The All You Can Dream Buffet (13 page)

A woman in a retro-style uniform, pale brown with a ribbon of pink stripes down one side, came over. “How ya doing, hon?” she asked. “One?”

“Yes, please.” Ginny followed, head down. There were lots of other single diners in here, but it still made her feel awkward in a way. Across the room, she spied the redheaded Aussie, her braid hanging over the shoulder of her plaid shirt. The woman waved and Ginny waved back.

“Here you go,” the server said.

Ginny needed to be able to eat by herself, in public. “Thanks,” she said, sliding into the booth.

The menu offered home-style cooking: meatloaf and mashed
potatoes, and country fried steak, and biscuits and gravy. She studied it luxuriously, rubbing her growling belly.

Someone approached the table, and Ginny looked up, expecting the Aussie or a server. Instead, it was a man, who said, “Hey. Aren’t you the lady with the dog?”

His face came into context. He was the guy who’d petted Willow at the rest stop back in Colorado. The man whose dog had died. “Oh! Hello. Yes, that’s me.”

“How’s the trip going?”

“Good.” She frowned, turning the menu side to side on the table between her two index fingers. “Today was a bit challenging, but I guess that’s to be expected.”

“It definitely happens.”

“I must not be doing too terrible if I caught up to you.”

His eyes twinkled. “Well, I live in Grand Junction. I had a layover. Fresh load now.”

Ginny laughed. “Okay, that makes more sense.”

“Mind if I join you?” He pointed at the empty spot across from her. “As you might have discovered by now, a person can get a little tired of their own company.”

She hesitated, more because she found herself sitting straighter, admiring his rich voice and good-looking face, than because she thought he was dangerous. “Uh—”

“No, no. Don’t worry.” He stepped back. “I’m not offended. But they know me around here. They’ll tell you that my name is Jack Gains and I run loads from Grand Junction to Portland about twice a month.”

Ginny flushed. “I didn’t think you were dangerous,” she said. “I’m just kind of new to all this.” She gestured, including everything. The restaurant, the road, the trailer outside.

He nodded. “I thought so.”

For one more minute she hesitated, a voice in her head blaring,
HE IS A STRANGER.
The voice sounded suspiciously like her mother’s. “I’d love to have you join me, Jack Gains,” she said, and indicated the other side of the booth. When he slid in, smiling, she said, “I’m Ginny Smith.”

“Nice to meet you. Where’s your dog?”

“Sleeping. It’s been a boring afternoon. We pulled in here around two and have been holed up in the trailer ever since.”

He rubbed his face. “Yeah, that wind was no fun. I was stopped on I-70 for nearly three hours. I heard over the radio that a truck jackknifed south of here on I-15.”

“It’s a relief to know even an experienced driver was rattled by those winds.” She stretched out her hands, feeling the ache in the joints and tight tendons. “I was afraid we were going to end up in a canyon a couple of times.”

“No, it was bad. I heard it’s whipping up some forest fires up north.”

“Seems like the rain would put them out.”

“If they get it. Weather patterns in the mountains are unpredictable.”

The server came over. “You want your usual, Jack?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She scribbled on a pale-green tablet. “Are you ready to order, sweetheart?”

“Meatloaf, please. No gravy on the potatoes, just some extra butter. And coffee.”

“Got it.” She winked as she picked up the menu. “Don’t let him sweet-talk you, now. This one is a charmer.”

“Oh, it’s not like that,” Ginny said, showing her wedding ring. “We just met.”

They both chuckled, and Ginny realized that it had been teasing. A flush roared through her cheeks, over her ears, down her neck.

“It’s all right,” Jack said, leaning over the table. “She’s got a little crush on me and was staking out her territory.”

Ginny still couldn’t look at him. “I see.”

“I’ll be right back, folks.”

The woman ambled away and Ginny became acutely aware of the placement of her feet under the booth, her hands on the table, the shine of her wedding ring. The silence around them seemed alive, buzzing.

“So, where’re you from, Ginny?”

Stop being so missish,
she told herself, using a phrase from the historical romances she loved to read. She was also partial to memoirs about cooks and women who had been brave for their times. She looked him right in the eye. “A little town outside Wichita, Kansas.”

“I’m familiar with Wichita. I do a run to St. Louis once every coupla months. What’s the town?”

“Dead Gulch,” she said, and it sounded funny to her, a made-up name for a dusty western town. “Do you know it?”

“I’ve been through it once or twice. Right on Highway 50, right? There’s a grain mill on the edge of town on the north.”

She smiled. “That’s it.”

“Farm country. Not much to it, is there?”

“You don’t choose where you’re born.”

“True enough.” He nodded, tapping a sugar packet against the table. He had long thumbs, with clean oval nails. “You grow up on a farm?”

“I did,” she admitted. “My daddy grew soybeans, mainly. My mom kept chickens and sells eggs, produce, that kind of thing, from a stand alongside the road. It wasn’t the most glamorous life, I can tell you. I hated it.”

“A pig farm is worse,” he said, half-smiling. The waitress
brought big mugs of coffee and hustled away, calling out to somebody coming in the door. “That’s where I grew up.”

“Really?” Ginny winced. “They do stink.”

He opened the sugar packet and poured it into the cup slowly, watching it. “I hated it, too. Thought about a million ways to escape, and you know what I did? I ended up taking agriculture classes at school. Thought maybe I’d grow peaches.”

“Not all farming is equal,” Ginny said. “Peaches sound like a good option. Did you try it?”

“Nope. Got married right out of school and had to figure out a way to make a living quick, so I was a farmhand instead of the boss, then a truck driver headed for divorce.”

“Sorry.” She watched him open one plastic creamer and pour that into the cup, stir, and pick up another. “It’s not exactly a good life for a family man, is it?”

“No, that’s true.” He seemed to get his coffee precisely right and took a sip. Made a soft noise of approval. Ginny felt the sound at the edge of her jaw, down the side of her neck. She found herself watching his mouth.

She looked away, alarmed.

“I say something wrong?” he asked. “You’ve gone all flushed on me again. Does that strike a nerve? You know a truck driver who done somebody wrong?”

“Um, no,” Ginny said, and laughed a little. “I’m just—”

“New to all this, right?”

She leaned over the table, her cup clasped between her hands, opened her mouth, hesitated, and decided to just be herself, whole cloth, for once in her life. “What if I told you I’d hardly ever left Kansas before last Sunday?”

“Ever?”

“Once, to go to a wedding when I was a teenager. We drove to
Minneapolis.” She pressed her palms against the cup, taking comfort in the solidness of ceramic and heat. “I have never been on a plane, or seen the ocean, or been to the mountains, before this week.”

Tenderness turned his mouth up at the corners, gentled something in his gray eyes. “And now you’re driving yourself and a trailer across the country.” He inclined his head. “What brought that on?”

And keeping with her decision to be honest, Ginny said, “My friend invited me to come to Oregon and celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday with her,” she began. She told him about Lavender—“another farm!”—and the Foodie Four. “We’re kind of an odd bunch, honestly. Kansas housewife, a hipster foodie, Lavender, and Valerie, who was a prima ballerina in Cincinnati. She used to write about wine.”

“But if there are four of you, why are only three meeting at the farm?”

“Valerie is doing something else,” Ginny said, and paused. “Two years ago, her husband and two of their three daughters were killed in a small-plane crash. Her daughter is not handling it all that well, and Val is taking her on a tour of Indian country. It’s her big passion.”

“That’s bad luck. How old is the girl?”

“Fourteen now.”

“Don’t get over that in a hurry, do you?”

“No,” Ginny agreed. She thought of the frantic emails at the time, the looming horror of it. Both Lavender and Ruby had flown to Cincinnati for the funerals, but even though Valerie and Ginny were the closest, in terms of both friendship and distance, Ginny had not gone. She hadn’t found the bravery.

Then.

Tonight she was braver. “I was mad at myself for not going to
the funerals, for being so afraid.” It was maybe the most honest thing she’d ever said out loud. “And I decided I didn’t want to be that person anymore.”

“So you bought that fancy trailer and took yourself on a road trip?”

“Pretty much.” She took a sip of coffee, feeling a different version of herself reflected in his eyes. It was odd—and weirdly freeing—to tell her story to a stranger, a person who hadn’t known her for the whole of her life. “I write a blog about cakes, and I’m meeting some of my readers along the way.”

“Blog?”

“You don’t know what a blog is?”

His mouth twitched. Amusement? Annoyance? “Of course. I was just asking more about it.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

Ginny said, “I used to be a supermarket baker.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Glamorous work, I know, but it was pretty creative and I liked it. Then one day I just decided to start this blog about cakes, and I took a photo of a German chocolate cake I had baked and posted it.” She fell silent, thinking about how that single decision had shifted her life so massively. The woman she had been that lonely afternoon could not have imagined this moment.

Across the table, Jack watched her over the top of his mug. His eyes were clear, the corners creased with laughter and squinting for hours into the sun.

“It changed everything,” she said. “Have you ever had that happen—done some small thing and it ended up changing your life?”

“Couple times,” he said. “The first time, I fell out of a tree and shattered my shoulder. It never was quite the same after,
which meant that my plans to be a professional ball player went right out the window.”

“Ow!”

He looked down, plucking at the edge of a napkin. “The other time was when I stole my wife from my best friend.”

“Wife.” The word felt heavy between them, even though Ginny had a husband, too, waiting at home. In a way it made it safer, and she breathed a bit deeper. “Were they married?”

“No,” he said. “We were all in high school. She moved to town when we were juniors, and Carl flipped for her. They dated for almost a year, and then he went on vacation with his family, and we ended up at an inner-tubing party at the same time, and she looked so damned hot in a yellow bikini that I decided I had to have her.”

Ginny smiled. “That’s kind of romantic, actually. Especially as you ended up married.”

“I guess.” His voice was raspier. “Except Carl never forgave me. Lost him for good over it, and then Debbie and I ended up being just about as miserable together as two people could be.” He lifted a rueful eyebrow. “Bad fit.”

“Kids?”

“You don’t know what kids are?”

Ginny laughed.

“I do have a couple. Grown now. A daughter who lives in Texas, and a son who can’t get his act together and still lives with his mom in Denver. How about you? Got any kids?”

She told him about Christie. “She is so smart. She’s a resident at a hospital in Chicago. I’m very proud of her.”

“You should be.”

Somehow, it was easy to talk to him. They kept talking. And talking. And talking. He told her about a dog he’d had when he was a teenager, a daring and irrepressible Lab. She told him
about the goldfish she won at the county fair that ended up living for twelve years. They touched on movies and books—she liked dramas and romances, and he liked science fiction and action adventure. He said he listened to a lot of books on tape—currently it was
A Game of Thrones,
which made her revise her estimation of his brain. “That’s a pretty dense series,” she said, folding an empty sugar packet into an accordion.

“You read it?”

She nodded. “My daughter insisted, and although I don’t always listen, I was intrigued by this one. It’s really romantic and magical and all that, you know?”

He nodded, smiling. “I do. I love it. Who is your favorite character? No, wait. Let me guess. Daenerys.”

“I love Daenerys,” Ginny said, thinking of the dragon queen and her bravery, “but I love Tyrion the most. You?” She smiled. “Wait. Let me guess.”

He leaned back, waiting. Ginny studied his face, his wide mouth and the crow’s-feet around his gray eyes. Something shimmered between them, soft and pale and ethereal, as if the time–space continuum had suddenly been rearranged.

Silly.

“I think,” she said, “that you like Tyrion, too.”

He grinned.

Rain kept falling. They kept talking.

It was almost four hours later that Ginny spied the time. “Oh, my gosh! I have to go. My poor dog must be crossing her legs by now.” She jumped up and stuck out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Jack.”

“You, too, Ginny.” He shook her hand gravely. From this angle, she could see the silver strands in the waviness of his dark hair. “Take care, now.”

“You, too.”

She forced herself to turn and walk away. As she was about to open her umbrella and dash through the rain, she heard him call her name. “Ginny!”

He jogged over and gave her a piece of paper. “My cell-phone number, in case you have any trouble on the road.”

“Thanks.” The paper felt hot in her fingers, and she pushed it deep into the pocket of her jeans. “See ya.”

He saluted. She felt his eyes on her all the way to the trailer.

Willow met her at the door, tail wagging urgently. “Come on, baby,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I just got to talking.”

Her dog leapt down, blinking sadly at the rain. Ginny tried to cover her with the umbrella as they headed for the edge of the parking lot, and both of them got soaked, but Willow squatted in the dark, peeing on a wildflower for what seemed like five minutes. She shook herself, looked at Ginny for direction. “Let’s get out of this rain, huh?”