Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan

Author:Lindy Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 21

Kim Cole

At half past one, Kim untied her frosting-smeared apron, shook the boredom out of her long black hair, and grabbed her coffin-shaped purse from her cubby in the employee break room. She was halfway through the back door of Jimbo’s Java Café when Rhonda, the chain-smoking day manager, trundled through the swinging partition door to call her back.

“There’s a phone call for you.” Rhonda’s words came out in a rush before she hacked in a breath, muffled the resultant cough by biting into a donut pilfered from the day-old pile, and wagged the cordless phone in Kim’s direction.

Kim sighed and rolled her eyes so hard she worried one of her contacts might get stuck. This was supposed to be an easy job, money earned to see her through cosmetology school and nothing more. The last thing she wanted to do was stay late to take a call from a needy customer about the inscription on their birthday cake order—especially after a five-hour shift that had already seen her through the breakfast rush and the better part of lunch hour. Things had been so much simpler when Jimbo’s had just been java and not café, too. Pouring coffee, she could do. Frothing milk? No problem. But being forced to interact with indecisive customers who—like the deputy who came in every morning and drooled over the pastry case—couldn’t choose between a red-velvet or Italian-cream sugar rush to go with their midmorning cup of pick-me-up?

Honestly, she’d rather die. Plus, she had a lunch date at the burger joint adjacent to the theater across the street.

Kim waved a dismissive hand over her head and moved a step farther out of the door. “I’m already off the clock.”

Another cough. Another bite. A ring of chocolate frosting filled in the folds around Rhonda’s jowls. “You sure? Sounds like your brother.”

Dillon.

Kim froze. She blew a gust of breath out of the side of her mouth and dragged herself back inside the refrigerated chill of Jimbo’s kitchen. Ever since her younger brother had told their parents he was gay, they’d made it their lives’ goal to make Dillon’s existence as close to hell on Earth as possible. So far it had been a lot of Dad yelling, Mom sobbing, and long-term periods of isolation in his bedroom, but sooner or later someone would try to exorcise a rainbow-clad demon out of her baby brother. Either that, or they’d do what everybody else’s parents did—attempt to medicate him back to “normal.” Such was par for the course in the Bible Belt. If you didn’t fit in, you must either be possessed, crazy, or just plain abnormal.

In the event of the latter, it was best you left town. If you stayed, it was take two pills and see you at church Sunday morning.

Thank goddess for my crappy little apartment, Kim thought. She’d been there, too, when their parents had decided her black clothes and hard rock must be demonic influence. That was why she’d scrimped and saved and

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