“What’s wrong with them then?” The woman inspected them like every last doughnut was suspect.
I shrugged. “They’re almost twenty-four hours old.”
“That’s all?” She said it like she didn’t believe they were blemish free, but her hands were reaching for them.
“That’s all. I swear.”
When the box was about a foot from her hands, she lunged, snatched it right out of my hands, and dodged back toward the dumpster. She cradled the box like it was a baby and leaned into the dumpster. As she decided which doughnut to devour first, she kept one eye on me, watching, waiting, like it wasn’t a matter of if but when I’d do something underhanded to her. After settling on an apple fritter, she downed that sucker in three bites. She was on to her second fritter before I’d released the breath I’d been holding.
“If you’re going to stand there gaping at me all night, talk or something.” Chunks of doughnut shot out of her mouth.
“Talk about . . . what?” Dammit. I was seriously in the running for most moronic things to say to one person.
“Something. Anything. I don’t care. I don’t have conversations with a person on the other side that often, you know.” Two doughnuts down, on to the third.
“A person on the other side?” I might as well keep with the moron-trend. “What other side?”
“Disillusionment.” She actually stopped chewing to issue that show-stopper.
I thought over my response—I really thought it over—but one question kept sliding to the tip of my tongue. “And who’s the one on the side of disillusionment?”
“The one who’s convinced life can be a fairy tale.”
I was silent for a few moments. Maybe she mistook that as me deciding how to form my rebuttal.
“In case you’re trying to work out which one of us believes in fairy tales, let me tell you something, Girlie. Fairy tales have been dead to me since before you were even born.”
“I don’t believe in fairy tales. I believe in making my own damn tale.”
The woman laughed manically between bites. “You and every one of us at some time. It doesn’t last.”
“What doesn’t last? The idea or the reality?”
“Both.”
I suppose if our roles were reversed and I was rolling around in a dumpster for dinner, I might have been just as doom and gloom. Hell, I’d been a numb version of doom and gloom a year ago. I wasn’t that person anymore though, and I wouldn’t go back.
“And don’t get to kiddin’ yourself that because you’ve found a little patch of perfect that life’s going to keep on keepin’ on in the same way.” I’d lost track of her doughnut count, but it certainly didn’t look like she was slowing down. “Perfect isn’t real.”
“I’ve known that for a while. Perfect’s fake.” That wasn’t a revelation.
“Not fake.” For the first time, she lowered her doughnut and leveled me with a wild look in her eyes. “Just not of our world.”
That was probably the point when I should have smiled, waved good-bye, and left the woman to her doughnuts. As time proved, I rarely went with what I “probably” should have done. “Perfect’s not of . . . our world?”
She shook her head once, her eyes going up a notch on the wild scale.
“Then what world is perfect of?” It was official. I sounded like the newest member of the head-case club.
Clutching the doughnut box with one arm, she used her other to point at the ground. Her hand trembled.
“The asphalt? Perfect comes from the asphalt?” Yeah, I realized how stupid that sounded.
The woman’s head shook as she pointed more firmly at the ground.
“The dirt?” One quick shake of her head. “The seismic plates?” Another shake. “The molten core of the earth?”
I knew with each guess I was getting farther and farther off my rocker, but I wasn’t sure where she was going. For being such a chatty thing earlier, she wasn’t saying much anymore.
She stuck her finger at the ground one last time before letting out a long sigh. I was obviously hopeless. “The dark place. The place of eternal damnation.”
“Hell? Are you talking about hell?”
A nod. It was about time.
“Do you mean that in the figurative or literal sense?” I was almost afraid to have that question answered.
“Both.”
And that was my crazy tolerance point. I didn’t do the whole heaven and hell, saved and damned song and dance. She could keep up the conversation with the dozen doughnuts I guessed she had left. I was just about back inside Mojo when she spoke again.
“Just because you refuse to see something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“And just because you think you see something doesn’t mean it’s real either.” I wasn’t racking up points in the let-crazy-be department, but something about her last words had unsettled me.
“At last, we agree, Girlie.” Her voice wasn’t shaking anymore. In fact, if I hadn’t seen her before, with my back to her, I would have guessed she was a sweater-set wearing mom of three. “Just because you’ve convinced you love and are loved in a way that seems like it will go on forever doesn’t mean it will. That’s not real either. There’s no such thing as expiration-free love.”
I was really regretting not escaping when I’d gone for it. Why did crazy people have to make so much sense?
Oh, yeah. Because the world was one sick, crazy fuck most of the time.
I WOULD HAVE thought each twelve-hour trek on the good ol’ Greyhound would get easier, or less traumatic at least, but the opposite seemed to be true. When I lumbered off the bus, I was half tempted to buy one of those reliable, five-hundred-thousand miles to the gallon cars Jesse had encouraged me to pick up at the beginning of the year. Anything to keep from cramming in between a couple of linebacker-sized guys who thought eau de funk was that season’s scent.
I wasn’t last off the bus, but I still received my share of stares. I didn’t get nearly as many sideways glances when I was getting off in Seattle, but out there . . . well, my funky, dark style hadn’t made its way east yet.
In honor of Montana, I had on the cowgirl boots Jesse had gotten me last summer. Since, wonder of wonders, the weather was almost summer-like, I had on a purple shift dress, the beat-to-shit motorcycle jacket I’d found at the Salvation Army last fall, and the denim ass purse (as I’d endearingly named it). After enduring two quarters of my natural hair color, I’d colored it darker again. Not black like before and not because I was trying to hide behind it. Because . . . well, I wanted to and I could. Jesse didn’t care what color hair I had so long as I had some. Actually, he probably wouldn’t have cared if my hair fell out. He was all noble like that.
I was the second to last person to step off the bus—small victories—and took in a long, deep breath. Montana still smelt a bit like cow shit, but nothing beat the feeling of stepping onto Montana soil and breathing its air while knowing my favorite people in the whole world were within arm’s reach.
“There’s a pair of legs a man could never forget.”
Okay, some of my favorite people in the world. And some of my not-so-favorite.
“And there’s a face a woman wished she could.”
“Rowen Sterling,” he said with his dark smile. In his dark clothes. With his dark ways.
“Garth Black. Minus the enthusiasm.” I made sure not to return his smile. Garth and I had made some serious progress in the friendship department, but it was kind of a contest to see who’d blink first. Instead of blinking, the loser was the first one to smile . . . and not that curved-at-the-corners one he flashed most of the time. The emotion behind that was the opposite of a smile. We were talking about whoever cracked a real, honest-to-goodness smile aimed at the other person first. “Where’s Jesse?” He’d always picked me up. He’d always been the first person I saw when I stepped off the bus. He would beam and wave, with a new white tee and still fresh from the shower. It was actually one of my favorite sights: Jesse Walker in all his glory waiting for me.