Texas Toast

By Mark Leggett

Lizzie Evans has always been an enigma to her daughter Sunny, gone for years at a time between visits, sending postcards from all over the world, but with no real connection between them. On her last visit she left Sunny an envelope containing $50,000 in cash and a note saying that she was going back to Berkshire Michigan, the town she grew up in, to "settle some things." A month later she is found dead, murdered in a particularly ugly fashion. Looking for answers Sunny goes to her mother's home town, but the questions she asks no one wants to answer. The local Sheriff Duncan Rimes, is movie star handsome but seems to be more interested in getting her to leave town than solving her mother's murder

Attacked in an alley and told to get out of town or "end up like your mother," Sunny needs help and needs it badly. The only person she can turn to is Jess Hanniford, her first love, who shattered her heart when she was seventeen. Sparks fly between them when Jess arrives but can they let the the past remain buried?

As Sunny and Jess delve into her mothers life they uncover a myriad of disturbing facts about the "Golden Girl," none of them flattering. Was Lizzie Evans just the local whore or was she something else? As Sunny and Jess trace back what happened years before, the attraction they both felt as teenagers returns. Jess's kisses are unbelievably hot but all Sunny can see is him naked in Chander's Creek with somebody else.

About to be arrested by the Berkshire police and with Jess missing, Sunny turns to her ex-fiance Dan Halliday, an FBI agent that Sunny had almost married the year before. Dan comes to the rescue but is his interest in Sunny professional or more personal?

The only person in town Sunny might call a friend is one of her mother's
ex-lovers from high school Josh Ringold. He seems like a nice enough guy but is he? After all Sunny's mother had laughed at his marriage proposal and dumped him graduation night to go do shots with Duncan Rimes and the boys from the baseball team.

Sunny's grandfather that she had never met still lives in Berkshire but with dementia how much information can he give her? Finding her mother's diary at his house generates more questions than answers and revels secrets that nobody in town knows except maybe Stella Rimes, Sunny's mothers best friend from high school and now the Sheriff's wife .

With Sunny 's mothers diary as guide, more and more dark secrets are reveled about Berkshire Michigan and Lizzie's friends and enemies. The investigation turns deadly when Sunny and Jess's motel room is blown up and a dead body found inside. When a suspect is arrested both Sunny and Jess suspect a set up even though the FBI and the local police declare the case closed. But is it?

Lizzie Evans had left town pregnant and broke after graduation without telling anybody and waited twenty-seven years to return… But why? Was she blackmailing somebody from her past or was she in Berkshire to settle an old score? What secrets last that long in a town like Berkshire and who was so threatened twenty-seven years later that they resorted to murder?

The mystery of her mother's death all revolves around what happened on graduation night twenty-seven years earlier, when Sunny's mother was doing tequila shots in the back of a pickup truck with the boys baseball team. Everyone in town thinks there was an orgy that night but what really happened? Was one of the boys involved her mother's killer? Was one of them the father that Sunny never knew? Or both? It's dangerous to ask questions in Berkshire Michigan but the real question is can Sunny and Jess stay alive long enough to get the answers they are looking for, or will Sunny suffer the same fate as her mother?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667806297

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Copyright © 2021 by Mark Leggett

Texas Toast

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known

or invented, without permission in writing from the publisher,

except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection

with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66780-628-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66780-629-7

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION PAGE

To my wife who always encourages me in everything and thinks I’m smarter and more talented than I am, to my mother who always took me to the Concord library on Saturdays, and to my daughter Rachael without whose technical assist I would still be writing with crayons.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER ONE

Do you remember that old country song, Tequila makes her clothes fall off?" That is pretty much how I was conceived from all I can tell from the few questions my mother would answer. Homecoming queen, Elizabeth Lorranie Evans, high school graduation night in the back of a pickup truck doing tequila shots with the boy’s baseball team. One thing led to another and nine months later I came along. When I used to ask my mother who my father was, before I gave up asking stupid questions, she would just smile and shrug, which I took to mean there were multiple possible candidates. She had left Berkshire Michigan and came to my Aunt Connie’s as soon as her belly began to swell, and I was born in Texas on a ranch out in the middle of nowhere. I still have a picture of my mother at eighteen, blond haired and beautiful in a ten-gallon hat leaning against a broken-down fence, her belly with me inside it out to here, a big smile on her face and a Lone Star beer in her hand. In the spirit of my conception, she named me Sunrise, after the old Eagles song Tequila Sunrise, but everybody has always called me Sunny.

My mother, a doting parent that she was not, had a tendency to disappear for months or even a year or two at a time 2 only returning to Connie’s ranch when she was broke or beaten up or between men. I hadn’t seen her much over the years and when I did see her, we never seemed to have anything to talk about or say to each other, I got all my love and support as I grew up from my Aunt Connie. My twenty-seventh birthday happens to be today, and my mother is supposed to show up, but absolutely nobody thinks she really will, the string of broken promises made by her over the years could reach to the moon and back easily.

Aunt Connie is a rangy washed-out blond in her mid-fifties with wrinkles on her face and a wide-open smile. She married young and her husband died less than a year later and left her a 20,000-acre ranch in Texas that she’s run by herself ever since. She takes in stray dogs, stray cats, and stray people, which is why I grew up there and I’m back visiting, it’s always been my home base and probably always will be. I’m a singer of sorts, I’ll probably never have a hit record or anything, but I’ve got a good enough voice for the bar circuit and while I’m no Eric Clapton I get along on my old Gibson guitar well enough to make a decent living.

As I pull my Jeep Wrangler off the main road and through the ranch gate with Circle C Ranch burned into it with a branding iron, I think about all the times I’ve returned to Aunt Connie’s place wounded or hurt from a bad breakup, a job-related disappointment or even just because I miss the battered ranch house and the woman inside. Maybe I’m not so different from my mother after all, although I never touch tequila and I’m religious about birth control.

The ranch is almost six miles from the main road, a dusty track with the typical Texas scenery of sagebrush and grass and low rolling hills. There were scattered bunches of cows grazing, mostly Herefords or Angus but with an occasional longhorn that Connie had acquired because she thought every Texas ranch should have some. I can see the old house in the distance, it looks like it belongs on a movie set, it is so stereotypical of what a western ranch house from back in the cowboy days should look like. It’s made from big logs with a front porch the whole width of the house and halfway down each side. There is a huge set of elk antlers on the peak above the door that Connie shot herself and a half a dozen rocking chairs spread out here and there for people to set in after the chores are done.

My Aunt Connie is pretty stereotypical as well, I’ve never seen her in anything other than jeans and cowboy boots with her yellow-blond hair pulled into a ponytail and stuffed under her cowboy hat, and when she rides the range checking out cattle, she wears a single action .45 Army Colt on her hip with an old Henry carbine in her saddle scabbard. She made me learn to shoot too, and although I don’t wear a .45 on my hip I do have a little .38 Special that I carry in the glove box of my Jeep just in case I need it and it’s come in handy a couple of times on the road too, discouraging would be Romeos that think because I’m a woman alone performing in bars I am willing to perform other things in the parking lot as well.

Most men are pigs with a very few exceptions, and one that I used to think was an exception but acquired pig status years ago was parked in Aunt Connie’s driveway as I pulled up. Jess Hanniford’s blue one-ton four-wheel drive Chevy sat dust covered and dirty between the house and the barn. Jess and I had gone to high school together, the Hanniford’s were Aunt Connie’s closest neighbors, so Jess and I had ridden to school together most days, the twenty mile trek a morning ritual for years. We’d been childhood friends, ramming around the two ranches on horseback or his old beat-up Jeep raising as much Hell as we could. Jess was a star athlete in high school and had multiple scholarship offers from colleges for football or baseball, but instead he had traveled for a few years on the rodeo circuit, riding bulls and wild horses. He had a drawer full of gold belt buckles, almost as many as the number of bones he’d broken to acquire them.

When his father had died suddenly of a stroke, he’d dropped out of the rodeo circuit and taken over running the family ranch. His mother had died a year later, leaving just him and his younger brother Ray to manage the sprawling H&H Ranch. I hadn’t seen Jess in a couple of years, I’d been on the road, and he’d been running a 22,000-acre spread which didn’t leave him much time for socializing.

Well, if it ain’t Dolly Parton, the rough male voice spoke from the porch, as I live and breathe. My boobs aren’t that big, I threw my duffel up onto the porch hard enough he had to step aside to keep from getting hit, I’m more Faith Hill size. Either one of them I’d like to see naked, he smiled his trademark smile that most women seemed to find irresistible, but I just found irritating, or even you for that matter. Been there done that, I shrugged, I wasn't that impressed. Oh man that hurts, he clutched his chest as if he’d been shot, we could go out to the barn over there and you could slip out of those jeans, and I could see if I could impress you.

I felt a little flutter in my stomach, well maybe a little lower, Jess was joking probably, but if I agreed to a little trip to the barn to call his bluff, I wasn’t 100% sure he wouldn’t take me up on it. Cheryl Jean wouldn’t like that, I said instead. Cheryl Jean is old news, he smiled again, haven’t seen her in a couple of months. So, who is sharing your king-sized bed now cowboy? I asked. Nobody, it’s empty just waiting for you, he pushed his cowboy hat back, you interested?

Not even one little bit, I shook my head, that mattress must be about used up by now. You agree and I’ll go buy a new mattress, Jess said, and some new silk sheets. Pass, I said, stepping up on the porch, but if you promise not to grab my ass, I’ll give you a hug.

Can’t promise that he chuckled and threw his arms around me, good to see you Sunny, he squeezed me so hard I couldn’t breathe, it’s been kind of dull around here without you. I doubt that I said, how’s Ray doing? Pretty good, he turned me loose but not before he grabbed my ass and squeezed anyway, he’s over to Milford looking at a breeding bull, but he’ll be here for your party.

Not a party, I groaned, do you remember what happened the last time? I don’t think birthday party brawls are that uncommon in Texas, Jess smiled, nobody went to the hospital after all. Happy Birthday to me, I said, no fatalities. Besides, Jess grabbed me again, it’s our tenth anniversary too, remember you and me naked down at Chandler’s Creek on your seventeenth birthday? Let go of me you moron, I shoved against his chest with no results what-so-ever, the man was solid muscle. We’re not celebrating that. We could go back to the scene of the crime, his lips whispered in my ear, a little skinny dipping, a little Jack Daniels, you know see what comes up. Aunt Connie voice spoke from behind us, If you two are gonna do it right here on the porch let me get a blanket to throw over you so I don’t have to watch. We are not doing any such thing, I finally pushed away from Jess, he’s just being his usual obnoxious self.

Hell, Aunt Connie snorted, half the gals in three damn counties would disagree with you on that one. Obviously they don’t know him as well as I do, I said, picking up my duffel, of course since he only dates girls with double digit IQs, and a 38 double D bra size or bigger it’s no surprise they find him irresistible. Hey, hey, Jess protested, that ain’t true! Really? What do Cyndi Barnes, Arlene Turner, Becky Sandoff and Cheryl Jean all have in common? Well, Jess pretended to scratch his head, I don’t know, they’re all blond? None of them naturally, I snorted, or probably their boobs either.

If you two wanna quit jawing at each other, I’ve got lunch made, Aunt Connie interrupted, and a couple of homemade pies for dessert. You don’t have to tell me twice, I said, I haven’t had anything to eat since Durango. I’ll go along, Jess agreed, I haven’t had any homemade pie in quite a spell. Got another surprise for you, Aunt Connie said, your mom is here.

Happy Birthday baby, the blond-haired blue-eyed woman got up out of her chair and gave me a hug, you’re looking good. Thanks mother, I hugged her as well and then stepped back, you are too. And it was true, she was looking good, fantastic even, the last time I’d seen her over two years ago she had been fresh off another breakup or marriage or whatever she’d been in, and she’d been forty pounds overweight with bags under her eyes and bruises courtesy of whatever man she’d been with. Today she looked ten years younger than her forty-four years, skin perfect, eyes bright and shining and larger cleavage than I remembered under her expensive cocktail dress.

Yes, ma’am, Jess said, never one to miss a chance to charm a woman, you look good enough to eat. Careful young man, my mother smiled her patented smile which was just as good as Jess’s, you’ll make a middle-aged woman blush. Middle aged? Jess clutched his chest as if he was having a heart attack, my God I was worried you weren’t twenty-one yet and I wouldn’t be able to ask you out for a drink. Enough with the comedy routine you two, I interrupted them, I’m about to starve to death, can we eat now?

Aunt Connie always made enough food in case ten extra people showed up and today was no exception. We had ham sandwiches on her fresh baked bread, homemade potato salad, baked beans, and ice-cold Lone Star beer. There was also a bowl of fruit, apples, oranges, and a couple of bananas. I made two sandwiches and filled up the rest of my plate with beans and potato salad. It had been a long drive from Durango with only one stop at a fast-food place on the way. Jess filled two plates, the man had an appetite like a starving dog, although it didn’t look like he was carrying anything but muscle on his six-foot two-inch frame. My mother’s plate held only a half a sandwich and a couple of small spoonsful of beans and potato salad and a glass of water instead of a Lone Star. You’re not eating mother? I asked in surprise, I can’t believe you’re dieting!

Oh, that’s not the half of it, she smiled, cardio three days a week, yoga on Thursdays, a four mile walk every morning and I haven’t had a drink in over six months. You are training for something ma’am? Jess said around a mouthful of ham sandwich. Because your body is just about as perfect as it can be right now. Oh, Christ stop, I glared at Jess, you’re spreading on that fake charm so thick that I’m about to throw up.

Sunny please, my mother smiled, don’t interrupt a man when he’s saying things like that, even if they’re not true, a woman always likes to hear them. Oh, they’re true, Jess started, you look exactly like the day I first met you. In fact, Sunny and I were just talking about old times a little while ago when she invited me to go skinny dipping with her down at Chandler’s Creek…

Jess caught the apple I threw about two inches before it would have smacked him in the face, the man had reflexes like a damn cat for cripes sake, and went on talking like nothing had happened, I told her that it wouldn’t be right for us to be doing that kind of thing with her mother visiting and all.

That never stopped you before, Aunt Connie snorted, I don’t know why you two even bothered wearing clothes that one summer. Aunt Connie really, I gasped, we weren’t doing anything! My daddy bought me two gross of condoms that May, Jess shook his head, and Sunny and I used them all up by the Fourth of July. That’s a lie! I picked up an orange and bounced it off Jess’s head, he was laughing so hard he was a little slow this time. And even if it wasn’t, you’ve got no business talking about it you jerk!

You mean those stories he told me about you two weren’t all lies? The voice came from the doorway, as Jess’s little brother Ray pushed open the screen door. Little might be a bit off base for a description, I hadn’t seen Ray in a couple of years and at eighteen he stood an even six feet tall and had the same muscles as his older brother, you didn’t get fat working a 22,000-acre ranch. That’s hard to believe. Most of what he says is exaggerated, I said, especially if there is a woman involved. There was this one story… Ray started, and I always wondered…. No more stories! I shouted, I don’t want to hear any more about old times! In fact, no more talking at all! I pushed my chair back and pointed my finger at Jess, I’m going for a ride, I said, don’t be here when I get back, in fact don’t ever talk to me again you son-of-a-bitch!

I stormed out to the barn to see Clancy, my paint gelding that I’d had for fifteen years. He greeted me with a knicker, and I held out my hand with a sugar cube in it for him, it was a routine we had going back from the time he was a gangly colt, and I was a gangly twelve-year-old. I threw a halter on him and didn’t bother with a saddle and as I left the yard at an easy canter. Jess was coming down the steps of the porch. Sunny wait! he tried to wave me down, I want to talk to you! Fuck off! I said as we went by, I’m not interested.

I rode for an hour, all the way to George’s Creek, a thin splash of water that was dry most years by now, but we’d had more rain than usual so it still gurgled and spilled down the old creek bed where it would eventually join up with Chandler’s Creek on the H&H Ranch. Thinking of Chandler’s Creek just pissed me off again, Jess was such an asshole, and even after ten years I could still remember that summer when I was seventeen like it was yesterday. We’d been close friends forever and then for one summer a lot more. It had started at Chandler Creek just like Jess had said, skinny-dipping one night under a full moon, both of us realizing at the same time our friendship had turned into something else. It was the spring just before high school graduation and neither of us knew where or what we were going to do with our lives, just that our lives were going to change soon.

Wow, Sunny you’re beautiful, Jess had said in awed wonder that first night as I’d come out of the water dripping, holding my shirt in front of me for modesty’s sake. I’d stopped, frozen by his words and looked at him like I’d never seen him before. He was naked, the muscles earned from years of hard work on the ranch wet from the creek. So are you, I’d whispered, my heart in my throat. I want to kiss you, he’d said moving towards me slowly, his eyes locked on mine. I’d like that, I whispered, barely able to breath, as he’d stopped in front of me and took my shirt out of my hands and threw it up on the bank. You are perfect, he had said softly and took me in his arms…

That had been the start of it, four months of the most intense physical relationship I’d ever had, nothing had existed but the two of us, it was love with a capital L, and lust with quadruple exclamation points. It had ended that summer when I’d caught Jess with Cynthia Barnes naked in Chandler’s Creek. They hadn’t seen me; I was to meet Jess there after midnight, but I’d gotten there an hour early to find the two of them standing there naked looking into each other’s eyes knee deep in the Creek.

It had been a betrayal on such a basic level I literally thought I might die of a broken heart right then and there. I had stumbled, and then ran back to Aunt Connie’s ranch, tears running down my face in a steady stream as I threw clothes into a backpack, then carried that and my old Gibson guitar out to the Jeep I’d bought with money I’d earned on the ranch. Going somewhere? Aunt Connie had appeared at the side of the Jeep as I was wiping the tears off my face good enough so I could drive. Away, I had sobbed, far away. Keep in touch, she had said, and handed me an envelope, and take care of yourself Sunny.

I had driven for ten hours not even knowing what direction I was going, stopping once for gas but finally having to quit driving because I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I rented a room at a cheap motel and slept for eighteen hours. When I woke up, I had breakfast in the diner attached to the motel and got back in my Jeep and drove another eight hours before stopping. It was dinner time and there was a bar with a sign out front that advertised the best burger in Texas, and since my stomach was growling so loud, I could hear it over the county music on the radio I went inside.

By that time, I’d cried myself out and my broken heart had scarred over and had been replaced by a long simmering anger at men in general and Jess Hanniford in particular, and I vowed nobody would ever hurt me that way again.

I traveled for a week with no goal in mind. The envelope my Aunt had handed me contained a thousand dollars, which seemed like a lot but wouldn’t last forever, I was going to need a job. I ate in bars most of the time and in one there was a sign up at the cashier’s desk that said, Weeknight singer wanted. I went out and got my old Gibson out of the Jeep and twenty minutes later I had a job. That was the start of it, from there I sang all over Texas and Arizona and after the first year I signed up with a talent agency and they put me on the circuit. I wasn’t getting rich, but I was doing all right, well, good enough to give Aunt Connie her thousand dollars back and buy a newer Jeep. I’d been gone for almost two years before I made it back to Aunt Connie’s ranch, and she just gave me a hug, like I’d just gone to the grocery store and back and never said a word about what had happened.

It would be five years since that night at the creek before I saw Jess again at his father’s funeral and by then I was a different person and so was he. I’d spent the years singing in bars and clubs and he’d been traveling the rodeo circuit. I never mentioned seeing him and Cynthia Barnes in the creek and neither did he, in fact neither of us ever mentioned that night at all. Our friendship kind of resumed, we were friendly anyway but that was it, and that was fine with me, I didn’t want anything more from Jess Hanniford. I’d had a few casual affairs here and there, a girl has needs after all but none of them were serious or lasted very long except one and that had now been over for the better part of a year.

I rode Clancy back into the ranch yard about dark, relieved to see there weren’t any cars parked there, I had no interest in a birthday party and even less interest in seeing Jess again if he had the gall to show up. By the time I rubbed Clancy down and gave him some grain and hay it was full dark. As I walked to the ranch house, I saw Aunt Connie was sitting in a rocker on the porch with a bottle of bourbon and two glasses on the table beside her. Sit, she motioned to the empty chair, let’s talk a little bit. I sat and poured the two glasses full. If it’s Jess you want to talk about, forget it. I tipped up my glass, I’ve got nothing more to say about him at all. It ain’t about Jess, Aunt Connie tossed down her whole glass and sat it back down for a refill, it’s about your mother. I see her car’s gone, I shrugged, that’s no surprise. No, no surprise there, Connie nodded, but this is. She pulled a thick envelope out of her shirt pocket and tossed it on the table. A good-by note? my eyebrows raised, that’s a first. Open it, Connie shrugged, it’s a little more than that. I opened the envelope to find a thick wad of cash and a single piece of paper. Money? That’s a first, I chuckled, usually she’s borrowing, not giving away. Fifty grand for you, Aunt Connie said, and the same amount for me. What the hell? I was stunned. How could my mother get a hold of that kind of cash? She didn’t say, Connie said, read the note.

Sunny… the note started, I know I haven’t always been the best mother to you but all of us are what we are in this life. I’ve had some good times and some bad times but about six months ago I got some news that changed my life. It isn’t good news but I’m doing what I can to deal with it. One of the ways to deal with it is to settle a few things from my past. The money isn’t much for all the years, but maybe it can help you out and make up for my past actions. I’m heading home to Michigan to clear up a few things and there are a few people I need to settle up with as well, but that is another story. Know that I’ve always loved you as much as I was able and that I’m proud of the way you’ve turned out. Love, Mom.

What the hell kind of disease does she have? I asked. She didn’t say, Connie shrugged, and wouldn’t tell me when I asked. So, her answer is running around like a crazy person instead of being with her family? What the hell kind of response is that? Your mother’s, Connie said, she’s always done her own thing and come hell or high water she’s not going to change now. God dammit! I almost spat. And she couldn’t stay a couple of hours to tell me this in person? She had to run off like she always does? Son-of-bitch she’s selfish!

Drink your whiskey, Connie said, and calm down. I did as she asked, tossing my drink down and pouring another one. If you want answers, you know where she’s going to be, Connie said, go get them. Maybe I will! I threw down another shot and poured the glass full again. Maybe I just will!

I didn’t. I had a gig in Tucson, and then a long drive to Laramie, and then Austin and a month had gone by when I got the call from Aunt Connie that my mother was dead, murdered in Berkshire Michigan, the little town where she’d grown up.

CHAPTER TWO

I pulled into the town of Berkshire a little after seven in the morning, having driven thirty-six hours straight. I was yawning so hard my jaw ached, so I pulled into a diner on the outskirts of town named The All-Nighter. Appropriate, I mumbled as I stretched my aching back muscles, my Jeep can cover rough country but it’s no Cadillac on the highway that’s for sure. I pushed open the door to the diner and half the people at the counter turned to see the new arrival. The men’s glances lingered, but I was used to that, I guess if you’ve seen one busty blond you’ve just got to stare at the rest of them. There were half a dozen truckers as evidenced by the rigs parked outside, three women sitting in a booth with matching blue coveralls on, two cops at the counter and one table full of octogenarians that looked like they were there for the all-day free coffee refills. I found an empty booth halfway down the narrow walkway and slipped in it with a sigh, damn I was tired. Coffee? The woman’s voice made me look up and I stared at her for a long moment, appearing as bad as the men that had been ogling me a moment before.

Doris, the waitress had the biggest breasts I’d ever seen on a woman, they had to be 44DD’s if they were an inch and I don’t know if they were silicone or not, but her bra must have been engineered out of airplane cable because they didn’t sag an inch but defied gravity as if they were helium balloons. I’ve been called busty more than a few times in my life, but this woman made me look like a teenage boy.

Yes, please, I finally managed to croak, hot and black. Coming right up, the woman smiled knowingly and dropped a menu in front of me, then turned and walked away. The coffee was strong enough to float a horseshoe, like they say in Texas, or dissolve the enamel of your teeth, but it had the jolt I needed to wake me up. Doris was a damn good waitress, she worked the whole diner without apparent effort, food got delivered quickly and coffee cups never seemed to stay empty very long.

I ordered something called the Lumberjack Breakfast, three eggs, three pancakes, three pieces of sausage, three strips of bacon and an order of hash browns with gravy. When I