Page 24 of Just One More Thing

I flip the lid open.

Glazed.

Old-fashioned.

Crullers.

Then what used to be a chocolate.

A chocolate for courage.

That was ours.

When we were kids, if one of us had to do something we didn’t want to do, Maddy would slide a chocolate doughnut across the counter and say courage. Somewhere along the way, it became our thing. Chocolate if you had to apologize. Chocolate if you had to tell the truth. Chocolate when we needed a little bravery.

She remembered.

Not just me. The details. The old-fashioned I always said I didn’t want and ate anyway. The crullers. The glazed. The chocolate.

Ten years, and she still remembered.

I set one hand on the bar beside the box and scan the doughnuts again.

Something’s off.

I count once.

Then again.

There should be one more.

Slowly, I lower the lid and look at Hank. He stares back at me from the floor, eyes a little glassy, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, his inner peace clearly achieved.

I narrow my eyes. “Hank.”

He immediately closes his eyes and starts fake snoring.

“You big fatty.”

His fake snore gets louder.

The zoomies weren’t random.

He ate a doughnut.

Then the whole thing hits me at once. I grab the edge of the bar because I start laughing so hard I can’t stand up straight.

Hank cracks one eye open to check whether I’m done yet.

I point at him, still laughing. “We both got wrecked by the same pink box.”

CHAPTER 9

EMORY

The Salty Dog sits at the edge of The Green as if it blew in one summer on a salty breeze and nobody had the heart to tell it to move along. Yellow and white striped umbrella. A hand-painted sign with a bulldog in a fisherman’s slicker hat and a curved pipe in his mouth, looking like a retired seaman.

The menu is written on an old green chalkboard in faded white paint.