Page 4

You and I met at a McDonald’s, under the haze of deep-fried potatoes and a brain-splitting migraine. The headache is what lured me there, actually, what gave my body a desperate craving for a Happy Meal. A magical, medicinal combination of starch and salt and fructose that works better than any pill I’ve ever poked down, the only thing that will loosen the vise clamping down on my skull and settle my churning stomach.
But good, so there I sat in my sunglasses, nibbling french fries while tiny monsters pounded nail after nail into my brain, when you leaned into the space between our tables.
“What’d you get?”
I didn’t respond. Speaking was excruciating and besides, I had no clue what you were talking about.
You pointed to the box by my elbow. “Don’t those things come with a toy? What is it?”
I pushed my sunglasses onto my head and peered inside. “It’s a plastic yellow car.” I pulled it out and showed it to you.
“That’s a Hot Wheels.”
I settled it on the edge of my tray. “A what?”
“Pretty sure that one’s a Dodge Charger. Every boy on the planet has had a Hot Wheels at some point in their lives. My nephew has about a billion of them.”
You were distractingly gorgeous, the kind of gorgeous that didn’t belong in a fast-food joint, chatting up a stranger about kids and their toys. Tall and dark and broad-boned, with thick lashes and a strong, square chin. Italian, I remember thinking, or maybe Greek, some long-lost relative with stubborn genes.
I held the car across the aisle. “Take it. Give it to your nephew.”
Your lips sneaked into a smile, and maybe it was the carbs finally hitting my bloodstream, but you aimed it at me that day, and the pain lifted just a little.
Three days later, I was in love.
So now, when I push through the glass door to the restaurant, I am of course thinking of you. Different state, different McDonald’s, but still. It feels fitting, almost poetic. You and I ending in the same spot we began.
The smell hits me, french fries and sizzling meat, and it prompts a wave of nausea, a faint throbbing somewhere deep in my skull, even though I haven’t had a migraine in months. I guess it’s true what they say, that scent is the greatest memory trigger, so I shouldn’t be surprised that one whiff of McDonald’s can summon the beginnings of a migraine. I swallow a preventative Excedrin with a bottle of water I purchase at the register.
For a fast-food restaurant at the mouth of a major interstate, the place is pretty deserted. I weave through the mostly empty tables, taking note of the customers scattered around the dining area. A mother flipping through a magazine while her kids pelt each other with chicken nuggets, a pimply teenager watching a YouTube video on his phone, an elderly couple slurping brown sludge up their straws. Not one of them looks up as I pass.
I select a table by the window with a view of the parking lot. A row of pickup trucks glitter in the late afternoon sun, competing for most obnoxious. Supersized tires with spit-shined rims, roll bars and gun racks, wavy flag decals on the rear window. People of God, guns and Trump, according to the bumper stickers, a common Midwestern stereotype that I’ve found to be one hundred percent true.
Another stereotype: the lone woman in sunglasses, sitting at a fast-food restaurant with no food is up to no good. I consider buying a dollar meal as cover, but I’m too nervous to eat. I check my watch and try not to fidget. Three minutes to five.
This Nick guy better not be late. He is a crucial part of my plan, and I don’t have time to wait around. You’ll be getting home from work in an hour. You’ll walk through the door and expect to find me in the kitchen, waiting for you with dinner, with the endless fetching of newspapers and remote controls and beer, with sex—though whether your desire will be fueled by passion or fury is always a toss-up. The thought makes me hot and twitchy, my muscles itching with an immediate, intense need to race to my car and flee. An hour from now, a couple hundred miles from here, you’ll be looking for me.
“How will I know you?” I asked Nick two days ago during our one and only phone call, made from the customer service phone at Walmart, after I lied and said my car battery was dead. Nick and I have never actually met. We’ve not exchanged photographs or even the most basic of physical descriptions. I didn’t know he existed until a week ago.
Nick laughed. “What do you suggest I do, carry a rose between my teeth? Don’t worry. You’ll know me.”
I cast a sneaky glance at the teenager, laughing at something on his screen. Surely not. When we spoke on the phone, Nick didn’t seem nearly so oblivious. My gaze shifts to the elderly man, offering the rest of his milkshake to his wife. Not him, either.
When Nick rolls up at thirty seconds to five, I blow out a relieved breath because he was right. Idoknow it’s him, because any other day, at any other McDonald’s, he’s the type of guy I wouldn’t have noticed at all.
It begins with his car, a nondescript four-door he squeezes between a souped-up Ford F-250 and an extended-bed Dodge Ram. His clothes are just as unexceptional—generic khakis and a plain white shirt over mud-brown shoes. He looks like a math professor on his day off, or maybe an engineer. He walks to the door, and his eyes, shaded under a navy baseball cap, don’t even glance my way.
He orders a cup of coffee at the counter, then carries it over to my table and sinks onto the chair across from me.
“Nick, I assume?”
From the look he gives me, there’s no way Nick is his real name. “And you must be Beth.”
Touché. Not my real name, either.
Up close he’s better looking than I thought he’d be. Wide-set eyes, angled chin, thick hair poking out the rim of his cap. In a normal world, in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt, Nick might not be half-bad.
He dumps three packets of artificial sweetener into his coffee and swirls it around with a red plastic straw. “It’s the only way I can stomach this stuff, by masking it with something that tastes like it was imported straight from Chernobyl. If I grow an extra ear, I’m blaming you.”