The Missing Place by Sophie Littlefield Read Free Book Online Page B

deodorant and shaving cream, and the shock of the forgotten scent kept her rooted to the spot for a moment, her father’s memory startlingly present.
    Martin Hockemeyer would have been at home here, a thought that made Colleen wistful. She had never been particularly close to her father, and he had died when Paul was in grade school after their visits had diminished to once-yearly trips to Florida. Even in old age, Martin had been a man’s man, puttering around their trailer park wearing a tool belt and fixing things for the widows while her mother gardened in her sunhat, beaming with thin and flinty pride.
    â€œMove,” Shay said, digging into the small of Colleen’s back with a knuckle. “Else we’ll lose that table.”
    But the waiting customers stepped respectfully aside. “Ma’am,” one said as they passed, touching his cap in such a perfect imitation of Martin that Colleen briefly wondered if she’d conjured him from her imagination.
    The men who were leaving wore bulky earth-colored coats over jeans and enormous boots. One of them pulled on the kind of hatthat some of the kids used to wear at Paul’s high school, what Colleen thought of as a Berenstain Bear hat, corduroy with a plush lining and ear flaps. At home they were a style statement, if a clumsy one. Here, she suspected they were strictly utilitarian.
    â€œWe left a mess for you girls,” the man in the hat said in a rueful drawl. He pulled a wad of napkins from the dispenser and wiped at the toast crumbs and syrup smears on the table.
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” Shay said, tossing her hair over her shoulders before plopping down in the chair and unzipping her coat. Colleen had noticed that Shay became unconsciously flirtatious around men, her voice throatier and a sashay in her walk. “Drive safe.”
    Colleen slipped off her own coat and draped it over her chair. She hung her purse over the coat and, after a brief hesitation, set her laundry bag on the floor, since there was nowhere else to put it. She avoided looking at the plates stacked at the edge of the table; a brief glance at the bright yellow smear of yolk, the rinds of a pancake stack, had made her faintly nauseous.
    A busboy came by with a tub and cleared everything away in a clanking flurry, followed by a sweet-faced waitress with a red ponytail and at least half a dozen earrings in each ear. She wiped the table with a rag that smelled of bleach and Windex, lifting the salt and pepper shakers to clean underneath. She pocketed the tips—one of the men had left a ten, the other a fan of ones—and dug her pad from her pocket.
    â€œWhat are you having?”
    â€œWe just got on the shower list,” Shay said. “Think we have time to eat before we come up?”
    The waitress looked over at the kitchen and squinted at the row of orders clipped to the warming lights. “Yeah, should be fine. They got it under control back there.”
    â€œOkay. I’ll have a western omelet, biscuit, potatoes fried well. Can you do that?”
    â€œSure thing. You, hon?” She looked at Colleen expectantly.
    â€œUm—toast?”
    â€œWhite, wheat, rye?”
    â€œWheat, please.”
    â€œGive her a couple of scrambled eggs too,” Shay said. “You sure you don’t want a biscuit? No? And potatoes, cook them like mine. You got any decent melon today?”
    â€œSure, got the honeydew.”
    â€œWe’ll have some of that too.”
    The waitress left with their order. Shay dug in her purse—really, it was more like a tote bag, a large rectangular brown canvas affair with an appliqué of pink birds—and took out a plain gray notebook. More digging produced a cheap mechanical pencil. Shay opened the notebook to a clean page and pressed it flat on the table.
    A different waitress came by and turned their cups right side up, pouring steaming black coffee without asking. “I’ll