Page 2 of No More Secrets

He could also show her exactly how unheroic he is and ignore her.

He spits foamy paste into the sink. “Go home, Faye.” He shuts the bathroom door.

A muffled “Lucas” penetrates the hollow barrier before he turns on the shower, and when he’s finished and has wrapped a loose towel around his waist, the front door slams.

He yanks open the bathroom door and spills out with a cloud of steam. Faye isn’t in his bed, and she isn’t excavating his fridge for spoiled milk and month-old eggs, insisting she whip up a hearty scramble because he subsists on Coronas and Cuervo.

The air conditioner hums. The ceiling fans he installed yesterday in the front room and his bedroom spin.

She’s gone. Thank fuck.

Hands on hips, he surrenders a relieved breath.

The Dusty Pantry is a convenience market located on a large parcel of barren land in California City, a town that never lived up to its founder’s hype of growing bigger and more vibrant than Los Angeles. Miles of paved roads lead to nowhere, baking in the desert heat. After a postwar real estate boom, its growth tapered off until it was virtually a ghost town, which is exactly why Lucas has found himself here.

He feels like a ghost, drifting through life with no purpose. He can’t figure out why he’s hanging on when he doesn’t have a reason to.

It’s been eight months since he ditched Seaside Cove, the gated community on the Central Coast he called home, along with his older sister, Olivia; his mother, Charlotte; and the troubles that haunt him.

It’s also been eight months that he’s avoided the police.

There’s a very real possibility he’ll be sent back to prison when the authorities catch up to him. But that isn’t why he ran.

When he got in his truck and drove, tossing his phone out the window somewhere along Highway 58, the market was the first place he stopped. He expected to have one last beer and drive on through. Instead he bought twelve. When the old lady behind the counter turned her back, a Reese’s candy, a pack of Dentyne Ice, and a jerky stick that was probably as old as he was found their way into his pockets.

Ivy Dervish. She and her late husband, Tom, had purchased the land and built the drab multiuse structure of apartments and deli market back in the late sixties. The business has been floundering and the structure falling apart since her husband passed five years back, she told him as he paid for his beer. She’d been working overtime to keepit afloat when she should have retired years ago. He told her he was driving through, that he didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t see a point in hiding those facts. He wasn’t planning on sticking around. But she convinced him to reconsider. There was an apartment above that needed a tenant. She’d lease it to him at half the publicized monthly rate if he helped her around the property.

He toured the sparsely furnished apartment and saw himself sitting on the worn couch powering through the twelve-pack. Then he saw himself draw a warm bath, shedding his clothes, and folding himself into the small alcove tub, and he made his decision. He accepted her offer.

This was a good place to die.

One problem, though.

He hasn’t yet mustered the courage to follow through.

The Dusty Pantry lives up to its namesake. Every morning, Lucas sweeps the stockroom’s floor, pushing fine, blond-toned dirt out the back door. The parking lot isn’t paved, and Ivy’s property in back stretches far enough that he can only see the rooftops of several single-family homes above the waist-high shrubs scattered across the landscape. The only good thing about this place is the night sky. Stars are brighter, more brilliant in the desert, where Lucas can remember he isn’t anything more than a speck of nothingness in the vast universe.

He hears the familiar rumble of Sanchez’s Produce. Mack drives the truck south from the Valley once a week and drops several small boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables Ivy displays in the self-serve fridge along the far wall. The parking brake drops into place, and metal doors clang open.

Lucas shuts the rear door, puts aside the broom, and pushes through the swing door that separates the stockroom from the market. He walks down an aisle of cleaning supplies, past the cash register, and unlocks the front door. He props it open with a brick.

“Hey, Mack.”

“Morning, Luc.” Mack drops a wood crate bursting with apples and oranges onto the sidewalk as Lucas returns to the stockroom to retrieve the empty crates from the prior week’s delivery.

“Got the white peaches Ivy ordered,” Mack says when Lucas hands off the crates. Lucas can smell the fruit’s sweetness wafting from the truck’s refrigerated box. Mack tosses the empty crates onto the truck.

“Thanks, man.” Lucas mechanically bumps the fist Mack holds up before he takes the fruit inside.

“See you next week,” Mack hollers after he slams the rear doors. Lucas grunts over his shoulder, dropping the fruit-laden crate by the self-serve fridge for Ivy to sort when she comes downstairs.

Mack leaves for his next delivery, and Lucas retrieves the other two crates in front. Closing the door behind him, he takes the fruit to the fridge in back. The door separating the stockroom from the market swings wide and sticks, remaining open. Lucas leaves it. His hands are full, and the market doesn’t open for another twenty minutes.

He packs fruit into the fridge, tosses the crate aside, and starts on the next when a bell jingles. “We aren’t open yet,” he hollers. He’s about finished with the second crate when he hears another noise, a can falling off a shelf. It rolls across an aisle.

Lucas sets down the crate, closes the fridge, and scopes the market from the doorway. There, along the far wall, he spots a head of dirty blonde barely visible above the aisle. He opens his mouth to tell whoever ignored him that the shop is still closed. But something stops him.

The figure appears around the endcap, Lucas going unnoticed. She’s too fixated on the products displayed, Snickers bars and M&M’s. Hot Tamales and Lay’s chips. Dirt-smudged cheeks and greasy hair, wearing an oversize hoodie too thick for the Mojave’s heat, she keeps her eyes averted as her fingers trail over the products on the shelf. They skim everything she passes. Every so often, her hand dips to her side.

---