In Reach Read Free

half-and-half in her other hand. She stands and creams the coffee for the girl, then walks away. There’s a dog, too, lying on the floor, a black Lab with one foot missing.
    Wayne lets out a long breath and slides into a strange, unsettling calm. He knows these people, even the dog. The way they leave the radio on at night to trick themselves into thinking someone else is in the room. The stickiness of spilled syrup, left to dry on the kitchen counter. The sweating hands when they check the mail, the answering machine. Ask them, any one of them, who’s waiting for you at home? He knows the answer. Like him, they find rest in these gray walls, the broke down look of this place, the knowledge that people come and go, come and go, nobody stays, because this isn’t supposed to be home. Nobody pretends that they belong. Here, where everyone is transient and anonymous, nobody betrays you.
    He stays as long as he can without drawing attention to himself. Eventually, he tears himself away, gets in his car, and stops at the top of the driveway, unable to decide what to do. He can’t show his face in Reach, the whole town buzzing over his loss of job. If he goes on to Denver, he could get a fresh start, but does he even know where to begin? It won’t be any different in Denver than it is in Reach. Everywhere he goes, he takes his damn self, and for him, the likes of him, there is no coming home.
    When he hears the knock on his window, he mistakes it for a gunshot. He feels for the wound, his hand moving around on his chest, the pain real, searing, and then he hears a man’s voice.
    “You all right in there?”
    He rolls the foggy window down a few inches and leans back to peer out. It’s the trucker from the diner, a leather jacket thrown over his plaid flannel shirt, a toothpick riding his lower lip. Snot dribbles from his nose, and the man wipes at it with the back of his hand. “You been sitting there a while. Everything okay?”
    “Fine,” Wayne says.
    “You goin’ to Denver?”
    “I thought about it.”
    “Because that kid over there wants a ride.”
    The man hitches his thumb toward the teenager hunched by the diner’s front door. It’s the girl from inside. She looks mad as hell and scared, her eyes glassy. She’s on something, meth probably, these kids today.
    “You can’t take her?” Wayne says.
    “Nah. I’m headed to Sidney, to Cabela’s. She asked me, but I ain’t goin’ that direction.”
    The girl sees them talking about her. She looks down, scuffs her feet, then turns and disappears back inside the diner. She’s standing in the outer foyer, between the gumball machine and a bulletin board with tacked-up notices of garage sales. Through the window, they can see she’s pulled out a cell phone.
    “Probably had a fight with her boyfriend,” the trucker says.
    “Or her parents,” Wayne offers.
    “Yeah.”
    The girl is gesturing wildly, her fingers splayed, hands tense. She whirls around. The two men watch her and don’t speak, and finally, she cries with heaving sobs, her head propped against the window.
    “Well, I guess she’ll be all right, then,” the trucker says.
    “I suppose.” Wayne knows what the man is thinking. Someone is on the other end of that phone line.
    “Well,” the man says, looking toward his truck.
    “Go ahead,” Wayne says. “I’ll wait.”
    The man nods. He moves away, and without turning his head, lifts his hand behind him in a farewell wave.
    Wayne sits in his car, engine running, for what seems like a long time. The girl has snapped her phone together and stands in the entryway, eyes dark and watching. A beat-up Chevy pulls into the parking lot, one fender bent like a potato chip. The driver is a woman, middle-aged, her hair a frowsy mess. Without bothering to turn off the car or close the door behind her, she catapults inside the diner. He watches her fold the girl in her arms, pat heron the back. The girl is taller than the woman, but she manages to slump