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showed through.
    Yes ma 'am, I will, would have been the polite thing to say. But I did not make promises. "Thanks for everything."
    Instead of the diner, I headed for the trailer. It had come with the diner. My parents had decided we would live in it temporarily to save money until the diner got established as the town's premier eatery and they could afford to build their dream home. We lived here still.
    The whole thing shook when I slammed the metal door behind me. The floor creaked as I walked to the bathroom. After my fainting spell in the jail, my body wanted to go for a jog and prove to me that it was not sick, it was not wasting away, it was okay. But my head throbbed. I needed more time to recover from the beer. And I was scheduled to work all morning. Something in my dad's glower had told me I'd better not use jail time as an excuse to skip out of work. I could jog later. I showered with the curtain open, mopped up the water on the floor with a towel. Then I slipped on a low-cut shirt that seemed inappropriate for work, yet 50 percent less inflammatory than my Peer Pressure T-shirt under the circumstances, and went to face the music.
    I made my entrance through the front door so I could bus dishes and greet my dad with my arms already full. My mom sat in a booth with a couple of regulars, probably complaining to them about what I'd done now. She looked like the before on one of those TV makeover shows. Bad perm. Forty pounds overweight. Enormous T-shirt with a picture of a kitten, paws on its head, and a thought balloon: "Is it the weekend yet?" Which made absolutely no sense because both my parents worked through the weekend. We all did.
    When my mom saw me, she opened her mouth. Her eyes darted to my dad behind the counter. She closed her mouth and watched me with a tortured expression as I passed. I knew my dad had coached her: When Meg comes in, don't you go over there and hug on her like she won a beauty contest.
    Without a word to anyone, I stacked dishes into the washer, tied on my apron, and took customers' orders. I waitressed and cooked, cleaning each little mess before my dad could point it out to me. If I worked fast enough, adrenaline put up a wall between me and my throbbing headache.
    T was chopping sausage and reliving my jail time, wishing I knew exactly where Officer After had put his hands as he picked me up off the floor so I could turn the tables and get him in trouble with the Powers That Be, when my dad grumbled from the grill, "You've got a lot of nerve to come back here."
    His beard hid his chin, so I couldn't tell anything from the set of his jaw. But his blue eyes snapped at the eggs on the grill. This was new territory. He might have washed his hands of me, but he'd never suggested I couldn't come home. Until now.
    Normally the implied threat would have scared me silent. But Officer After had shocked the life out of me quite a few times over the course of the night, and I'd had enough. I banged the knife down on the cutting board beside the sausage. "Oh, you're kicking me out of the 'house'?" I made finger quotes. "And you're 'firing' me?" My parents made me work, but they didn't pay me. I reminded them of this whenever I got in trouble. "Good luck getting Bonita to cover my shift. She keeps her grandkids in the mornings."
    He glanced up to make sure my mom was on the other end of the kitchen, out of earshot. Then he hissed, "I don't give a shit what your mother says. I'm tired of you playing her like a piano. I'm taking her to Graceland like we planned."
    "You—" I stopped short. There was no point in whispering. You 're sending me to juvy? He would say I'd sent myself. Just then my mother dropped a baking pan with a clang like the jail cell door closing. The blood drained from my face and pooled around my feet. My heart sped up, pumping nothing. But I would not let my dad see me faint over this. I leaned farther forward over the counter and chopped more sausage, wondering vaguely where