More NaNoWriMo... finally
Ellen had known they weren’t telling her everything when Randolph and Camilla left the night before, but she didn’t press it. She knew there was something Harold was saving up to tell her when he was ready so she didn’t ask. When she was washing up the breakfast dishes and she could see a black smudge over the trees in the rear of the yard, she finally decided to get some answers.
She had waited until Harry came back for lunch. She’d served him hot sandwiches and soup, what he usually enjoyed, and saved up her words. She knew he realized something was on her mind, and she also knew he was certain she’d speak when she was ready to. When she set his mug of black coffee before him so he could dunk his crusts, that was the time she had chosen to question him.
“Randy wasn’t taking Camie to the airport.” It was a simple statement and Harry lifted his brown eyes to meet her own blues. He nodded once and took a bite of his soaked crusts.
“Where’re they going?” She slipped into a chair across from him and folded her arms on the table as she tried to keep her expression mild. Harry would likely see the worry in her eyes, but after being married for thirty years she figured he would be able to tell even if she were trying to hide it.
“Somewhere Camie thinks they’ll be safe.” He pushed his plate away and lifted his mug, though he didn’t drink from it.
“From that black thing in the back twenty?”
Harry studied her for a moment before again nodding and sipping his coffee. At least he wasn’t surprised by the fact that she was put things together. He had lived with her long enough to know she could. Their children, though, to them she was just flighty Mom, needing to be protected from everything she didn’t understand. She didn’t expect them to understand her any better, but she didn’t need them to.
“And what it did to her, it can do it to anything, you think?”
“I imagine so.”
Harry lifted his face to meet her eyes, his expression serious, almost resigned. Almost. There was determination in his eyes, though it was tempered by reality. When she didn’t speak after several seconds, Harold continued.
“That black blob, whatever it is--Camie called it the shadow. Anyways, that thing, she said it would get big enough to cover the world. There’s a place, though, where people might be able to get away from it. That’s where she’s going. Says she can see it, can feel where she’s supposed to go.”
“And Randy’s going with to see that she gets there?”
Again Harold nodded, turning his coffee in his hands. “If you want to try to go, we can do that.” Ellen hadn’t heard him speak like that in years… decades, even. It was like how he’d asked her out on their first date, confident in her answer but allowing her the opportunity to disagree, to decline.
“What do you want to do?”
“See what we can do to save the property.” He gazed over her shoulder, and Ellen was sure he was looking through the window at the slice of black visible over the trees.
“We should probably warn the neighbors. They’ll want to get their families out.”
Harold reached across the table and covered one of her hands with one of his own, gently squeezing it. She offered him a tight-lipped smile in return and pressed her free hand over his.
“I’ll go do that. You do whatever you think you should about that… thing out there.” After thirty years Ellen had learned to trust her husband, but beyond that, she’d learned to support him.
Randolph
They had been on the road for a day before Randy had finally had enough and pulled over at a convenient motel and got a room for the night. Camilla had looked like she wanted to protest, but he gave her a flat look and she held her tongue instead. The sign declared it The Lonesome Night, but that was fine by him. It was small, but it was clean enough, even sporting a decent television and a mini fridge. He and Camie both managed to get in a shower before the hot water gave out, and by then it was a simple matter to convince her to walk across the parking lot to a small restaurants for some food.
Meg’s Bar and Grill was, as anticipated, a smoky, poorly lit establishment with peanut shells scattered across the floor and memorabilia from rodeos and local sports teams hung from the walls. Randy was fairly certain the closest thing the area had to a rodeo was the county fair, and that was only for a week in August. He could only assume that Meg was a fan.
A long bar dominated the center of the room, curving back around itself to make an island. Separate booths were divided from each other by thin barriers constructed of wooden planks, and individual tables drifted around the open space like orphaned satellites. On either end of the bar a TV was mounted from the overhanging cupboards, one displaying, predictably, a rodeo, the other a newscast. Both were muted so as not to distract from the twanging country music being piped in through overhead speakers, but they had closed captioning turned on so the interested could still follow along.
A few tired-looking old men were grouped near the screen showing a bull being roped by a stylish-looking cowboy on a grey horse, but aside from them, he and Camilla appeared to be the only other customers. A bell mounted above the door announced their entrance, summoning a short, curvy woman out from behind a swinging door to the right of the bar. Seeing the pair she smiled and swung an arm out to take in the entire place.
“Take a seat anywhere you like, I’ll be with you in a second.” Randy had half expected her to drawl when she spoke and to smack on some chewing gum as she turned away, but thankfully she hadn’t. Her bleached hair was swept back in an airy bouffant, though, and a cigarette hung from brilliant red lips.
Camie leaned forward and whispered into his ear at that point. “I dare you to call her Peggy. Can’t you just see her in leopard-print spandex capris?”
How she could manage to joke was beyond Randy, but he couldn’t bring himself to laugh. Instead he simply lead them to the nearest table and took a seat. He glanced at the set showing the news and it seemed to be a local broadcast. He thought he might recognize the correspondent speaking to the anchors, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t care enough to keep watching, so he faced forward to wait for the Peg Bundy look-alike to come back.
Camie was slower to seat herself, her eyes fixated on the set. Leave it to her to watch the television now. Eating and sleeping, those things were necessary, but she couldn’t seem to keep track of what they were doing. Or maybe he was just bitter, but she was acting strangely. Not even consistently strange, either. One minute she was all quiet and brooding, the next she was trying to reminisce over some childhood game they’d played.
“Randy, look at this.”
Her request pulled his eyes away from his hands and his awareness back to the present. “Look at what?”
She gestured towards the television with one hand, not taking her eyes away. “Isn’t that Dad’s forty?”
“What?” She’d gotten his attention and he twisted around to see for himself.
Sure enough the correspondent was standing off the shoulder of the road with the backdrop of the fields the family still used for their horses, a brook winding its way through one edge with tall willows clustered along its banks. The view changed then to a shot from above, likely on a helicopter. Randy hadn’t realized he’d stood up until he was craning his neck to take in the screen. The camera was showing what would have been the family property, but now only a slice of it was left, most of the forty, and only half of the house. The rest looked like it had been blotted out by ink dripping on the lens or the film or something... There was no way it was something natural.
“Something wrong, sugar?” It was the waitress and she was standing on the other side of the bar.
“Can we get some sound on this?” Camie had come to his rescue, standing just behind his shoulder, transfixed by the spectacle.
“I suppose I can, sweetie. It something important?” She moved away and found a remote control, and within a few moments the music had been turned down and sound was restored to the set.
“Again, we’re reporting from just outside Copper Ridge at the Blue Eden Horse Ranch where something has begun... obscuring a large section of land. The owners of the ranch have been unavailable for comment and neighboring landholders have no explanation as to what might be causing the blot.”
During the correspondents narration of the footage, the camera curved around to the south, showing how the thing had become lopsided, curving like a crescent around the house, covering more land than Randy would have thought possible. He heard a gasp and turned to look at his sister, but she was still staring silently at the broadcast. It had been the waitress. She’d come around the bar and stood with them to take in the spectacle.
“Again, this is field correspondent Ned Forester. Back to you, Emily.” Behind the middle-aged man wearing a tan trench coat and holding a microphone branded with the station emblem, through the willows and above the middle break of trees that lined the road between two of the fields, the black loomed like a tidal wave ready to sweep away creation.
They cut back to the station, then, catching an attractive red-head staring agape at something off-camera. After several seconds of silence she came back to herself, jaw working briefly before she managed to thank Ned and move on to more mundane topics.
“What the hell station is this? Did you change it off the news?” The waitress glared at him and Camie then started flipping channels, slowly satisfying herself that it really had been set to the local news.
Randy turned his back and leaned heavily against the bar, catching the group of men at the other end watching what was happening at his end intently. They saw him looking and they turned back to each other, their conversation hushed as they took pulls from their beer bottles.
“Randy, we need to go. Very soon.” Camie had leaned in close and whispered at him, her black eyes making her look even more intent.
“What the hell does something like that?” That was the waitress again. She looked between them with a morbid wonder on her face, seemingly still trying to wrap her mind around what she’d just seen. “What the hell was that?”
He shook his head slowly, not sure he could find his voice to answer her even had he known. Stunned, he pushed away from the bar and walked numbly back to the table he’d claimed, dropping heavily into his seat. Camilla trailed after him, settling lightly into her own chair before reaching across the table to touch his hand with her intact fingers.
“Are you okay? We can’t stay long. You should rest and then we should leave, okay?”
He didn’t answer her immediately, instead staring at the grains in the table top as he tried to digest what he’d seen. “How did it get so big?”
Camie squeezed his hand but didn’t say anything else, realizing he needed time to recover from the shock. Of course the waitress had a much worse sense of timing than his twin as she crossed over to them accompanied by the steady click of her pumps on the battered hardwood. Who served at a bar wearing high heels?
“Crazy what you see on the news these days, eh?” She tried out a nervous laugh on them but cut it off abruptly when Camie didn’t react and Randy only gave her a flat look. She didn’t take the hint, though. “You two know folks from out that way? You seemed pretty interested.” As she spoke she pulled out a tablet and pen in case they felt like ordering, apparently forgetting that she’d never brought them any menus.
“That was our parent’s ranch,” Randy supplied softly, his gaze slipping away from her as the image the camera had shown came back to him.
“No shit? Damn, sugar, I’m sorry. Let me get you something on the house?”
He shook his head but Camilla spoke up then, taking over.
“Just get him a burger and fries. It’s been a long drive.” At some point Camie had dug a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and pushed them over her face, and through their dark lenses she regarded their as-yet unnamed server.
“I bet it was. Where was that at? Copper Ridge? That’s quite a ways off from here.” Despite her chattering, the waitress jotted down a few things in the tablet. “Anything for you, sweetie?” She stopped when she realized Camie was wearing the shades and gave her a strange look. “What’s wrong with you, girl?”
“Please? Just the burger.”
The woman finally nodded once, gave them both a lingering look, then turned and crossed back across the room, presumably to turn in the order.
He could feel Camilla watching him, then, but he couldn’t pull his mind away from what he’d seen. It had been a day since they’d left. It had covered five acres. Now it was swallowing nearly the entire ranch, house included.
“I wonder if they got the horses out...” The barn had been completely engulfed and he hadn’t seen any running in what was left of the forty, at least he hadn’t noticed any.
“Randy.” Her voice had a touch of worry in it but he didn’t respond to her.
“What did they even think they could do? Why? It was stupid.” Scrubbing his hands through his hair he glared at the table, grinding his teeth as his anger built. Camie’s mangled hand settled gently on his shoulder, commanding his attention even if he did refuse to look at her.
“They faced it together, Randolph. In they end they prayed.”
He straightened with a jerk, pulling away from Camilla’s touch like it was a flaming hot. “’In the end’? What the fuck do you mean by that, Camie? How the hell do you know, anyways? How could you know?” He was half standing before he caught himself and forced himself to sit back down. It didn’t calm his anger any more, though, and he glared at his sister.
“I can feel it when I think of them. That’s how I know you can get away from this thing. That’s how I know waitress Peggy’s going to get caught by it screaming in terror.” Her eyes cut up towards the back of the bar and she stopped speaking.
Randy stared at her but she avoided his eyes, cutting glances back over his shoulder.
“So what about you? That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? Getting you away from whatever the hell that thing is?” As he spoke he could tell he was getting louder, was on the verge of yelling at his twin, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Finally she looked back at him, anger sparking in her eyes enough to match his own.
“I’m doing what I have to, to keep you safe,” she hissed at him, hitting the table with her injured hand.
“And you just left Mom and Dad behind to that?” His voice was restrained to an equally intense whisper as he motioned behind him at the television and the report it had aired.
“It was their choice, Randolph! They’re not children.”
“But I’m the child. Always have to lead little Randy around by the hand for his own damn good, eh?
Camilla was opening her mouth to snap back at him but a platter clinked down beside Randy’s elbow and they both sat up straight with a start. The waitress looked between them like she’d caught children bickering.
“Can I get you two anything else?” Her eyes swept back and forth over them and Camie dropped her gaze to her lap. That left Randy to deal with the woman.
Stalling for time while he tried to calm himself enough to talk, he pulled the plate over in front of him. It held an open-faced hamburger with all the toppings arrayed beside it. He gave the plate a half turn before lifting his face to regard the waitress. “Something to drink, please? A diet for her. I’ll just take a water.”
She reached out and patted his shoulder with a dainty hand as she exhaled a cloud of smoke away from the table. “No problem, sugar. I’m sorry for your loss.”
What the hell was with these people? Did everyone just assume his parents were dead because the property was gone? He bit back his resurging anger and offered her a twist of his lips he hoped she’d take for an appreciative smile.
“Was there anything else, before I go and get you those drinks?” She looked expectant, almost hopeful, and Randy couldn’t imagine why. Then something occurred to him.
“You have a payphone around here?”
She had waited until Harry came back for lunch. She’d served him hot sandwiches and soup, what he usually enjoyed, and saved up her words. She knew he realized something was on her mind, and she also knew he was certain she’d speak when she was ready to. When she set his mug of black coffee before him so he could dunk his crusts, that was the time she had chosen to question him.
“Randy wasn’t taking Camie to the airport.” It was a simple statement and Harry lifted his brown eyes to meet her own blues. He nodded once and took a bite of his soaked crusts.
“Where’re they going?” She slipped into a chair across from him and folded her arms on the table as she tried to keep her expression mild. Harry would likely see the worry in her eyes, but after being married for thirty years she figured he would be able to tell even if she were trying to hide it.
“Somewhere Camie thinks they’ll be safe.” He pushed his plate away and lifted his mug, though he didn’t drink from it.
“From that black thing in the back twenty?”
Harry studied her for a moment before again nodding and sipping his coffee. At least he wasn’t surprised by the fact that she was put things together. He had lived with her long enough to know she could. Their children, though, to them she was just flighty Mom, needing to be protected from everything she didn’t understand. She didn’t expect them to understand her any better, but she didn’t need them to.
“And what it did to her, it can do it to anything, you think?”
“I imagine so.”
Harry lifted his face to meet her eyes, his expression serious, almost resigned. Almost. There was determination in his eyes, though it was tempered by reality. When she didn’t speak after several seconds, Harold continued.
“That black blob, whatever it is--Camie called it the shadow. Anyways, that thing, she said it would get big enough to cover the world. There’s a place, though, where people might be able to get away from it. That’s where she’s going. Says she can see it, can feel where she’s supposed to go.”
“And Randy’s going with to see that she gets there?”
Again Harold nodded, turning his coffee in his hands. “If you want to try to go, we can do that.” Ellen hadn’t heard him speak like that in years… decades, even. It was like how he’d asked her out on their first date, confident in her answer but allowing her the opportunity to disagree, to decline.
“What do you want to do?”
“See what we can do to save the property.” He gazed over her shoulder, and Ellen was sure he was looking through the window at the slice of black visible over the trees.
“We should probably warn the neighbors. They’ll want to get their families out.”
Harold reached across the table and covered one of her hands with one of his own, gently squeezing it. She offered him a tight-lipped smile in return and pressed her free hand over his.
“I’ll go do that. You do whatever you think you should about that… thing out there.” After thirty years Ellen had learned to trust her husband, but beyond that, she’d learned to support him.
Randolph
They had been on the road for a day before Randy had finally had enough and pulled over at a convenient motel and got a room for the night. Camilla had looked like she wanted to protest, but he gave her a flat look and she held her tongue instead. The sign declared it The Lonesome Night, but that was fine by him. It was small, but it was clean enough, even sporting a decent television and a mini fridge. He and Camie both managed to get in a shower before the hot water gave out, and by then it was a simple matter to convince her to walk across the parking lot to a small restaurants for some food.
Meg’s Bar and Grill was, as anticipated, a smoky, poorly lit establishment with peanut shells scattered across the floor and memorabilia from rodeos and local sports teams hung from the walls. Randy was fairly certain the closest thing the area had to a rodeo was the county fair, and that was only for a week in August. He could only assume that Meg was a fan.
A long bar dominated the center of the room, curving back around itself to make an island. Separate booths were divided from each other by thin barriers constructed of wooden planks, and individual tables drifted around the open space like orphaned satellites. On either end of the bar a TV was mounted from the overhanging cupboards, one displaying, predictably, a rodeo, the other a newscast. Both were muted so as not to distract from the twanging country music being piped in through overhead speakers, but they had closed captioning turned on so the interested could still follow along.
A few tired-looking old men were grouped near the screen showing a bull being roped by a stylish-looking cowboy on a grey horse, but aside from them, he and Camilla appeared to be the only other customers. A bell mounted above the door announced their entrance, summoning a short, curvy woman out from behind a swinging door to the right of the bar. Seeing the pair she smiled and swung an arm out to take in the entire place.
“Take a seat anywhere you like, I’ll be with you in a second.” Randy had half expected her to drawl when she spoke and to smack on some chewing gum as she turned away, but thankfully she hadn’t. Her bleached hair was swept back in an airy bouffant, though, and a cigarette hung from brilliant red lips.
Camie leaned forward and whispered into his ear at that point. “I dare you to call her Peggy. Can’t you just see her in leopard-print spandex capris?”
How she could manage to joke was beyond Randy, but he couldn’t bring himself to laugh. Instead he simply lead them to the nearest table and took a seat. He glanced at the set showing the news and it seemed to be a local broadcast. He thought he might recognize the correspondent speaking to the anchors, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t care enough to keep watching, so he faced forward to wait for the Peg Bundy look-alike to come back.
Camie was slower to seat herself, her eyes fixated on the set. Leave it to her to watch the television now. Eating and sleeping, those things were necessary, but she couldn’t seem to keep track of what they were doing. Or maybe he was just bitter, but she was acting strangely. Not even consistently strange, either. One minute she was all quiet and brooding, the next she was trying to reminisce over some childhood game they’d played.
“Randy, look at this.”
Her request pulled his eyes away from his hands and his awareness back to the present. “Look at what?”
She gestured towards the television with one hand, not taking her eyes away. “Isn’t that Dad’s forty?”
“What?” She’d gotten his attention and he twisted around to see for himself.
Sure enough the correspondent was standing off the shoulder of the road with the backdrop of the fields the family still used for their horses, a brook winding its way through one edge with tall willows clustered along its banks. The view changed then to a shot from above, likely on a helicopter. Randy hadn’t realized he’d stood up until he was craning his neck to take in the screen. The camera was showing what would have been the family property, but now only a slice of it was left, most of the forty, and only half of the house. The rest looked like it had been blotted out by ink dripping on the lens or the film or something... There was no way it was something natural.
“Something wrong, sugar?” It was the waitress and she was standing on the other side of the bar.
“Can we get some sound on this?” Camie had come to his rescue, standing just behind his shoulder, transfixed by the spectacle.
“I suppose I can, sweetie. It something important?” She moved away and found a remote control, and within a few moments the music had been turned down and sound was restored to the set.
“Again, we’re reporting from just outside Copper Ridge at the Blue Eden Horse Ranch where something has begun... obscuring a large section of land. The owners of the ranch have been unavailable for comment and neighboring landholders have no explanation as to what might be causing the blot.”
During the correspondents narration of the footage, the camera curved around to the south, showing how the thing had become lopsided, curving like a crescent around the house, covering more land than Randy would have thought possible. He heard a gasp and turned to look at his sister, but she was still staring silently at the broadcast. It had been the waitress. She’d come around the bar and stood with them to take in the spectacle.
“Again, this is field correspondent Ned Forester. Back to you, Emily.” Behind the middle-aged man wearing a tan trench coat and holding a microphone branded with the station emblem, through the willows and above the middle break of trees that lined the road between two of the fields, the black loomed like a tidal wave ready to sweep away creation.
They cut back to the station, then, catching an attractive red-head staring agape at something off-camera. After several seconds of silence she came back to herself, jaw working briefly before she managed to thank Ned and move on to more mundane topics.
“What the hell station is this? Did you change it off the news?” The waitress glared at him and Camie then started flipping channels, slowly satisfying herself that it really had been set to the local news.
Randy turned his back and leaned heavily against the bar, catching the group of men at the other end watching what was happening at his end intently. They saw him looking and they turned back to each other, their conversation hushed as they took pulls from their beer bottles.
“Randy, we need to go. Very soon.” Camie had leaned in close and whispered at him, her black eyes making her look even more intent.
“What the hell does something like that?” That was the waitress again. She looked between them with a morbid wonder on her face, seemingly still trying to wrap her mind around what she’d just seen. “What the hell was that?”
He shook his head slowly, not sure he could find his voice to answer her even had he known. Stunned, he pushed away from the bar and walked numbly back to the table he’d claimed, dropping heavily into his seat. Camilla trailed after him, settling lightly into her own chair before reaching across the table to touch his hand with her intact fingers.
“Are you okay? We can’t stay long. You should rest and then we should leave, okay?”
He didn’t answer her immediately, instead staring at the grains in the table top as he tried to digest what he’d seen. “How did it get so big?”
Camie squeezed his hand but didn’t say anything else, realizing he needed time to recover from the shock. Of course the waitress had a much worse sense of timing than his twin as she crossed over to them accompanied by the steady click of her pumps on the battered hardwood. Who served at a bar wearing high heels?
“Crazy what you see on the news these days, eh?” She tried out a nervous laugh on them but cut it off abruptly when Camie didn’t react and Randy only gave her a flat look. She didn’t take the hint, though. “You two know folks from out that way? You seemed pretty interested.” As she spoke she pulled out a tablet and pen in case they felt like ordering, apparently forgetting that she’d never brought them any menus.
“That was our parent’s ranch,” Randy supplied softly, his gaze slipping away from her as the image the camera had shown came back to him.
“No shit? Damn, sugar, I’m sorry. Let me get you something on the house?”
He shook his head but Camilla spoke up then, taking over.
“Just get him a burger and fries. It’s been a long drive.” At some point Camie had dug a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and pushed them over her face, and through their dark lenses she regarded their as-yet unnamed server.
“I bet it was. Where was that at? Copper Ridge? That’s quite a ways off from here.” Despite her chattering, the waitress jotted down a few things in the tablet. “Anything for you, sweetie?” She stopped when she realized Camie was wearing the shades and gave her a strange look. “What’s wrong with you, girl?”
“Please? Just the burger.”
The woman finally nodded once, gave them both a lingering look, then turned and crossed back across the room, presumably to turn in the order.
He could feel Camilla watching him, then, but he couldn’t pull his mind away from what he’d seen. It had been a day since they’d left. It had covered five acres. Now it was swallowing nearly the entire ranch, house included.
“I wonder if they got the horses out...” The barn had been completely engulfed and he hadn’t seen any running in what was left of the forty, at least he hadn’t noticed any.
“Randy.” Her voice had a touch of worry in it but he didn’t respond to her.
“What did they even think they could do? Why? It was stupid.” Scrubbing his hands through his hair he glared at the table, grinding his teeth as his anger built. Camie’s mangled hand settled gently on his shoulder, commanding his attention even if he did refuse to look at her.
“They faced it together, Randolph. In they end they prayed.”
He straightened with a jerk, pulling away from Camilla’s touch like it was a flaming hot. “’In the end’? What the fuck do you mean by that, Camie? How the hell do you know, anyways? How could you know?” He was half standing before he caught himself and forced himself to sit back down. It didn’t calm his anger any more, though, and he glared at his sister.
“I can feel it when I think of them. That’s how I know you can get away from this thing. That’s how I know waitress Peggy’s going to get caught by it screaming in terror.” Her eyes cut up towards the back of the bar and she stopped speaking.
Randy stared at her but she avoided his eyes, cutting glances back over his shoulder.
“So what about you? That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? Getting you away from whatever the hell that thing is?” As he spoke he could tell he was getting louder, was on the verge of yelling at his twin, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Finally she looked back at him, anger sparking in her eyes enough to match his own.
“I’m doing what I have to, to keep you safe,” she hissed at him, hitting the table with her injured hand.
“And you just left Mom and Dad behind to that?” His voice was restrained to an equally intense whisper as he motioned behind him at the television and the report it had aired.
“It was their choice, Randolph! They’re not children.”
“But I’m the child. Always have to lead little Randy around by the hand for his own damn good, eh?
Camilla was opening her mouth to snap back at him but a platter clinked down beside Randy’s elbow and they both sat up straight with a start. The waitress looked between them like she’d caught children bickering.
“Can I get you two anything else?” Her eyes swept back and forth over them and Camie dropped her gaze to her lap. That left Randy to deal with the woman.
Stalling for time while he tried to calm himself enough to talk, he pulled the plate over in front of him. It held an open-faced hamburger with all the toppings arrayed beside it. He gave the plate a half turn before lifting his face to regard the waitress. “Something to drink, please? A diet for her. I’ll just take a water.”
She reached out and patted his shoulder with a dainty hand as she exhaled a cloud of smoke away from the table. “No problem, sugar. I’m sorry for your loss.”
What the hell was with these people? Did everyone just assume his parents were dead because the property was gone? He bit back his resurging anger and offered her a twist of his lips he hoped she’d take for an appreciative smile.
“Was there anything else, before I go and get you those drinks?” She looked expectant, almost hopeful, and Randy couldn’t imagine why. Then something occurred to him.
“You have a payphone around here?”