Free The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott

eyes and begged him to, and when she opened them, Caleb Ross and the boy she imagined him to be were gone. Anne waited, just to be sure; then without really thinking, she pulled all the papers together, shuffled and reordered them, bringing Caleb’s to the top.
    She hoped against hope that there was nothing there: no tiny note in the margin, no picture or image sketched in No. 2 pencil, no secret message to decode from the circled letters on the quiz questions.
    Not again, oh god, not again.
    She found his paper, stole a look, only to find
nothing
, just sentences in precise, feminine longhand, so different from his father’s. There were three essay questions and he’d completed them all.
    It didn’t matter what his answers were, Anne wasn’t going to read them. She dashed off an A on the top, near his name, pressing a little too hard so her hand wouldn’t shake, and shuffled it back to the bottom.
    Not here.
Not again.

8
    MELISSA

    S he’d made spaghetti. True, it was with store-bought sauce and frozen Pepperidge Farm Texas Toast from a box to soak it up with, but it was something.
    Chris just moved it around on his plate, though, and she guessed he’d already grabbed a burger or two. He probably hid out in his truck down the street eating it all before coming home. Kind of how she’d hid her day’s spent cigarettes in the empty spaghetti sauce jar. She felt her anger spark, ready to catch fire, but tried damn hard to stop it before it burned far and fast. He put his fork down, looked up, as if just noticing she was there.
    “Did you talk to Will Donner over at Earlys?”
    She shook her head, though she didn’t have to. He
knew
she hadn’t, just like she hadn’t talked to Constance Merrill over at the Hamilton or Felipa at the Dollar General or whoever the hell it waswho managed the Hi n Lo or the Napa Auto Parts. He’d been pushing her to find something, anything, to bring in a bit of money so they could keep fixing up the house, even suggesting she work weekends at the Comanche, the cattle auction. She didn’t know what she was going to do with herself, but it didn’t involve selling beers or burgers or windshield wipers or goddamn cows.
    “I just know that he’s going to be shorthanded over there. May Doyle needs to get to Abilene. Her sister’s sick . . . or something.” Chris saw her face, let it go. He picked up the fork again, and she knew he was going to make peace by changing the topic and eating her shitty spaghetti. “The body’s going out to Austin. We’ll know something soon, I expect.”
    “I’m sure you will,” she said, taking his plate from beneath his raised fork, giving up on dinner for the both of them.
    “I wasn’t done with that,” he tried. But she was.
    •   •   •
    Tonight there was a football game over at the stadium; next week, or the week after that, a carnival, too. She wouldn’t have minded getting out a bit, sitting in the bleachers, sipping a spiked Coke . . . drinking and people-watching and letting the cold wind move her hair to hide her face. There was no way Chris would go or even suggest going. He’d barely glanced at the stadium since returning to Murfee.
    She could go without Chris and he probably wouldn’t say a damn thing one way or another, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been anywhere, done anything, on her own. Since Chris, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d wanted to.
    •   •   •
    He helped bring the last dishes into the kitchen, taking the ones out of her hands to scrub them in the sink.
    “Look, babe, all that stuff about Earlys? It’s no big deal. No pressure.”
    “I got it, Chris. I do, loud and clear. I’ll check it out next week.”
    He looked at her, shrugged, worked on the dishes.
    She thought of him sitting in his truck down the street, waiting to come into the house, then later tonight, wasting their hours by flipping through some old dental film all spread out on the