Trailer Park Heart
Page 4

I woke up in the middle of the night with a massive hangover, an empty bed and a half-torn open condom wrapper I couldn’t remember using. I slipped out of Kristen March’s house without being seen and drove home with more regret than I anticipated.
But my bucket list was done. I’d accomplished everything I set out to do.
And in three months, I would head to college and do the same thing there. Only without the whole virginity thing and Logan Cole.
Or Levi Cole for that matter.
At least that’s what I had hoped would happen.
Six weeks later I puked my guts out after smelling scrambled eggs and everything I had planned and hoped and wished for was thrown into the proverbial fire and set to flames.
I was pregnant.
And six weeks after that, just when I had decided to find the courage to tell Logan, word came back that Logan had been killed in enemy fire in a desert halfway across the world.
That’s when I decided I wouldn’t hope for anything ever again. Hope was for the weak. I had something much stronger now. I had regret. And I would let it direct every step I took forward.
1
Diners, Donuts and Dives
“Why don’t you come on over here and warm me up, darlin’?”
I blinked at the giant belly squeezed between the cracked vinyl of the booth and the Formica table that held the remains of a rather large breakfast and winced on the booth’s behalf.
“Sure thing.” I smiled sweetly, but it wasn’t real. I wanted this man’s tip, but if he called me darlin’ one more time I wasn’t sure I could plead innocent at the trial for his untimely murder. I was three seconds from snapping and losing all sense of sanity.
This was a typical day at Rosie’s Diner and Donuts To Go. Locals simply referred to one of the best eating establishments in town as Rosie’s, but I preferred the full title since it was so utterly ridiculous. Donuts to go?
And they were only sold that way at Rosie’s. Donuts were served through a drive-thru window on the side of the small, square building. If you had enough time to sit down, you had enough time for a full breakfast. Or that was Rosie’s philosophy anyway.
This was my place of employment. And had been since I was fourteen and old enough to wash dishes. I’d been promoted to server when I’d managed to grow boobs a few years later. And now, at the not so tender age of twenty-five, I was used to Mick ordering double bacon with a side of double entendres.
I tilted the coffee pot in my hand and filled his mug to the brim. “Can I get you anything else this morning?”
His leer revealed two missing molars and a long history of chewing tobacco. I swirled the coffee around the glass pot in my hand and held my smile steady.
He made a slow perusal of my body, starting at my red Chucks, up and over my bare legs that could stand a good shave, to the stained ruffled, half-apron tied around my waist and settled somewhere between my boobs and my chin.
“That’ll do, honey. Just come back and check on me from time to time.”
“Will do,” I told him before giving him my back. I knew his gaze moved to my ass and let out a slow sigh of surrender. Five more hours of this shift before I could get the hell out of here. I could survive it.
I could.
It wasn’t the pet names, although those could be intensely annoying, but they also came with the territory. Mick was a farmer. He had farmed all his life. He was approximately the same age as the dirt on his old-as-dirt farm. He couldn’t help all the honeys and darlin’s and sweethearts. In his diesel-addled brain, he thought they counted as compliments.
It wasn’t even the ogling. I could handle that easily enough. Not that I enjoyed it, but I was tough enough to be secure in my womanhood without being threatened by an old pervert’s wandering gaze. To be honest, I judged him the same. The difference was, he appreciated what he saw in me. My judgment of him went the other direction.
What bothered me about this place was the general feeling that everything I did or said or thought was on display. In this town nothing went unnoticed, nothing was unseen. But rarely was anything interpreted correctly.
However how I treated Mick and the rest of my customers this morning would be whispered and murmured about and dissected until someone had noticed I gave Shirly Benjamin the evil eye when I delivered her eggs. And then there would be a made-up reason cycled through town why I hated Shirly Benjamin so much. And was it because her son, the high school science teacher, had turned me down for a date? Or did I have a secret thing for Mr. Benjamin?
Over the course of the day, this tiny rumor would spread through town until I was thought the worst of and my reputation for the trailer trash bad girl was reinforced a hundred times over.
Nobody would ever stop to consider that I gave Shirly Benjamin the evil eye because she complained about everything—like how her eggs were cold, even though I’d brought them straight from the kitchen.
I walked around the counter and settled the coffee pot back on the burner. We’d hit that mid-morning lull that occurred between the breakfast rush and lunch time.
Mick hung around because his two sons had taken over his farm five years ago and he didn’t have anything else to do. Glancing over at him, a heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, I felt a twinge of pity. He’d worked hard his whole life. Sun up to sun down days for years—for more years than I had been alive. And yet, now that the work had been taken away from him, he had nothing left to do with his life except sit at the same booth every single day for hours on end, talking county politics with the other old men that wandered through Rosie’s, and sexually harassing any woman that happened by his table.
The bells over the front door jingled. Another good old boy swaggered in, dirty white t-shirt under stained blue jean overalls, muddy work boots on his feet and a straw dangling out of the corner of his mouth. He was half the size of Mick and mean as hell.
He was also my favorite.
His mouth twitched when he saw me leaning on the counter. “Ruby girl,” he murmured as he slid onto the stool across from me. “How you been?”
I smiled gently at him, before reaching over to fill up another mug of coffee. “Oh, same, RJ. How are you?”
He answered my question by ignoring it. “Any good gossip this morning?”
I chuckled at his bold question. Rosie’s was the social hub in the small town of Clark City, Nebraska. Anybody who was anybody stopped by before lunch for a cup of Rosie’s stellar Colombian roast and a heavy dose of gossip. And then stopped by for supper or a piece of pie afterwards for updates and breaking news.
Lord knows what they had to talk about in the span of a few hours. There just wasn’t that much going on in this town of fifteen hundred people.
I mean, to normal people there wasn’t much going on. The crazies that lived here thought otherwise.
“Dolly Farrow was seen leaving Blake Upchurch’s house early this morning.” RJ raised a bushy white eyebrow, so I sweetened the pot. “In the same dress she was wearing last night at Pug’s.”
“My, my, my, Ms. Farrow,” RJ chuckled. “The chief of police.”
I pressed my lips together to hide my smile. Everybody knew that Blake Upchurch was a womanizing manwhore that had been given too much power too soon.
To be clear, any other twenty-eight-year-old man could handle as much power as the local chief of police wielded in a town of this size, but not Blake. He was one of those guys that thought his high school days of playing starting wide receiver on the football team still entitled him to free drinks whenever he was off duty. But Dolly Farrow had been chasing him since high school. So, good for her.