Page 44 of Coveted By the Bear

My feet couldn’t move fast enough as I scrambled for the safety of the pie shop. I sought my refuge in the inventory room.

Eventually, Opal ambled in and leaned against the doorframe to the tiny room. “You want to talk about it?”

My arms rested on my knees and my head on those. I shook my head slightly. My eyes were dry. I just didn’t want to face the world quite yet.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” she told a customer. Sitting beside me, she patted my arm. “At least tell me where you got the scars, Mira. That stuff is no good all bottled up. Tell one person and get it out of you. You can never move on if you keep that kind of darkness inside.”

I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words. Time dragged on, and I found the admission more and more difficult. When Opal stood to leave, I rushed the words, “I got them from being hungry.”

Opal leaned her back against a row of shelves and waited.

“When I was so hungry I thought I would die, I had trouble getting around. I ran into things. Table. Bathroom sink. Dresser. Everything was right at the height of my hips. My bones stuck out so much and my skin was thin as rice paper. When I hit something, it would split me open, and I was too young to know how to stitch myself up yet.”

Opal didn’t offer advice or make sympathetic mewling sounds. She listened quietly with her hands clasped in front of her. “Go on home. Your shift is almost over, anyway, and the lunch rush has died down.”

I stood and rubbed my sore bum.

“And Mira?”

I turned.

“The next time a man squeezes your ass without permission, lay him out. You understand?”

I laughed shakily. “Wouldn’t that be bad for business?”

“Like hiring the town witch with a punch-happy throng of admirers following her around?”

I untied my apron and hung it on the hook. “Fair enough. Lay them out. Got it.”

Opal sent me home with two sandwiches. I tried to refuse on account I didn’t work the full day and hadn’t earned either of them. She said my scars earned them for me. I could have sworn I saw her wipe moisture away from her eyes when she came out of the inventory room, but I’ve been known to be wrong before.

The oil workers had taken their lunch to go and headed back to the rig before I left the pie shop. Thank goodness for small blessings. If I never saw Evan McCreedy again for the rest of my life, it would be too soon. And Caleb? Well, I couldn’t see the man soon enough but stilled my traitorous heart. I would just have to get used to the ache as I had done with everything else in my life.

****

“T minus five minutes and counting until the first float hits Main Street,” Opal yelled over the street noise outside. “You girls lock up, and I’ll take our food upstairs.”

“You got it Ms. Opal,” Sadey said. She snatched the keys from me and raced to the front door. “I win.”

I rolled my eyes and tried not to smile. “Fine, race to the top floor.” Even if she wasn’t fumbling with the lock, I was much closer to the stairs and at an advantage.

“Cheater,” she accused when she plopped down beside me at the table in the very middle of the balcony.

Opal was already divvying up our lunch, and the raucous crowd below was enough to provide plenty of entertainment for a curious people-watcher like myself. The whole town had shown up. I don’t know why I was surprised. Everybody knew everybody, and this was the social event of the season. How much I had missed while sitting in my lonely tower on Dark Corner Road.

Sadey opened wide to shove a huge bite into her mouth in a very anaconda-like fashion but stopped mid-strike. “Caleb is on the seventh float.”

I squinted at her as she delved into her ham and Swiss on rye. “Why would you think I need to know that?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Opal said. “Is Caleb the boy from the other day? Fists of fury?”

Sadey gulped. It was a miracle she didn’t choke. “Sure is. I heard about the whole thing not ten minutes after it happened. Pretty sure the whole town did. I tried to call Caleb and get details, but he said he didn’t want to talk about it and hung up on me. Lame. So then I thought about calling Evan, but you really can’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth, so I called Caleb’s friend, Joseph Reyes, instead, and he told me everything. Well, as much as he could tell me while riding in the bed of Caleb’s pickup truck going sixty.”

I crossed my arms. “Did he also tell you he was messing around with Becca in the hallway before he turned Kung Fu Caleb?”

Opal gasped and almost choked on a chip. “Mira, your life is like a movie.”

I snorted. “A horror film.”