Shadows Read Free Page B

year, he decided, was even worse than the first day last year.
    And it wasn’t going to get any better.

2
    “C hili up, no tears!”
    Brenda MacCallum heard the shout from the kitchen, but acknowledged it with no more than a quick nod of her head as she tried to keep up with the changing orders of the four men who were impatiently ordering lunch. Not that she could blame them for their irritability, but was it her fault that Mary-Lou had called in sick that morning, leaving just herself and Annette to deal with the lunch rush? Still, the slow service wasn’t the customers’ problem, and she held her temper carefully in check as one of the men changed his order for the third time. But when Max’s voice—etched with sarcasm this time—came again, his demand to know if she’d suddenly turned deaf combined with the heat of the day to snap the thread of her nerves.
    “I hear you,” she yelled back. “But I’ve only got two arms and two feet.”
    “More like one of each, given the service around here,” one of the men muttered.
    Brenda clenched her jaw, firmly checking the words that hovered on the tip of her tongue, and turned away, heading for the kitchen. Only another forty-five minutes until the noon rush was over. Forty-five minutes until she could find the time to sit down and drink a cup of coffee while the feeling came back into her feet. As she passed the cash register, the phone beside it started ringing. But Brendaignored it, moving on to the pass-through to slip the order onto the wheel and pick up the three bowls of chili that were still steaming under the warming lights.
    “God damn it, Brenda,” Max growled. “You think the customers want their food stone cold?”
    “If they want food, they don’t come here in the first place! And don’t yell at me—I’m not the one who called in sick.”
    Max opened his mouth as if ready to fire back at her, but then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth it. And he was right, Brenda reflected as she balanced the three bowls of chili, a basket of stale sourdough bread, and a dish of grated cheddar cheese that was rapidly turning orange, on her left arm, while she picked up the limp salads with her right. This was not the day to push her, not after this morning, when she’d all but had to force Josh into going to school, and tend with the baby’s colicky stomach as well.
    As she threaded her way to the table where three women—with whom Brenda had gone to high school only ten years ago—waited for their lunch, she caught sight of herself in the mirror behind the soda fountain, and her heart sank.
    Though she was the same age as the three women who were waiting impatiently for their chili, she looked at least ten years older. Her hair, once a luxuriant mane of naturally blond curls, had darkened into a drab, limp mass that looked as if it hadn’t been washed for a week, even though she’d shampooed it this morning right after Josh finally left for school.
    Her face had taken on the first lines of middle age, although she was still only twenty-eight. Which, she ruefully realized as she delivered the chili to her three former schoolmates, was nobody’s fault but her own. After all, it had been her decision to marry Buck MacCallum, even in the face of her mother’s objections, as well as those of everyone she knew. But back then, Buck had been as handsome as she was pretty, and she’d been too young to see anything beyond his well-muscled body and his thickly-lashed brown eyes.
    Eyes, she’d quickly discovered, that never missed a pretty face—and some not so pretty ones, too.
    Within a year of Josh’s birth, Buck had taken off, bored with Eden, bored with pumping gas and fixing carburetors at the Exxon station, bored with her. So she’d come to work for Max, waiting on tables and struggling to make enough to support herself and Josh.
    And then, a year and a half ago, she’d run into Charlie Decker for the first time since high school, and thought her