It’s a question, but she says it like a statement. Unfortunately, it’s a statement Buck knows for certain to be true.
“That’s not true at all,” Buck lies, hoping Tiffany can’t see through him. “She’s so concerned about you and your well-being. She just needed the weekend to collect herself.”
“I thought she needed the evening to collect herself.” Tiffany counters.
This is why people hate teenagers, Buck thinks to himself. This is also why he shouldn’t lie. “The evening, the weekend…it’s like twenty-four hours’ difference. Let’s have some breakfast.” Buck quickly changes the subject and lumbers down the hallway toward the kitchen.
The house is small—too small for a wide receiver like Buck Platner, but technically big enough for one person—and since Buck couldn’t justify a bigger house for just himself, he squeezes himself in like Alice in the rabbit hole. Once inside the messy kitchen, Buck opens the old refrigerator in hopes that fresh food has magically appeared overnight. No such luck. Starting to live like a grown-up is constantly on Buck’s list of things to do…it just never gets done. Instead of containing breakfast staples like coffee and Nutri-Grain bars, Buck’s shopping cart always ends up with marshmallow cereal, which he often has to eat dry since it seems his milk is perpetually past its sell-by date. To say that this home needs a woman’s touch is the understatement of the year.
Buck peers into the fridge, easily looking through the sparse contents—beer, mustard, and leftover pizza—and finding himself face-to-face with the buzzing old light bulb. He looks sheepishly over his shoulder, hoping he is alone, but finds Tiffany standing behind him looking skeptical.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Buck quickly decides. “We’re going to go out for breakfast, go to your house and get your stuff, and then you’re going to spend the night here. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to drive down to L.A. and Lizzie is going to be thrilled to see you.” Buck says each step with such conviction that he even has himself believing in this plan.
“Where are we gonna go for breakfast?” Tiffany asks, and Buck breathes a sigh of relief that she is on board with the plan or at least not putting up a fight.
He quickly thinks about her question. His father always goes to Sunday breakfast at Denny’s in the next town over with his mother after church. “Mug’s,” Buck answers definitively.
Tiffany nods her head and walks out of the kitchen saying, “I’ll get my shoes,” as Buck breathes a sigh of relief that a plan is now in action.
8
Sitting in the cracked brown vinyl booth at Mug’s, Tiffany can’t help but think about how her stepfather, Chuck, loves (loved) the crummy coffee shop. Normally, whenever he suggested it, Tiffany put up a fight to go to Denny’s instead. Denny’s benefited from the power of the parent company and undoubtedly has better food. Mug’s, so named because of the owners’, sisters Mildred and Wilma Appleby, mismatched collection of mugs in which they serve everything from coffee to clam chowder, is substandard on a good day. Today, though, Tiffany didn’t have the strength or the will to argue. She doubted she’d be able to eat anything anyway—which she was proving true as she shoved the runny scrambled eggs around her plate and took tiny sips of watery hot chocolate from a Shepherd and Moore Insurance Agency mug with a smiling yellow sunshine on it.
Buck had laid out a plan: breakfast, going home to collect her belongings, and then, in the morning, going to L.A. to deliver her to her aunt Lizzie. She could tell that Buck had tried hard to sound convincing when he told her about her aunt Lizzie’s concern for her and about how happy she would be to see them when they arrived. She had quelled her normal teenage defiance and let him believe that she believed it.
“Eggs okay?” Buck asks with a look of true concern.
“They’re a little runny,” Tiffany admits, taking a bite of overly buttered wheat toast midway through her answer. “Toast’s good, though.”
“Yep, they make good toast here,” Buck agrees, taking a bite of his underbuttered raisin toast and thinking that his eggs seem runny enough to be a salmonella risk.
They finish what they can manage to stomach of the putrid breakfast before Buck puts a single twenty-dollar bill on the table and doesn’t wait for change.
“Ready?” he asks politely, signaling to Tiffany that it’s time to get up and go.
As she stands up, her flannel pants stick to the sweat the vinyl booth created on the backs of her legs. She looks down as she peels them loose and realizes for the first time—or maybe just caring for the first time—how stupid she looks out in public in the same pajama pants she has had on since she went to bed two nights before. Tiffany stares at the green-and-navy plaid as she makes her way out of Mug’s. She also notices that as she passes by the booths and tables and walks toward the door that people are whispering. Victory is a small town, and in small towns word travels fast.
“They all know about my mother,” she thinks as she pushes the restaurant door open and hears Wilma Appleby mutter “Poor thing” from behind the old register.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Buck nod at the beehived restaurateur as he holds the door and follows Tiffany out. In silence, they climb into his truck and the engine starts with a roar. Chuck’s truck is (was) an older (much older) version of the same Ford. Tiffany takes notice of all the improvements the manufacturer has made—most noticeably the difference in the starting sound. Buck gives his key a slight turn and the truck eagerly turns over. Chuck would have to hold his key for seconds while the old engine begged for mercy before accepting defeat and grumbling to attention. The blue oval with Ford in script in the middle of the steering wheel is identical, though. Tiffany finds herself wishing that Buck’s truck was a piece of shit like her own family’s simply so that she could find some comfort in something familiar. For as long as she could remember, Tiffany had complained about her boring life. Now, her life had suddenly become much more exciting, and she wished with all her might that it was back to the mundane existence she had formerly despised.
A few seconds go by before Tiffany realizes that they are still sitting in the parking space in Mug’s cracked-asphalt parking lot. She looks over at Buck, who is watching her, looking afraid to speak—like she is counting something important and one word could cause her to completely lose her place. When they make eye contact he uncomfortably asks, “Where is your house?”
“Oh,” says Tiffany, feeling stupid for not realizing that of course he doesn’t know where she lives (lived). She gives him simple directions to her house, which is only a few miles away, and then settles back in the passenger seat, her wish for familiarity coming true as they travel the well-known route.
In a few minutes, Buck’s truck is in her driveway, perfectly centered over the oil stain Chuck’s truck had left behind. He puts the car in park and then turns the engine off, but he doesn’t make a move to get out.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” he asks, clearly unsure of what he should do.
“No, that’s okay,” Tiffany says, trying to sound nonchalant…the way she would have this time last week. Of course, this time last week, Buck Platner wouldn’t have been driving her home from breakfast, and if he had, her mother would have been running outside, bursting with excitement, to greet him and invite him in for a cold Coke.
Buck nods, giving the key a half turn in order to lower the power windows. He then leans his head against the back of the seat and instructs Tiffany to take her time.
She hops out of the truck and makes the same walk up the driveway that she has made thousands of times. When she gets to the front porch and stoops to retrieve the emergency key—which is actually the only one they ever use—from under the doormat, she realizes that her legs are shaking.
With uneasy hands, Tiffany puts the key in the lock, turns it, and then puts it back beneath the mat. She opens the door and steps inside, and can hear her mother hollering,