The Last Train to Key West - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,4
reply, letting go of the table instantly. “Thank you, though.”
His cheeks flush again as he angles his body away from mine. On his weekend trips into Ruby’s, I haven’t seen him in the company of the other veterans working on the highway. They never fail to acknowledge him with a nod of their heads or a tip of their hats, but they move past him as though he has erected a barrier around himself. He is one of them, and yet, he is not.
Much of the town has given the veterans a wide berth, complaining of general drunkenness and disorderly conduct when they come down to Key West for the weekends. In the tight-knit communities up on Matecumbe and Windley Keys where the population is smaller and the days—and nights—quieter, they’re probably even less welcome. These are difficult times, and when you’re at your lowest, fear and uncertainty have a nasty habit of making you close ranks and view outsiders with suspicion, even if you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. For all we need the railroad and highway to bring the tourists in, you’d think the locals would be a little nicer to the people working on them, but then again I’ve given up on trying to understand why people do the things they do.
People are a mystery, and the second you think you have them figured out, they surprise you.
“How much longer?” John asks, straightening in his seat, his gaze on my swollen belly beneath the worn apron. His eyes are a rich brown, a shade darker than his hair, framed by long lashes most women would envy.
I flush at the matter-of-fact manner in which he asks the question.
Pregnancy has a way of exposing your most private intimacies to the world whether you’d like them to be exposed or not.
“A few weeks,” I reply.
The baby kicks again.
John’s eyes narrow slightly as though he is attempting to work something out in his mind. “You shouldn’t be on your feet so much.”
I don’t spend much time worrying about “should.” As much as Ruby has some affection for me, she’s running a business here, and there’ve been times when this job has meant the difference between us having food and going hungry when Tom’s hit the bottle too hard to go out to sea or drunk his pay away.
“Can I take your order?” I ask, ignoring the intimacy.
“I’ll have eggs and bacon,” he answers after a beat. “Black coffee, too, please.”
He orders the same thing every time he comes in here.
“It’ll be a few minutes,” I reply.
I lean forward and brush a speck of food from the table left from one of my earlier customers, and my sleeve rides up on my forearm, exposing the dark purple bruises that decorate my skin.
Five fingerprint-sized bruises, to be exact.
I tug the sleeve back in place, my cheeks heating.
“What happened?” he asks, his voice low.
“Nothing,” I lie.
You can tell he’s not a local, because I doubt there’s anyone left in Key West who doesn’t know that Tom Berner gets a little rough with his wife when he drinks—and when he’s stone-cold sober.
“Can I get you anything else?” I struggle to keep my voice steady, to plaster a polite smile on my face.
I don’t want his judgment or sympathy; have no use for well-meaning words that would do more harm than good. What’s between a man and his wife is a man’s business, or so they tell me. I am Tom’s wife, Tom’s possession, to do with as he wishes.
The baby will be his whether I wish it to be or not.
John shakes his head in response to my question, letting me know he doesn’t need anything else, and he is once again the taciturn stranger to whom I have grown accustomed.
The bell above the front door rings, and the room quiets considerably more than usual as new arrivals stroll in.
The woman is far more elegant than our typical fare, in a dress that looks like it came from Paris or some fancy city like that. She’s beautiful in an almost untouchable way, as though she sauntered off the pages of Photoplay or one of those other Hollywood magazines, her hair an inky black, a slash of red across her lips, her skin flawless. The dark-haired man beside her strides in like he owns the place, while she appears as though she’s skimming through the water, gliding through life.
Railroad folk for sure. I’ve never seen a dress like hers in all my life.