Pump one, where the SUV was parked. Pump two, on the other side of the same island. Pumps three and four, on the second island, farther back.
On the handles of pumps three and four, someone had taped sheets of paper inside clear plastic sleeves, flapping in the wind. She could read them from where she sat. OUT OF ORDER. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. — MGMT.
On pump two, the premium nozzle had a yellow plastic bag tied over it.
She looked at pump one. At the dark gray SUV parked beside it. At its open fuel door. At the green nozzle that was locked into it. She looked at the labels on the pump. Regular. Mid-grade. Premium. The green nozzle was the regular. The SUV was filling up on regular, on the only working pump in the station that had premium.
And standing beside the SUV, holding the nozzle in both hands, utterly still, as if she had all the time in the world, was a tall young woman in a leather jacket, looking at the numbers on the pump as they slowly, slowly ticked upward.
Brooke looked at the clock. Eight-thirty-six.
She looked at the fuel symbol. Flashing.
She looked at the tall young woman in the leather jacket, who had not even glanced at the orange car, who was standing there as if the orange car did not exist, as if Brooke did not exist, as if nobody in the whole wet gray world existed except herself and her stupid old truck and her stupid slow pump.
And something inside Brooke Halston, something that had been stretched tighter and tighter for two years, for eleven weeks, for the last forty-five minutes, something that had been holding her together with ninety-second bursts of crying in other people's bathrooms, finally, quietly, snapped.
She shoved open the door of the orange car and got out into the rain.
* * *
Theo Navarro had been at the gas station on the corner of Linwood and Fifth for about twelve minutes, and for eleven of them he had been trying to work up the courage to ask Mr. Farouk for a job.
He was nineteen. He was wearing what he wore almost every day, a black hoodie that had once said something on the front in white letters that had long since washed away, a pair of gray sweatpants, beat-up white sneakers, and a black baseball cap turned backward on his head so that the strap sat across his forehead. He had a thin mustache he was not sure about and a chipped front tooth from a skateboarding accident when he was fourteen and a résumé, folded into quarters, in the front pocket of his hoodie, that he had typed up the night before at the library and printed for ten cents a page. It was one page long. It did not have very much on it. Two summers at a car wash. Six months stocking shelves at a dollar store that had since closed. A high school diploma. Under SKILLS he had written, after a long time staring at the blinking cursor: Reliable. Good with people. Can lift heavy things.
He had been out of work for four months. His mother had been out of work for two, since the hospital laundry where she had worked for nine years had closed and moved its operations to a facility three hours away. His little sister needed new glasses. The rent on their apartment above the hardware store on Linwood was due on the first. Theo had applied for forty-one jobs in four months and had heard back from three, and all three had said no. So this morning, when his mother had sent him down to the gas station on the corner to buy a carton of milk and a loaf of bread with the last eleven dollars in her purse, he had folded the résumé into his pocket on the way out the door, because Mr. Farouk had a sign in the window of the convenience store that had said HELP WANTED — INQUIRE WITHIN for three weeks, and Theo had walked past it every single day, and every single day he had not gone in.
Today he had gone in. He had bought the milk and the bread. He had stood at the counter while Mr. Farouk, a heavy, slow-moving man of about sixty with a gray beard and kind tired eyes behind thick glasses, rang them up. He had felt the folded paper in his pocket like a hot coal. He had opened his mouth. And he had said, "Thanks," and taken his change, and walked out of the store.
Now he was standing under the concrete canopy of the gas station, between the two pump islands, with a plastic bag in one hand and the change in the other, looking back at the store through the rain-streaked glass and calling himself every name he could think of.