“Ma’am,” he said.
“You can call me Linda.”
He nodded once.
“Mason.”
He held his hand out like a grown man.
I shook it.
His palm was cold.
“That was for my dad,” he said.
“I figured.”
He looked down at his sneakers.
“They laugh at him sometimes.”
“Who does?”
He shrugged, which usually means too many people to name.
“People.”
He swallowed.
“He says it doesn’t matter. But sometimes when he thinks I’m asleep, he sits on the edge of the couch and just stares at the floor.”
I did not know Ray Hale.
Not yet.
But I knew that stare.
I had seen it in the mirror at truck-stop bathrooms at three in the morning.
In warehouse windows.
In my own dark kitchen when bills were lined up like accusations and the house was quiet enough to hear the refrigerator hum.
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