The Voicemail Nine Days After I Left

He flipped two pages. “What do I need this for?” he said. “You’re here.” And he tossed it onto the seat of my truck through the open window.

I never took it back in the house. It rode behind the seat of my Ranger for two years, under the jumper cables.

It was back there the night I left. I did not think about it at all.

I got to Valentine a little after seven and realized I had no idea where I was going.

I parked behind the bakery on Main Street, because the lot was dark and nobody would bother me, and I slept in the cab with my church dress rolled up for a pillow.

At half past three in the morning somebody knocked on my window with a set of keys.

It was Connie, who owned the bakery. She had sold my mother cinnamon rolls every Saturday for twenty years. She was sixty-some, built like a fence post, with flour already on her forearms somehow.

“Abby Lindstrom,” she said, when I rolled the window down. “What on earth.”

“I left home.”

She looked at the duffel bag. She looked at my face. She did not ask one question.

“Can you run a register?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you get up early?”

I almost laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Then come in out of the cold. I’ve had a sign in that window for two months and nobody under seventy has asked about it.”

The room was up a flight of stairs at the back, over the ovens. It had a twin bed with a quilt, a dresser, a hot plate, a little bathroom with a shower the size of a feed sack, and one window that looked down on Main Street. Connie wanted three hundred and fifty dollars a month for it and said she would take it out of my check.

My check. I had not had a check with my name on it since a summer job at the Dairy Queen when I was seventeen.

That first day I worked the counter from five until one. A few customers looked at me a second too long. Nobody said anything unkind. A couple of the older women squeezed my hand when I gave them their change.

At one o’clock Connie sent me upstairs with a ham sandwich. I sat on the edge of the bed to take my boots off, and I woke up at nine that night with one boot still on.

Then I slept again until four.

I had forgotten what that felt like. I am not exaggerating. The whole room smelled like warm bread coming up through the floor, and nobody needed anything from me, and I slept eight hours a night for the first time in six years.

By the fourth day I noticed my shoulders had come down from around my ears.

By the sixth day I had stopped checking my phone.

Because that was the other thing. It did not ring.

Not that night. Not the next day. Not Sunday, when my chair would have been empty in the third pew. Not once in a week.

Jake had been right, you see. That was what I lay there and thought about on that twin bed. I had left, and nobody missed me. I kept waiting to feel worse about it than I did.

On the ninth day, a Saturday, I was wiping down the display case at closing when my phone buzzed in my apron pocket.

Jake.

I watched it ring. I let it go.