The Missing Place by Sophie Littlefield

get your creamer in a second, or you can just fetch it,” she said, already moving on to another table.
    Shay got up and grabbed a little metal jug of cream off the counter. Colleen saw how men watched her move, their eyes both hungry and glazed. Shay was wearing the same jeans she’d had on yesterday, dark denim with a loop of sparkling topstitching on each back pocket, curving over her narrow rear. Colleen felt even more self-conscious, dressed in her wool pants and silk and mohair sweater. She took a sip of the coffee, hot enough to scald. She blew on the cup and took another, longer sip. It tasted so good she thought she might cry.
    â€œJust black?” Shay asked, pouring a long stream of cream into her coffee until it was pale as caramel. “Okay, let’s talk about money. I don’t mind keeping track. We can split it all down the middle, the shared stuff. You got the showers, they’re twelve dollars—I know, they jack you—and I can get breakfast, but I got to be honest, I’m getting to the bottom of my cash so if you could chip in for your half of the trailer that would be . . . let’s see, it was Tuesday to Tuesday, you got here . . .”
    Colleen watched uncomfortably as Shay wrote a neat column of numbers, her pencil flying over the numerals. “Four days out of seven, at three hundred, that’s eighty-five dollars and change if we split it. I don’t mind covering the deposit.”
    â€œShay . . .” Colleen said. “I don’t—this is—let me just get it all. I brought a lot of cash.”
    Shay was already shaking her head before Colleen finished speaking. When she frowned, the brackets around her mouth and the fine lines along her top lip made her look older. “Let’s just keep it square, okay?”
    â€œI just want to find my son. Our sons. I don’t—”
    Shay slammed her hand down flat on the table, making the coffee cups jump. Some spilled over the edge of Colleen’s, sloshing onto the table.
    â€œDon’t you think that’s what I want?” Shay demanded. Her eyes shone with tears, but she brushed them angrily away with the cuff of her sweater. “Don’t you think that’s what I’m thinking every second of the day? There’s so much of him in my head, I just have to—I have to—”
    She looked down at her numbers, carefully closed the loop of an 8, drew two lines below the total. “I have to keep my brain moving. Okay? If I don’t—oh, God, I don’t know. I just do things, keep busy.That way everything, Taylor and all those little moments when I’m so terrified I want to scream, they just kind of stay aboveground a little. I do this”—she tapped the paper with the point of her pencil—“and it helps for a minute. So humor me here. Let me do my math.”
    She picked up her own mug with two hands and drank deeply, the heat of the coffee evidently not bothering her.
    â€œI understand,” Colleen said, though she didn’t, not really. But if the numbers on the pad helped Shay, she wasn’t about to argue.
    The first waitress was back with their food. “Careful, it’s hot,” she said. “Ketchup? Hot sauce?”
    â€œHot sauce for sure. You got any strawberry jam?” Shay asked. “Col, you want anything?”
    Colleen shook her head. No one but Andy had called her Col since college, but she found that she didn’t mind.
    â€œEat,” Shay said, salting her potatoes. Colleen’s stomach rumbled. Hunger felt like a betrayal. She picked up her fork and poked at her scrambled eggs, pushing a thin string of egg white out of view under the toast. She took an experimental bite of potato. It was good, salty and hot and crispy, the sort of thing Colleen never ordered. Breakfast, when she had anything at all, was usually a protein bar or oatmeal, but she preferred to wait as long