I return the gesture. “Make yourself useful and put on some toast.”
Chapter 4
Hope
I make it through dinner service and the breakfast rush washing dishes at The Friendly Table, but Bellamy is hard to contain to Mercy’s little office.
At the start of lunch—really mid-morning, but ranchers wake up early—she sneaks into the restaurant and starts talking to an obnoxious woman who asks her where her Daddy is.
And then when I scoop my daughter up, my shirt pulls up and that woman’s snakelike eyes zoom in on the ugly purple and yellow bruise on my side.
I immediately have a panic attack.
“Jessika is a you-know-what who needs to mind her own business more,” Mercy says quietly when she’s scooped Bellamy up and herded me into the back office. “It’s fine.”
I shake my head between hiccupping sobs. It’s not. I know it’s not.
“There are shelters in the city. They have programs?—”
I can’t tell her that I know about shelters. Tried one in Vancouver and didn’t last long. I need to get thousands of kilometres between me and my past. That’s the only thing that will help me breathe.
“I need my car,” I manage to whisper.
“Okay. You’re okay. We’ll figure something out.” She pushes a tissue into my hand. “Let’s find out how much it’ll cost to fix your car first, yeah? And how long.”
“I can’t afford it.” My voice cracks.
“One thing at a time. I know the guy who owns the garage. He can work on a payment system, or an IOU. Let me worry about him.”
I don’t deserve this kindness. But I’ve been on the run for five days, with almost no sleep, and I’m at my limit. I will greedily take whatever help Mercy can offer.
“Why don’t you take Bellamy back to my house for a nap?”
We stayed in the little carriage house behind the diner last night. I slept fitfully, the shadows closing in around us, every distant vehicle sound waking me up. I’m not sure if I can actually sleep during the day, but lying down still sounds shockingly good.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper again.
“I’m not. Go. I’ll come check on you after lunch.”
When we wake up, Mercy has brought us some soup, and a cookie for Bellamy as well.
“I talked to the mechanic,” she says. “He’ll tow your car over to the garage this afternoon, and he’ll do what he can for the least amount of money to get it driving again. In the meantime, he mentioned something else that I think you might want to consider.”
“What’s that?” I ask as I try to re-direct Bellamy to eat some soup before the cookie.
I give up pretty quickly.
“His mother is a vegetable farmer who needssome help with her spring kale harvest. She would have room for you and Bellamy in her house. It would be a quiet place to wait until your car is repaired—and the work you do for her could offset that cost.”
“Picking…kale?” I try not to sound skeptical, but it’s hard.
She nods vigorously. “You’ll understand when you see her gardens. And it’s not hard work, really. Not as hard as washing dishes.”
“I don’t mind hard work.” I swallow hard, fighting back against a visceral shudder at the thought of working in a garden. I don’t have a green thumb, and kale is my nemesis. I hated Derek’s high tunnel on the island. It stank of mouse pee and rotting vegetation. But I can see Mercy’s logic that a day or two of picking greens is probably going to be easier, mentally, than a restaurant full of strangers. “If Bellamy can be close by me?”
“Of course.” Mercy holds up her phone. “I thought we could do a quick video call with Luna, first? So you could get an idea for what this would entail.”
Nodding jerkily, I hold my breath as she pulls up a contact card on her phone and taps the video button.
