Million Dollar Road by Amy Connor Page B

“I got off early, for once. You need to run into town today?”
    â€œHell, yes!” Elated, Lireinne threw her arms around her stepfather, breathing in the not-unpleasant, familiar smells of clean sweat, Red Man chewing tobacco, and motor oil. “I really, really need to get to the feed store before it closes, but can we go to Walmart, too? I’m out of my shampoo, conditioner—like, girl stuff, you know? My hair always gets frizzy if I don’t have the right conditioner for it, and I want to buy this month’s Vogue, too.”
    Rubbing his stubbled jaw with a grease-stained hand, Bud said, “Hold up there, sugar. I got to get clean first. Can’t take my little girl to town smelling like a goat.” He opened the door to the cramped, shared bathroom off the hall. “Just give me a minute and we’ll go. Swear.”
    â€œWhatever. Get clean,” Lireinne said with a wave. “My polish needs to dry anyway.”
    Twenty minutes later, after Bud had reamed Wolf a new one for leaving the kitchen a wreck, giving him strict orders to wash up the dishes in the sink and put away the paper goods Lireinne had bought, they walked out to the truck in the hot, oblique sunlight of the late August afternoon.
    â€œDon’t you be worrying ’bout the feed store. We got plenty of time,” Bud said, throwing up the truck’s rusted tailgate. “Ol’ Ricky never closes much before six on Saturdays, waiting on all the farmers to drag their asses into town, and Walmart never closes anymore.”
    He opened the passenger door for Lireinne the way he’d done since she was a little girl, just as though she were someone special, a lady or something. She climbed inside the truck, shifting a pipe wrench and a jumbo roll of duct tape from the bench seat onto the floor with the other crap, taking care to avoid the plastic spit cup riding on the hump of the gearshift.
    â€œWeird,” Lireinne mused out loud as Bud got in behind the steering wheel.
    She was remembering Mr. Costello. He’d opened the door for her, too. He’d even done that out-there, embarrassing bowing thing. She tried to imagine Bud with a Lexus and just couldn’t see it, but his opening the door for her was always nice. Bud did stuff like that without making a big deal out of it, but Mr. Costello had been just sort of, well, weird . Maybe not weird in a scary way, but weird all the same.
    â€œWhat’s weird?” Bud asked, backing down the drive.
    â€œNothing.”
    Lireinne didn’t want to talk about her near-death experience. Bud wasn’t all that cool with her walking to the Dollar General as it was: the last thing he needed to hear was how she’d almost wound up smushed like an armadillo and gotten a ride with the weirdo who’d almost hit her, a weirdo who was her boss. She probably should’ve been nicer to Mr. Costello, but she’d never even met the guy before. It had been taking a chance she only rarely risked, catching a ride with a man, but Lireinne had already walked three miles to the Dollar General and two more on the way home. The bags had been so heavy that she’d decided that taking the chance was worth it. Besides, it wasn’t like she’d been rude to him.
    There hadn’t been any trouble, not really. Everything had turned out okay, Lireinne decided.
    â€œHow’s the well going?” She rolled down her window. The truck’s air-conditioning had quit earlier that summer and chances were it wouldn’t be coming back. The air tangled her long black hair around her face, the warm rush of wind making it hard to be heard in the cab.
    â€œThat job’s a cluster-fuck, pardon my French,” Bud shouted. “We got down another thousand feet, the drill shaft sheared off, and then that dumb-ass Ottis tried to back it out but . . .”
    Bud’s update on the ill-starred Pentecostal well went on for nearly the whole ride