Chapter One

The store was closed at midnight. Mandy knew this because she worked there and she'd locked the door herself.

She was alone in the stockroom, counting inventory, when the bell above the door jingled. She didn't look up. People didn't come in at midnight. They weren't supposed to.

"Store's closed," she said.

The person at the door didn't leave. Mandy looked up. It was Jake. Of course it was Jake.

"Hey," he said. He was wearing his work shirt—the blue one with the grease stain on the sleeve, the one he'd worn for three days straight because he said laundry was for people who had time.

"Hey," she said. She went back to counting.

"Ruthie's got a fever."

Mandy's pen stopped. She looked up. Jake was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching her the way he watched things—quietly, like he was reading a manual and trying to figure out how something was supposed to work.

"How bad?"

"Bad. She's shivering. I gave her some medicine but—"

"Let me get my keys."

Chapter Two

Mandy's apartment was above a laundromat in a mobile home park on the edge of Youngstown. The walls were thin. The heating didn't work. The landlord came once a month and knocked on doors and asked if everything was okay, and Mandy always said yes, because she was twenty-two and she'd been saying yes since she was sixteen and it had never worked for anyone.

Ruthie was on the couch, wrapped in three blankets, shaking. She was sixteen, thin as a rail, dark-haired, with her mother's face and her mother's habit of disappearing when things got hard.

Mandy's mother had disappeared two weeks ago. Gone to Indianapolis to "start over." Left Ruthie behind. Left Mandy with a kid, a broken car, and eighty dollars in her purse.

Jake was kneeling beside the couch, holding a glass of water and a bottle of something that might have been medicine. He looked up when Mandy came in.

"She's burning up," he said.

Mandy knelt beside him. She put her hand on Ruthie's forehead. It was hot—too hot. She pressed two fingers to Ruthie's pulse. Fast. Too fast.

"I need to get her to the hospital."

"It's midnight."

"I don't care."

Jake stood up. "I'll drive."

They got Ruthie into Jake's truck. It was an old Ford—dented, taped together in places, the radio only picking up one station that played 90s rock at maximum volume. Mandy put Ruthie in the back seat and buckled her in. She got in the passenger seat and closed her eyes.

"Mandy."

She opened them. Jake was looking at her.

"You okay?"

"No."

He started the truck.

Chapter Three

The drive to the hospital took twenty minutes. They didn't speak. The radio was playing some song Mandy didn't know, something loud and electric that made the windows vibrate. Jake kept both hands on the wheel. He drove like he always drove—carefully, like the world might break if he wasn't gentle.

At the hospital, the ER doctor looked at Ruthie for thirty seconds and ordered a fever reducer. Mandy sat in a plastic chair in the waiting area while Jake sat beside her. She stared at the wall. The wall was beige. It had a water stain in the corner shaped like Ohio.

"Your truck," she said.

"What about it?"

"It's going to fall apart."

"So I've heard."

"You should fix it."

"I will."

"When?"

Jake was quiet. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. A nurse walked past with a cart of supplies. The clock on the wall said 12:47 AM.

"I will," Jake said. "When I can afford it."

Mandy nodded. She didn't say anything else. There was nothing to say. They both knew about not being able to afford things. Jake knew because his father had spent their money on whiskey. Mandy knew because her mother had spent it on bottles and bus tickets.

Ruthie's fever broke at 2:13 AM. Mandy found out because a nurse came out and said so, and Mandy felt something inside her chest unclench—just slightly, just enough to notice.

They drove home in the dark. The sky was starting to lighten at the edges, a pale gray bleeding into the black. Mandy fell asleep in the passenger seat. She didn't remember waking up.

Chapter Four

Mandy woke up on the couch. Ruthie was in her room, sleeping. The house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of the laundromat below them—the machines that never stopped, even at 6 AM, even when nobody was doing laundry.

Jake was in the kitchen. She could tell by the sound of the coffee maker. He'd made coffee. She didn't know that Jake could make coffee. She knew that Jake could change a transmission, fight a drunk man off a fence, and sit silently in a hospital waiting room for four hours. She didn't know he could make coffee.

She walked into the kitchen. Jake was standing at the counter, holding two mugs. He looked at her.

"Drink," he said.

She took the mug. It was too hot. She blew on it and drank. It was the best coffee she'd ever had.

"Jake," she said.

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

He looked at the window. Outside, the sky was gray and flat and Youngstown-looking. "It's nothing."

"It's not nothing."

"It is, basically. I drove a kid to the hospital. That's the bare minimum."

Mandy sat down at the table. She put her hands around the mug and let the heat soak into her palms. Her hands were rough—calloused from years of stocking shelves, lifting boxes, scrubbing floors. She'd stopped trying to make them soft when she was nineteen.

"Jake," she said. "You know what I hate about you?"

He looked at her. "What?"

"That you do all this stuff without saying anything. Without making it—big. You just—show up. And you drive. And you leave. Like it's nothing. Like it's the most normal thing in the world."

He set his mug down. "It is normal."

"No. It's not. Most people—the guys I know—they do something like this and they want you to thank them. They want you to say 'wow, Jake, you're so great.' They want—something."

Jake was quiet. He was looking at her the way he always looked at her—like he was trying to figure something out and the figuring was the point, not the answer.

"I don't need you to thank me," he said finally.

"I know. That's what I'm saying. You don't need anything. And that makes me feel—" She stopped. She was searching for a word. There weren't many words for how she felt. She wasn't good with words. Words were for people like Ruthie, who read books and wrote essays and could say exactly what they meant. Mandy's words were usually shorter.

"Useless," Jake said.

She looked up. "What?"

"That's what it makes you feel. Useless. Because I do things and you can't do them and you can't thank me and you can't pay me back and so you feel—"

"Don't," she said.

But he'd already said it. Don't. The word that contained everything.

Mandy stood up. She carried her mug to the sink and set it down. She went to the window and looked out at the mobile home park—the chain-link fences, the overgrown lawns, the cars that hadn't run in two or three or seven years.

"I'm not useless," she said.

"I know."

"But I feel—"

"I know."

She turned to look at him. He was standing in her kitchen, in her too-small apartment above a laundromat in a town that nobody visited unless they had to, and he was looking at her like she was something he'd been trying to understand his whole life and never quite managed.

"Jake," she said. "Why do you do this?"

"Do what?"

"This. The driving. The coffee. The sitting in hospital waiting rooms. Why?"

He was quiet for a long time. Then: "Because you're the only person I know who needs help and hates asking for it. And I know what that's like."

Mandy looked down at her hands. They were rough. They were shaking—just slightly. She made them stop.

"I need to go to work," she said.

"Yeah."

"I work tonight."

"I know."

She picked up her keys. She was at the door. She put her hand on the knob and looked back at him.

"Jake?"

"Yeah."

"I'll pay you back for the coffee."

He smiled—a real smile, small and quiet and Youngstown. "Don't bother."

She left. He stayed in the kitchen. He drank the rest of his coffee. It was cold now. He drank it anyway.

Chapter Five

Mandy came home from work at 7 AM. She'd worked the night shift at the convenience store—eight hours of stocking shelves, scanning groceries, and ignoring the guy who came in at 3 AM drunk and tried to pay with a credit card that had been declined four times.

She opened the door to the apartment and found a note on the kitchen table:

Mandy—Ruthie's sleeping. I left fifty bucks on the counter. It's not much but it's something. —J

She picked up the fifty dollars. They were five-dollar bills—creased and used and real. She held them in her palm and felt the texture of the paper, the weight of the ink, the reality of money that had come from somewhere and was now here.

She went to Ruthie's room. The girl was sleeping peacefully, the fever broken, her breathing even. Mandy stood in the doorway for a moment and watched her.

Then she went back to the kitchen. She put the fifty dollars on the counter. Next to it, she put a note of her own:

Fifty bucks. Not enough for the truck but maybe enough for oil. Don't tell me not to buy it. —M

She left it on the counter and went to her room. She lay down on the couch—the one Ruthie had slept on the night before—and closed her eyes.

Outside, the sun was coming up over Youngstown. The sky was gray and the light was flat and the world was exactly as big as it had always been—small, tired, and holding on by a thread.

Author Note & Copyright: