Re: Pat & Lou: boxes
Lou was tall. She had been told that her whole life. 'You're tall', as they looked her over, like tall caught the eyes and the cheekbones and the skin-tone. Tall, like it was off, unexpected. Lou didn't give a shit what people expected but tall put her eyes on level with the kid's nose because she was five eleven in bare feet and she had no idea which pan was which. Burned water the last time she tried to make pasta, and that had been years ago. Ramen. She could figure out ramen and the pans were from the cupboards under the sink, long after the water had been turned off and the beds emptied out and the family had gone, no note. Lou hadn't expected a note. Hadn't expected pans, either.
"You knew yourself back then," Lou offered up comfortably. It had a smile tucked into it, that statement, like a wallet in a back-pocket. "Goldfish crackers, fingers up your nose, you knew what you liked, Pat. One is an age that has a lot to recommend about it, apart from the incontinence." The smile got cashed, and it spread easy as butter. She listened to him talk about Con and tried to work out what was between the lines. The girl hadn't made her think military. Lou had known military. It was a lifestyle and it wasn't all that good with free thought and breaking rules.
Dirty cops. Made sense. Just about everything in town had a grubby side. "The bar with the music," Lou said, and she didn't need to clarify. Saw the bar on the way in, it had a marketable point and it was pressing it home. "Skipping the bar with the music. Leaves me, last I checked, a strip bar and a place that looks like it wants five bucks for a bowl of peanuts. Guess I'm doing a lot of solo drinking."
She swigged her beer. It wouldn't hit her, not until another couple but the kid was still a kid, and Lou didn't need to get buzzed to unpack boxes. She pointed him toward a bunch that had '????' written on the side and contained, if she remembered right, shit like boxes of tea, mugs, a kettle, a variety of weird shit that had been shoved in the junk drawer in the old place and a pack of pot-holders, still in plastic, along with cereal bowls. Probably broken.
"So the cops are dirty, and the skin-trade's running. Anything else I should know about town before I have to buy milk or something?"