The All You Can Dream Buffet (17 page)

Plucking a serving spoon from the pile of utensils, she swept across the bottom of the sink, bringing up the spoon, the cup, and finally her phone.

Her dripping-wet, soaked-to-the-microchips smartphone. The screen was blank. Water poured from beneath the case and
the various openings—speakers and plug-in spots. Her heart sank.

But she didn’t give in. She pried the cover off and dried it thoroughly. What dried out electronics? Was it oatmeal? No, rice.

Which she didn’t have.

Willow cocked her head as she watched Ginny wring her hands, and something about her whiskey-colored eyes, the patience and simple curiosity there, calmed Ginny down. “It’s only a phone, right? Not the end of the world. I’ll get some rice and we’ll try to dry it out, but what’s the worst that could happen? It’s a dead phone. No big deal.”

Willow wagged her tail.

For a minute, Ginny held the dead phone in her hand, feeling strange. How long since she’d been out of touch,
completely
out of touch? Of course, she could always fire up the computer if she needed to, but that was not an issue this morning.

She put on a light jacket and walked over to the truck-stop diner. It was pretty slow now, at almost eight. The truckers had all moved on very early, no doubt trying to make up for the lost time from yesterday. A girl with long black hair was separating receipts at the cash register. “One for breakfast?”

“No, thanks. I have a request. I soaked my phone and need to get some rice. Would your manager let me buy a couple of cups?”

“Whoa, that sucks.” The girl grinned. “Let me go find out. Just ordinary rice, right?”

“I guess.”

The girl went into the kitchen, and Ginny spied the waitress from the night before sitting in a booth, eating. Long night. The woman spied her, and her eyes turned to slits. She waved Ginny over.

As Ginny crossed the room, the woman took a piece of paper out of her pocket and slid it across the table. “He left this for you. I don’t know why he didn’t give it to you himself.”

“He?”

“Jack.”

Ginny ran her finger along the fold of the paper, thinking of him walking away with wet shoulders last night.

“Careful there, sweetheart.” The woman had two tiny, identical smears of mascara under each lower lid. “He’s not exactly the settling kind.”

Ginny tucked his note into her jeans pocket. “I’m married.”

“So you say.” She picked up her toast with work-reddened fingers. “Just a friendly warning.”

“Thanks.” In her peripheral vision, Ginny caught sight of the hostess coming back from the kitchen. “See you.”

The note poked her thigh as she headed to the front, as if the corner were a knife. The girl handed over a plastic bag of rice. “Two dollars.”

Ginny passed over the money.

“Good luck!”

Dead phone,
she thought, pushing out into the sunny morning,
but a note from a guy.
Why had he given it to the server? Why hadn’t he just left it on her windshield or tapped on her door?

She waited to read it until she had tucked the phone into the bag of rice and finished securing the trailer. Willow leapt up into the backseat of the Jeep. Ginny stood at the driver’s side door and pulled out the folded paper. Sun fell unobstructed on the back of her neck and hit the paper with such strong reflection that she had to squint to read the blue ink.

His handwriting was strangely elegant, all triangles and points, not at all what she was expecting.

Ginny touched her nose with its freckles and thought for one hot second about his gray eyes, his kindly smile. As she stood there in an ugly truck-stop parking lot, under a vast blue sky, holding the first note a man had ever written to her, she felt a sense of opening, as if there had been mountains standing between her real life and the false one she’d been living and she’d suddenly spied a road through them.

She wouldn’t call him, of course. That was how affairs started, and she was a better woman than that. But she gave herself a minute to think about him admiring her freckles and breasts or maybe her bottom when she walked away. The air smelled of cotton candy and rumpled sheets and all the things she’d been missing for so long.

In her neat way, she folded the paper exactly as he had, then tucked it into the glove box, where it would be safe but out of sight.

Then, with deliberation, she turned her thoughts to her friends waiting for her in Oregon. Only one more night on the road, and she’d be with them!

Ginny skirted the Great Salt Lake and headed north into Idaho by late morning. The traffic thinned considerably, not surprising for a Thursday. She saw other RV’ers like herself, and single people in Subarus on long-distance drives, and the odd trucker catching up and overtaking her.

The day was very hot. Even with the air conditioner blowing full blast, Ginny sweated down her back and under her hair. She stopped to water and walk Willow twice as often as usual, worried that she would get dehydrated, and finally rolled the windows in back down halfway so the dog could get some strong air.

Something made Ginny start to sneeze, but she left the windows down anyway.

More worrisome were the clouds on the horizon, now stretching over the mountains from east to west as far as Ginny could see. They were low and thick, but sun poked through them here and there, so maybe it wasn’t anything to worry about. She didn’t want to start getting paranoid about rain.

If she’d had her phone, she could have checked the weather. Instead, she turned the radio dial, trying to find a local station. She picked one up out of Salt Lake City, then got a scratchy country station from Boise that never did give the weather or anything else, just inane patter she thought might be canned elsewhere, paid for by the radio station.

She flipped it off. If the weather got bad, she’d stop.

But as she came closer to Boise, the clouds boiled closer and deeper across the road, as if a dragon were breathing, and she caught a hard whiff of smoke.

Was it a
fire
? Jack had mentioned the winds whipping up forest fires. She slowed down, peering over the windshield at the slate-colored clouds, but she didn’t really know if they looked any different than regular storm clouds. In a way, a fire would be less daunting—she wouldn’t have to drive through rain and lightning, worried sick that she’d slide off the road. The highway ran alongside the mountains, not through them.

And at least the clouds blotted out the sun, letting things cool off a little. She turned the radio back on, just in case she could pick up weather reports as she got closer to Boise, and sang along.

Her mind wandered as the Jeep gulped down the miles. A thousand things rose up in her mind and then drifted away—memories, possibilities, recipe ideas. A collection of ranch buildings, all roofed in green metal, made her think inexplicably of a bicycle she’d had as a child, which she rode on the gravel roads through the country, wind in her hair. She’d skinned her knees and elbows and eaten dirt a thousand times falling off that bike. She’d begged for a little motorcycle as a young teen, but that idea had been nixed.

The memory made her wrinkle her brow. Once, she’d been bold. Mighty. What had happened along the way to change that?

Trying to get out of Dead Gulch, maybe. Almost succeeding, then failing in such an ordinary, boring way. Pregnant. Married too young.

She wouldn’t trade Christie, of course. Her daughter had
ended up being a great blessing. But if she had it to do again, would she marry Matthew?

Once upon a time, she had not been indifferent to him. She thought of seeing Marnie’s husband grabbing her ass at a barbecue one night. Ginny had been in the bathroom and they thought themselves unobserved, and it was a real grab, his fingers digging into her cheek, one sliding down between. Ginny nearly melted in pure envy. Bobby was not a good-looking man, with his balding head and big nose, but he’d always been lusty like that. You had the sense that he’d just take you hard and holler loud and make sure you came just as he did.

It wasn’t until she was nearly upon it that she realized that the cloud had changed, deepened. It billowed downward, cascading over the front of the mountainside.

Fire.

She pulled to the side of the road, astonished and oddly giddy. Bright orange flames burned in a serpentine pattern against the hill—up one, down the next, and up the next and down.

Without even thinking, she grabbed her camera from the backseat. Willow whined, but Ginny said, “Stay, baby. I’ll be right back.”

She dashed down the slope from the road and ducked between two strands of barbed wire, checking only in a cursory way for bulls that might charge. The fire was some distance away, but the animals would be running away from it, not toward it.

As if to emphasize that, a knot of antelopes, small and fleet, dashed into her line of vision. Ginny trained her lens on them and shot a fast series of photos: the darkness behind them, the orange line of fire, the animals fleeing. Great shots! A swell of artistic pleasure swam through her.

She trained the camera on the flames, which were burning downward at an amazing rate, gobbling up trees and shrubs like an angry dragon. Cars raced by on the highway, and she heard sirens somewhere.

She had no idea how much time had passed when she heard Willow barking frantically in the car. She lowered the camera and froze. The flames roared over the mountain right in front of her, breathing and moving like a live being, licking out, spilling over the top, then disappearing.

She could not breathe. Her legs wouldn’t move. Her camera was halfway to her chest, held out like a shield.

Ash and blackened debris fell like snow through the air, some still carrying fire on its tail. She saw one ember catch the grass near her feet, and still she could not—

“Lady, what the fuck are you doing? Get out of here!”

She whirled, body loosened, and saw a young firefighter, grubby and smeared with ashes, waving her away. She glanced over her shoulder—a wall of fire was roaring down the mountain.

Her paralysis shattered. She ran, feeling cinders sting her face and arms, praying her hair would not catch. Diving between the strands of barbed wire, she cursed herself for putting Willow in danger like this. She’d never forgive herself if anything happened to her dog.

A barb caught her shoulder and shirt and ripped deep. Ginny cried out, ducking lower, but the shirt tore as she pulled away. It made her stumble, and the camera banged against her knee. Willow was barking frantically, and a horn blared somewhere nearby, and Ginny heard herself panting and sobbing like an animal. She caught her jeans on the wire, extricated herself, and bolted up the hill, actually hearing the fire that licked at her heels.

She opened the door to the Jeep and flung the camera inside, then jumped in and started the engine, only to realize that the fire had crossed the highway in front of her. A ripple of primeval horror made every hair on her body stand straight out. As if that would protect her.

Willow howled.

“Oh, baby, it’s okay. I promise. I promise.” She roared into action, seeing a flat area just ahead where she could turn around. The trailer bumped behind her, and a row of fire trucks and emergency vehicles roared by, headed for the fire line. Ginny’s hands shook as she turned the truck around and forced her way back into the traffic fleeing the fire. A woman ahead of her had a Subaru packed to the gills with household goods. A guitar leaned against a stack of books.

In the rearview mirror, she saw the billowing black cloud backlit with hellish pink light. The smell of the fire filled the cab, clung to her hair. Willow whined and panted, pacing from one side of the car to the other, panicked.

“Sweet Jesus,” she breathed. “Get me out of here alive. Please. I’ll never be such an idiot again, I swear.”

Lavender Honey Farms

yamhill co., oregon

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