Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [64]
She stayed until she got the sign of where to head next. She stayed until she heard the name Pie Town. Trina thought she might be pregnant but tried to pretend otherwise, even though the old Indian woman patted the girl’s belly and nodded with a smile. Trina had hoped, tried to make herself believe, that the woman simply wanted to feed her breakfast, thought that she should eat. Now she understood that the old woman had known what she herself had not wanted to know. Trina lay in bed, wondering if Conroe was heading to San Diego to deliver BMWs or El Paso to hand over patrol cars, or if he was home, having already forgotten the girl he said was worth the wait.
Trina knew her options. She could have an abortion or give the baby up for adoption. She even heard she could sell the baby and make some nice cash if she could find that 1-800 number she had been given when she was sixteen and thought she might have gotten pregnant by Tommy Dexter. She worked afternoons at the garage with her grandfather and had driven his truck clear over to Dallas to take a pregnancy test, and there she met a girl in the waiting room of the clinic who told her about the agency and her plans to sell her baby before it was born. Trina had been lucky that time—the test came back negative—and had never risked that again, at least not until this last time.
“Maybe this isn’t all bad,” she said to herself, even though she did not believe that to be true. She blew out a long breath and closed her eyes. She had done the very thing she swore she would never do again. She had done exactly the same thing her mother had done. She’d had sex without protection, and she had believed a man who talked too sweet. And now she would probably end up in the same way she had started. Only this time, instead of being the baby, mishandled and starved, beaten by a man who hated anything lovely, she would be the woman, her mother, broken and old, used up and worn down way before her time.
Trina sat up on the sofa and glanced at the clock. It was after nine o’clock, and she wanted to talk to someone. She wished she were back in Amarillo and could talk to Dusty or Jolene or even Lester, the bartender at the club where she hung out a lot. She hadn’t contacted any of her old roommates since she climbed up into the cab of Conroe’s truck because she knew that both of them and Lester would say the same thing. “You should have known better than to trust anybody with boots that shiny, and a man with a beard is hiding something.”
Dusty would say that Conroe was too good at being needy and too smooth with his clumsiness. She was always a good read of men, and she had warned Trina that there was just something too clean about this boy, something too covered over. She had even guessed that he was married and had urged Trina to check him out before going out on the first date. Dusty found his name in the phone book on the Internet and told Trina to call the number just to see who answered. Trina had told her no and thrown away the piece of paper that Dusty had handed her while they drank beers on the house at the bar, compliments of Lester.
Jolene had not been overbearing in her suspicions of Conroe, but she did not approve of Trina packing everything she owned in a suitcase and traveling with him. Jolene told her to leave at least a few things hanging in the closet so he could see them, make it clear that she was coming back and not throwing away everything to drive west with him.
Lester could have cared less. He shrugged when Trina told him she was heading out with Conroe and said it was her life, but he had told her to call if anything happened and if she needed any help. He had even slipped her twenty dollars, all in ones, the tips from one night at Tank’s Cowboy Bar where