First Time, Forever

The café had six tables, two booths and a lunch counter. There were coffee cups half filled, and bacon and eggs half eaten at nearly all those tables, but the seats, save for the one Evan inhabited at a booth, were empty, abandoned.

The guys were three deep at the window, trying to get a look at the Outpost, the town’s general store, across the street. A strange car was parked out front, a U-haul trailer behind it. The car had caused this great stirring of interest when a pair of strangers had emerged from it. Both of them had looked around briefly, and then disappeared into the Outpost.

“If they were just askin’ for directions,” Sookie Peters said wisely, “they would have left the engine running.”

“Did you see her?” Jack Marty asked for about the sixtieth annoying time. “She looked just like Julia Roberts. I swear. Well, maybe a little older. And not scrawny like Julia.” He said this with easy familiarity, as if Julia were his second cousin.

“Nah, she dint,” Sookie said. “More like the other one. The one from the movie about the bus. That’s who she looked like.”

“Sandra Bullock?” Cal, Sookie’s brother, hooted. “She did not!”

“Oh, what do you know?”

The banter went back and forth, Evan furrowing his brow and trying to ignore the nonsense as best he could. All those guys at the window should take a lesson from him. Good things did not necessarily come in pretty packages.

Millie came and refilled his coffee cup. He didn’t quite get the Sports Illustrated up fast enough or high enough, and she caught sight of the book hidden behind it, crooked her head, read the title, and smiled.

If she told the guys he was never going to live it down.

Potty-Training for the Hopelessly Confused.

But she just smiled, in that way he was never going to get used to, as if being a single dad made him adorable to the female populace, like a teddy bear.

“Where is Jesse this morning?” she asked.

“I dropped him off at Beth’s Day Care for a while.”

“That’s good. He needs to be with other kids sometimes.”

“So I’ve been told.” Evan scowled at the book. Step Five: Pray.

He thought that was a mighty strange step to include in a book on potty-training, not scientific at all. On the other hand, when his son had gone missing and he had done everything he knew how to do, applied all his intellect and strength and devotion, everything, to getting Jesse back, and nothing had worked, isn’t that what his days had become?

Please God, please God, please God. If You can’t bring my baby home, look after him. It would shock those guys at the window to know he had done that, prayed every day, but he’d been shocked himself the first time those words had gone through his head. Shocked, and then surprised, the words bringing him the only measure of peace he’d had in those desperate years.

Jesse was home now. Okay, it had taken two years, but then Evan would admit to being somewhat rusty in the prayer department, since he’d spent most of his youth moving in the other direction, hell bound.

Still, a two-year wait was a might scary thought in terms of potty-training.

It was very hard to formulate a proper potty-training prayer with all the commotion at the window.

“What do you suppose she’s doing over there?”

Millie, known for her foghorn voice, called out, “You know Pa hasn’t been feeling so hot. They tried to sell the place, but now they’re just hoping to get someone to run it for them.”

“That would mean she’d have to live here,” Mike Best pointed out sagely.

The crowd at the window contemplated that for a few minutes of blessed silence that allowed Evan to review his prayer. He decided to keep it simple. God, help. Satisfied, he looked back at the book.

And realized he had read it incorrectly.

It didn’t say pray. Step Five said play.

He read carefully: Be sure and make potty-training fun. A game.

The guys at the window started up again, sounding like a gaggle of old hens excited about an unexpected windfall of worms.

“Hey, there’s the kid. He’s coming out by hisself, though.”

“Don’t he look like trouble?”

“Aw, you don’t suppose she’s married, do you? She must be. That kid is hers. Is the spitting image of her.”

This observation seemed to put a momentary damper on the ardent bachelors at the window.

“He does have the look of her.”

“Guys,” Evan finally called, beyond impatience, “would you give it a rest?”

A few of them turned and acknowledged him with grins that were not in the least contrite, but basically they ignored him.

He did his best to shut them out.

But it penetrated his gloom about potty-training when one of them said, “I guess Mr. High and Mighty over there wouldn’t care that the kid is looking at his truck.”

Evan rattled the magazine. So what if someone was looking at his truck? It was a damned attractive truck, far worthier of a fuss than a strange woman passing through town.

“Guess old Mr. Lonesome over there wouldn’t care, either, that the boy’s looking over his shoulder right now. I don’t like the look on his face, either, not one little bit.”

Evan pretended he wasn’t listening, but the truth was they had his attention now. He was pretty protective of that truck. A fact they all knew. They were probably ribbing him a bit, trying to get him over there at the window to moan and groan over a complete stranger, just like them.

“It looks like he’s writing something on it.”

Well, okay, he hadn’t been through the car wash for a while. Maybe the kid was writing a message in the dust. Big deal. Hardly headlines. Not even for Hopkins Gulch.

“Is that a nail he’s using?” Sookie asked, amazed.

“I do believe it might be. Oh, that’s an S for sure,” Jack said.

Evan was up out of his booth now.

“Yup. And that’s an H.”

Evan crossed the café in one long stride and shoved his way through the guys to the front of the window. Just in time to see the little creep putting the finishing touches on an I. On his brand-new midnight-blue Dodge Ram Diesel extended cab pickup truck.

The guys were all staring at him, silent, horrified, knowing that that unsuspecting child’s life as he knew it was about to end.

He pushed back through them and went out the door and across the dusty street in about one-tenth of a second.