Page 31 of The Maverick
"That is the whole question about Valentine, Texas," he said. "The honest answer is, no. It's about as far from anything as you can get without falling off the edge of the map. Two hundred and something people, one blinking light, and the best sky you've ever seen in your life."
"That sounds like home," I said.
"It was."
I noticed the past tense. I didn't ask about it.
"What do you do?" I said.
"Consulting," he said, easy and smooth. The kind of easy and smooth that meant the word was technically true and also nowhere near the whole answer. I'd waited tables long enough to know when somebody gave me a receipt instead of a story.
"Consulting," I repeated.
"It takes me places." He met my eyes. "Like Charleston."
The way he said it—like Charleston was the point, like the place and the moment and me sitting across from him were connected parts of the same answer—made something in my stomach go warm and liquid.
I thought about the Battery. The free walk along the harbor seawall. The live oaks and the parks and the way the city opened up in places that didn't cost anything. I thought about the coffee shop on King Street where you could sit for hours with one cup. I thought about the way I'd been cataloguing these things since I got here—the free things, the cheap things, the dates that didn't require money I didn't have—and I thought about how he'd just paid for the donuts without making it a thing, and how I didn't know what any of this was yet or what he expected and I couldn't afford to find out the wrong way.
I thought about the kind of man he probably was. The kind who took women to places with wine lists. The kind for whoma spontaneous lunch and donuts was the casual version of something, not the ceiling.
I thought about what I was, by comparison.
A waitress from a mountain holler with a used guitar and a gap where her education was supposed to be.
"You're quiet all of a sudden," he said.
"Just thinking."
"About what?"
I shook my head. "Nothing important."
He leaned forward. Put both forearms on the table. The shift in posture brought him closer—not much, the table was small, but enough that I could see the color of his eyes properly now. Green with something warmer underneath, like creek water over copper.
"Rebecca Lynn," he said.
"Yeah."
"What are you thinking about?"
"I told you. Nothing."
"You went somewhere," he said. "Just now. Your face changed."
I looked at him. At this man who'd walked across a restaurant for me and crouched on the floor and fixed my guitar without being asked and then paid for donuts and sat across from me like there was nowhere he'd rather be, and all I could think waswhy.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Anything."
"Why are you—" I stopped. Tried again. "You don't know me."
"Not yet."
"So, why are you—" I gestured vaguely at the table, the donuts, the whole situation.
He didn't answer right away. He looked at me for a long moment—not uncomfortably, not in the way men sometimes looked that made you feel assessed. More like he was deciding how much truth to use.
