One Bag

The cake says HAPPY 34TH COLTER in blue gel, and you're the one who wrote it.

You did it at four this afternoon in the Den's kitchen, with the October heat coming through the screen door like an oven left open. Six years of birthdays. You know he likes the C to look like a horseshoe.

Now it's eleven at night and the cake is sweating on the bar, and Colter isn't anywhere near it.

The Den is loud the way it's always loud on a party night. Forty Coyote Kings and their women packed into an old roadhouse that still smells like the fryer it used to have. The pool table has a girl dancing on it. Hoyt Starkweather, the club president, sits in his corner booth in a pressed white shirt under his cut, silver hair combed back, watching all of it like a man watching his own cattle.

"You seen Colter?" you ask the prospect behind the bar.

He doesn't look at you. That's how you know.

"Back office," he says to the beer tap. "Club business."

You've heard club business about four hundred times. Club business was why the down payment on the little house in Oildale went somewhere and never came back. Club business was why you dropped out of Bakersfield College two semesters short of your accounting degree, because Colter needed someone to keep the bar books straight and he said, Next year, baby, I swear. You'll go back next year.

That was six years ago. You were twenty-one. You're twenty-seven now, and you can still do a balance sheet in your head faster than anyone in this building, and you've never once been paid for it.

You walk down the back hall.

You don't knock. You've never knocked in six years, because whose office is it, if not his? Your name is on nothing here, but you thought it was yours.

The door opens on a desk lamp, a bottle of Crown, and Shayla Moffett sitting on the edge of the desk with her platinum hair down her back and Colter's hands on either side of her. She's twenty-four, gorgeous, false lashes like little black fans. Colter's shirt is open. His golden hair is a mess. He looks over his shoulder at you with those clear blue eyes, and for one second you see it: not guilt. Annoyance. Like you walked into the wrong movie.

"Jesus, Ava," he says. "Knock."

Shayla has the grace to go red. She slides off the desk and tugs her top straight. "I'm gonna..." She points at the door and goes, and she can't look at you as she passes. You notice that. You'll remember it later.

Colter buttons one button. "It's not what it looks like."

"It looks like the third time," you say. "Or the fourth. I stopped counting at the Fourth of July run."

"Don't do this tonight." He picks up the Crown. "It's my birthday."

"I know. I wrote it on the cake."

He grins, the grin that's gotten him out of every traffic stop and bar fight and promise since he was sixteen. He's still the best-looking man in any room in Mesa Seca, and he knows exactly what that grin does. "So come here and give me my present."

Something in your chest doesn't break. That's the strange part. You keep waiting for the crack, and instead there's a click. Quiet. Like a lock turning.

"No," you say.

You walk back down the hall. You don't run. You don't cry. You go out the side door to the double-wide behind the Den where you've lived for six years with a man who never once put your name on the lease.

You're stuffing T-shirts into a Walmart bag when Glenna Quintrell shows up in the doorway.

She's forty-eight and she looks like a woman who's been through every kind of weather: red hair going silver, a long denim shirt, a cigarette she isn't smoking. Her husband Ancel kept the Kings' books until he went off the Grapevine road two years ago in the fog. Since then she's been the only person in this club who asks how you're doing and waits for the answer.

"Well," she says. "Finally."

"Don't." Your voice comes out thin. "If you're gonna tell me he'll change..."

"Honey, I've been praying for this night for three years." She looks at the plastic bag and makes a face. "You're not walking out of here with your whole life in a Walmart sack. Hold on."

She's gone two minutes. When she comes back she's carrying an old army-green canvas duffel with leather handles, the kind with a brass zipper and a stiff bottom. It looks forty years old.

"Glenna, I can't take..."

"It was Ancel's. It's sturdier than you are right now." She pushes it into your arms. It's heavier than it looks, even empty. "Take it. Please. I want it to go somewhere."

Her hands stay on the handles a second too long. Her eyes are wet and very steady.

"Glenna?"

"Go on." She kisses your forehead. "Don't take anything of his. Don't look back at the porch. And don't go toward town."

"Where else is there?"

"The junction," she says. "Walk to the junction."

You fit your life into Ancel's bag. Four pairs of jeans. Your mother's silver hoop earrings. The textbook for Intermediate Accounting II you never returned. Your phone charger. Three hundred and twelve dollars from the coffee can under the sink, the only money you've saved in six years, a dollar at a time out of grocery change.

When you come out with the bag on your shoulder, the party has spilled onto the porch. Colter is leaning on a post with a beer, Shayla nowhere in sight. A dozen Kings turn to look.

"Where you going, baby?" Colter calls. Easy. Amused. "It's dark."

"Away."

He laughs. A few of the others laugh with him, because he's the VP and Hoyt's nephew, and you laugh when Colter laughs.

"Away where? You got no car. You got no money. You got nowhere." He raises the bottle at you. "You'll be back by Sunday, Ava. Leave the porch light on, boys."

You don't answer. You don't look back at the porch. You walk out past the line of chrome and black paint, out the gravel lot, onto Route 65 in the dark.

It's three and a half miles to the junction. The oil pumps nod in the fields like they're agreeing with something. Trucks blow past and rock you on your feet. Your sandals were a mistake. The bag cuts into your shoulder and you switch sides and keep going.

The Junction 24 gas station is the only light for six miles: a white canopy, a buzzing Coke machine, a clerk asleep behind bulletproof glass.

And a motorcycle.

It's parked under the canopy lights, black and quiet and not one you know, which means it's not a Kings bike. You know every Kings bike in Kern County. The man leaning against it straightens when he sees you. Slowly, like he doesn't want to spook a horse.

He's tall, taller than Colter, broad through the shoulders in a black leather cut. Dark hair pushed back. The light falls on his face and your step stutters, because it's the kind of face you only see on billboards along the 99: a hard jaw under a close beard, a thin scar cutting through one dark eyebrow, eyes a color you can't name from here.

Then you see the patch on his chest. Two roads crossing in a circle, and the words DRY CREEK.

The Drifters. The club Colter hates more than cops. More than taxes. More than you, maybe.

He isn't just any Drifter. You've seen his face across a hundred feet of fairground, across a parking lot at a county run, across the road on the Fourth of July with a beer he wasn't drinking. Everybody in this county knows Waylon Hatcher.

He looks at you, and then at the bag, and he says your name like he's said it before.

"Ava."