely believed any explanation could justify his lies.
“And yet you cheated on her,” Bette sneered.
Weston put his face in his hands and nodded.
“We’ve been together for ten years. The first few were good, great even. But then…” He looked into Bette’s eyes. “We drifted. I started spending more time in East Lansing. She traveled more for work. She’d started taking on private nursing jobs. When I met Crystal…” He stopped, closing his eyes. “It was like being on the shore as a powerful hurricane gathers in the ocean. The hurricane is so strong it sucks the water from the shoreline. That’s how I felt, this inescapable pull. I couldn’t turn away.”
Bette bit her lip and said nothing. She knew Crystal’s magnetism. She’d felt it herself her entire life, the force that surrounded her sister, that had drawn more than a few obsessive admirers during Crystal’s twenty-two years on earth.
“So it’s Crystal’s fault. Is that it? My twenty-two-year-old sister was so powerful that you — a grown man — couldn’t keep it in your pants?” Bette gripped the edge of the table so hard her fingers ached.
“I didn’t hurt her, Bette. I swear to you, I didn’t.”
“How can I possibly believe a word you say, Weston? You came to my house and had dinner. You lied point blank to my face and not only to mine, but to Crystal’s, the supposed love of your life.” She shook her head in disgust.
“I’m a coward. I… I knew when I told her the truth, I’d lose her. I never intended for it to go so far.”
“The man with a thousand excuses,” Bette taunted.
Wes sighed and pushed a hand through his hair. He paused and touched the short strands.
“Let’s hear your excuse for that,” Bette demanded.
He blinked and frowned.
“I… Hillary got gum in it,” he confessed.
Bette laughed. “Are you fucking kidding me? Your explanation is that your wife got gum in it? Are you a ten-year-old girl?”
Weston’s face turned red. “I know, it sounds ridiculous, but—”