chapter one

Double Shift

The diner’s coffee machine hissed like it was mocking her.

Wren Calloway wiped down the counter for the third time, though it was already clean, because stopping meant thinking. It was almost midnight, the end of her second shift in a row, and her feet had stopped hurting an hour ago in the way that meant they were beyond hurting.

The last customers were a trucker pushing a half-eaten slice of pie around his plate and two teenagers splitting a basket of fries. Wren topped off the trucker’s coffee without being asked. He nodded the way regulars did, a thank-you with no words in it, and she nodded back. In the nine days since her grandmother had gone into the hospital, small exchanges like that had been the only conversations that didn’t involve a number.

“Go home, Wren,” said Dolores, the owner, not looking up from the register. “You’ll be back here at six.”

“I need the hours.”

“I know you do, honey.” Dolores finally looked at her, and there was something in her face Wren didn’t like. Pity. “Go home.”

Wren’s phone buzzed against her hip. She pulled it out and saw a number she already knew by heart, the billing office at St. Anne’s, which had called three times that week and never this late. She let it ring out. There was no version of that conversation she could survive at midnight.

Dolores watched her silence the screen. Then she reached under the register, took out an envelope, and pressed it into Wren’s hand. It was thick with small bills, the kind collected from a dozen people who didn’t have much to spare.

“The regulars,” Dolores said. “Don’t argue. Harold started it, and he has never given anybody anything in his life.”

Wren’s throat closed. She wanted to hand it back. She wanted to say that she and Edna had never taken charity, that it would take a hundred envelopes like this one to touch the number on the letter. Instead she said, “Thank you,” in a voice she barely recognized, and tucked it into her jacket. It was the most generous thing anyone had ever done for her, and it was nowhere near enough.

Wren untied her apron and counted the tips in its pocket while Dolores pretended not to watch. Forty-two dollars. She folded the bills into her shoe, a habit from the years when the apartment had been broken into twice, and pulled on her jacket.

The night air outside smelled like rain and fryer oil. Across the street, a black sedan sat at the curb with its engine off, the kind of car that didn’t belong in a town like this. Wren noticed it the way you notice a stranger’s dog, with a flicker of attention that faded the moment she turned the corner. She was too tired to wonder about anything that didn’t come with a price attached.

She walked the eleven blocks to the apartment above the hardware store. The hospital had sent a letter that morning, and she had read it standing at the kitchen counter and then sat down on the floor without deciding to. The letter held a number. The number had a comma in it. She had never owed anything with a comma before.

The town was already asleep. The hardware store’s sign buzzed pink over the sidewalk, the laundromat’s windows glowed with the blue light of a single dryer still turning, and somewhere a dog barked twice and gave up. Wren knew every crack in this pavement. She had learned to ride a bike on this street, scraped both knees on the corner by the pharmacy, and walked it every night for six years with her keys laced between her fingers. It was not a beautiful place, but it was hers, and it had never once asked her to be anyone but herself. She wondered, not for the first time, what it would cost to keep it.

The apartment was dark except for the small lamp in the corner. Her grandmother’s chair sat empty beside it, a knitted blanket folded over one arm, a pair of reading glasses resting on the cushion where Edna had left them. Wren hadn’t moved them. Moving them would have meant admitting the chair might stay empty.

She sat down in it anyway and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. It smelled like lavender soap and old wool, like every winter of her life.

On the shelf above the radiator stood the only photograph Wren owned of her early childhood, a faded snapshot of Edna holding a baby in front of a yellow kitchen wall. Wren had never known who her parents were. As a child she had asked, the way children ask about the weather, and Edna had always given the same answer, kind and final: Your mother was someone who couldn’t stay, baby. But you stayed with me, and I got the better end of it. Wren had stopped asking by the time she turned ten. It had never occurred to her that someone, somewhere, might be wondering about her too.

Edna Calloway had never had money, but she had had rules. Don’t borrow what you can’t return. Don’t say yes when you mean no. Cry if you must, but set a timer, because the dishes won’t wash themselves. Wren had been seven years old the first time she heard that last one, sitting on this same floor with a scraped knee and a lost spelling bee, and Edna had set the oven timer for five minutes and sat down beside her without a word. When it rang, Edna had stood up, offered her hand, and said, “Now. Let’s see what we can fix.”

Wren looked at the clock on the stove. 12:14. She let herself cry for exactly five minutes, quietly, with her hand pressed over her mouth, the way she had learned to do in a home where the walls were thin and the people on the other side of them were tired too.

Then she got up, washed her face, and set her alarm for five a.m.

On the kitchen table the hospital letter sat where she had left it. She turned it face down. Tomorrow she would ask Dolores for the Saturday double, and the day after she would try the grocery store for evenings, and somewhere in all that she would find a way to make a comma disappear.

She had been raised by a woman who believed that crying was fine as long as you got back up after.