1:35AM, page 1
Title Page
1:35 A.M.
Room for One More
The New Kid
About the Authors
Teaser
Copyright
“Oh hurray, buzzy, buzzy, buzzy,” sang a loud tinkling voice.
The inane song reached, like a long-handled hook, into Delilah’s enjoyable dream and yanked her from the blessed retreat of sleep.
“What the … ?” Delilah muttered as she sat up in the middle of her rumpled flannel sheets, blinking at the sun punching through gaps in her louvered blinds.
“You make me feel so perky,” the singer continued.
Delilah threw her pillow at the inadequate wall that separated her apartment from the one next door. The pillow made a satisfying thump when it hit a framed poster depicting a serene beachy scene. Delilah looked at the poster with longing; it represented the view she wished she had.
But Delilah didn’t have an ocean view. She had a view of dumpsters and the filthy backside of the twenty-four-hour diner where she worked. She didn’t have serenity, either. She had her annoying neighbor, Mary, who continued to sing at the top of her lungs: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for starting my day.”
“Who sings about alarm clocks?” Delilah snapped, groaning and rubbing her eyes. It was bad enough having a singing neighbor; it was a thousand times worse that the singing neighbor made up her own stupid songs and always started her day with one about an alarm clock. Weren’t alarm clocks bad enough on their own?
Speaking of which. Delilah looked at her clock. “What?” She catapulted from her bed.
Grabbing the little battery-powered digital clock, Delilah glared at its face, which read 6:25 a.m.
“What good are you?” Delilah demanded, tossing the clock onto her bright blue comforter.
Delilah had a pathological hatred of alarm clocks. It was a vestige of the ten months she spent in her last foster home nearly five years before, but life in the real world required the use of them, something Delilah was still learning to deal with. Though now she’d discovered something she hated worse than alarm clocks: alarm clocks that didn’t work.
Delilah’s phone rang. When she picked it up, she didn’t wait for the caller to speak. Talking over the sound of clattering plates and a hum of voices, she said, “I know, Nate. I overslept. I can be there in thirty minutes.”
“I already called in Rianne to cover. You can take her two o’clock shift.”
Delilah sighed. She hated that shift. It was the really busy one.
Actually, she hated all the shifts. She hated shifts, period.
As a shift manager at the diner, she was expected to work whichever shift best fit the overall schedule. So her “days” varied from six to two, two to ten, and ten to six. Her body clock was so messed up that she was practically sleeping while she was awake and awake while she was sleeping. She lived in a state of perpetual exhaustion. Her mind was always murky, like fog had rolled in through her ears. Not only did the fog dampen her ability to think clearly, it also made it difficult for her brain to interface with her senses. It seemed as though her vision, hearing, and taste buds were always a little off.
“Delilah? Can I count on you to be here at two?” Nate barked in Delilah’s ear.
“Yeah. Yes. I’ll be there.”
Nate made a growling sound and hung up.
“I love you, too,” Delilah said into the phone before she set it down.
Delilah looked at her queen-size bed. The thick mattress and her special memory foam pillow beckoned like a languid lover, inviting her back to bed. Delilah so wanted to give in. She loved sleep. She loved just being in her bed. It was like a cocoon—an adult version of the blanket forts she liked to build when she was little. She would spend all day in her bed if she could. She wished she could find one of those stay-at-home jobs that let her work in bed in her pajamas. It wouldn’t be ideal for her employer, because she’d rather just lounge about and sleep, but it would be better for her health. She could set her own shifts if she worked for herself.
But all her searching for such a job had found nothing but work-at-home scams. The only place that would hire her after she and Richard split up was the diner. All because she had a juvie record and had dropped out of high school for reasons she barely remembered anymore. Life sucked.
Delilah looked at her useless alarm clock. No. She couldn’t risk it. She had to stay awake.
But how?
Next door, Mary was on at least a third repeat of her stupid wake-up song. Delilah knew it would do no good to bang on the wall or go next door to ask Mary to keep it down. Mary wasn’t cooking with all her burners. Delilah wasn’t sure what was wrong with the woman; she just knew that her previous complaints had disappeared into the void that seemed to make up the mind hidden under Mary’s thick gray hair.
Delilah didn’t want to stay in her apartment and listen to Mary. She might as well do something useful.
Shuffling into her tiny pink-tiled bathroom, Delilah brushed her teeth and dressed in gray sweats and a red T-shirt. She figured she might as well go for a jog. It had been at least three days since she’d gotten exercise. Maybe that had something to do with the fog in her head.
Nah. She knew that wasn’t true. She’d tried exercise as a solution to her constant exhaustion. It didn’t seem to matter how much she worked out. Her body just didn’t like bouncing from one schedule to another like a hummingbird flitting about.
“It’s just because it’s winter,” Delilah’s best friend, Harper, said. “When spring comes, you’ll wake up, just like the flowers.”
Delilah had doubted that, and rightfully so. Spring was here. Everything was blooming … except Delilah’s energy levels.
But whether it would help her head or not, Delilah put on her running shoes and tucked her keys, phone, some money, driver’s license, and a credit card into her running pouch, which she then hung around her neck. Leaving her little noisy apartment—Mary was still singing—Delilah stepped out into a carpeted hallway that smelled like bacon, coffee, and glue. What was with the glue?
Delilah snorted as she trotted down three flights of narrow, uneven steps. The super was probably fixing the wall or something. She wasn’t exactly living in an upscale place.
Two sullen, slouchy teens ambled through the building’s lobby as Delilah reached it. They eyed her. She ignored them, stepping through the scratched gray metal door just in time to watch the sun duck behind a fluffy white cloud.
It was one of those bright, breezy spring days that Harper loved and Delilah hated. Maybe if she lived on the coast or in a forest, she could appreciate the happy sun and the sprightly air currents. Surrounded by nature and maybe some blossoming flowers, such a day would feel right. But here?
Here in this urban conglomeration of strip malls, machine shops, car dealerships, vacant lots, and low-income housing, bright and breezy wasn’t pleasant; it was jarring. A tiara would look more suitable on a pig.
Trying to ignore smells of rotting lettuce, exhaust, and rancid frying oil, Delilah propped her foot on the side of the empty flower planter in front of her gray-walled boxy building. Maybe it would feel more like spring if the planters were growing flowers instead of rocks. Delilah stretched, then shook her head at her negativity.
“You know better,” she scolded herself.
Setting off at a medium-paced jog, Delilah pointed herself north, which would take her through the nearest housing area, where she could run past houses and trees instead of struggling businesses and cars.
She needed to get out of this dark spiral she was in. She’d had enough therapy when she was in her teens to know that she had an “obsessive personality”; once she latched onto a perspective, there was no unlatching her. Right now, she was stuck on the idea that her life sucked. It was going to continue to suck if she didn’t pick a new idea.
As her feet met the uneven sidewalk, Delilah tried to clear the fog from her brain by thinking happy thoughts. “Every day, I’m getting better and better,” she chanted. After ten rounds or so of this affirmation, she was starting to feel snarly. So she traded affirmations for an image of the life she wanted to be living. That made her think of the life she had been living with Richard, which just dropped her further into the negativity pit.
When Richard decided he wanted to replace his dark-haired, dark-eyed Mrs. with a blonde, blue-eyed wife, Delilah didn’t have many options. She’d signed a prenuptial agreement before marrying Richard. She had nothing going into the marriage, and she got nothing in the divorce. Well, not nothing. She received enough of a settlement to get her an apartment, some secondhand furniture, and her fifteen-year-old tan compact sedan. She got these after she found the one place that was willing to hire her and train her. Given her stunning résumé of “completed half of twelfth grade,” “babysat,” and “worked in a fast-food restaurant,” she was lucky to get what she got. And, awful hours aside, the job had been good to her. Nate had sent her to management training, and she had climbed the ladder from server to shift manager in just a few months. At twenty-three, she was the youngest shift manager in the restaurant.
“See?” Delilah panted. “Things are looking up.”
She clung to that tenuously positive thought as she jogged through the ratty old neighborhood that backed onto an industrial park. The neighborhood was too rundown to be called pretty, but it was filled with beautiful old maple trees and tall sinewy poplars that swayed in the gentle wind coming up the street. All the trees were filled with light-green new growth. The tender leaves encouraged more hope ful thoughts, if only for a minute or two.
She wondered if the people who lived in the area ever let the trees inspire them. Looking around, she doubted it. A few listless kids were waiting for the yellow school buses that belched diesel fumes as they came chugging up behind Delilah. An old guy with a shiny bald head mowed a yard full of weeds, and a woman whose attitude appeared to be worse than Delilah’s stood on her front porch glaring into a coffee mug.
Delilah decided she’d had enough of the neighborhood, and enough of her run, for that matter. She looped around a defunct car parts store and aimed for home.
Home.
If only it was home. But her apartment wasn’t home. She’d had two homes in her life. One she shared with her parents, until they died when she was eleven. The foster “homes” she’d lived in after that were nothing more than places to bide her time. Her other home was with Richard. Now she just had a place where she slept, and she never got to sleep enough.
Lately, it felt like life was just one annoying sleep interruption after another, like the world was an alarm that kept going off and waking her from her dreams, the only place she could find a truly happy thought.
Back in her apartment, Delilah did her best to ignore her mostly empty pale-green walls—she hadn’t gotten up the oomph to repaint since she’d moved in. She took off her shoes and put them neatly by the front door. She crossed to her well-worn beige leather loveseat and straightened the green-and-yellow afghan draped over its back. Delilah didn’t like the afghan, but Harper had crocheted it for her. One day, Harper had dropped by and was crushed when she didn’t see the afghan. After that, Delilah had left it out.
“You just have to be careful to tuck in the wonky bits,” Harper told Delilah when she presented the gift. Given that there were many such bits, proper tucking was challenging.
Mary continued warbling next door as Delilah peeled off her sweaty T-shirt and opened the cabinet where she kept her stash of cookies. The cabinet was empty. Of course.
Sighing, Delilah opened her refrigerator. She knew that was a futile action because she didn’t cook and therefore kept nothing in the fridge but bottled water, apple juice, and half-eaten carryout food from the diner. One of the perks of working at the diner was she got two free meals every shift. That kept her pretty well fed. So all she really needed were her cookies, milk, some protein bars, and frozen dinners for the nights she didn’t work. The refrigerator revealed that she needed not just cookies but milk, too.
Mary’s voice wafted through the wall. “Spring has sprung and worms have come …”
“Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of, Mary,” Delilah said.
She couldn’t stay here.
Striding into her small bathroom, Delilah took a lukewarm shower, then dressed in brown leggings and a gold-and-black plaid jacket. She avoided looking in the mirror while she dried her wavy shoulder-length hair. Delilah didn’t wear makeup anymore. Rather than spend money on cosmetics that got her unwanted male attention, she left her face bare and put the extra dollars in her savings account. Even without makeup, Delilah was pretty enough to turn heads. A modeling agency she applied to once told her she was just a large chin shy of having classically beautiful features. Two agencies had given her the names of plastic surgeons and told her to come back after she had a little chin and jaw work done.
Delilah figured if she wasn’t going to put on makeup, why look in the mirror? She knew what she looked like, and lately, she wasn’t too keen on meeting her own gaze. She saw something there that scared her, something that made her wonder what her future held.
Next door, Mary was singing at the top of her lungs about visiting Mars. “You go, Mary,” Delilah said, wishing Mary would go to Mars … and not come back.
Grabbing her purse, Delilah headed for her car. She figured she could get to the store, get some cookies and milk, and still come back in time to take a little nap before work.
After a visit to the grocery store replenished her oatmeal cookie stash and her milk supply, Delilah left the store from the rear of the parking lot. She liked weaving her way back to the apartment on quiet neighborhood roads instead of the congested four lanes that ran through the heart of the industrial and retail splat she lived in.
This neighborhood was a little nicer than the one she ran through. It had bigger houses, greener lawns, and newer cars. The trade-off was that the older neighborhood had those big maple and poplar trees, and this new neighborhood had runty cherry trees. She had to admit that the pink blossoms were pretty, though.
Turning the corner next to a particularly flowery tree, Delilah spotted a garage sale sign. Its arrow pointed straight ahead, so, on a whim, she went that way. Two more signs directed her to take right turns, and eventually, she found herself in front of a two-story Spanish-style home looming over several card tables piled high with household merchandise.
Delilah couldn’t help herself. She had to stop.
Just as Delilah had a thing about getting stuck in a thought pattern, she had a thing about garage sales. She’d been hooked on them since she was a teen. One of her therapists, Ali, had a theory about it. Ali thought Delilah loved garage sales because they gave her glimpses into family life. They reminded her of what “normal” looked like.
Delilah wasn’t an obsessive garage sale shopper. Yes, she did occasionally buy—she’d gotten all her current furniture from garage sales. Mostly, though, Delilah was a garage sale watcher, an archaeologist of household items, a “stuff” private eye. She wanted to know what people used, what they collected, what they loved, and what they didn’t want to keep around anymore. It entertained her.
Figuring her milk could sit in the car for fifteen minutes or so, Delilah pulled her car behind a dirty red pickup. The pickup and a powder-blue Cadillac were the only cars parked in front of the house. Just two people wandered among the tables. One person was a heavyset woman who seemed intent on kitchenware. The other was a slight young man who was browsing piles of books and records. Delilah nodded at them both and also at the middle-aged woman who sat next to a picnic table that held a metal cash box, a pad of paper, and a calculator.
“Welcome,” the woman called out. She had short, spiky brown hair, and her eyes were encircled in heavy black eyeliner. She wore a yellow running suit, and she carried a butterscotch-colored Chihuahua that was so quiet and docile, Delilah began to wonder whether it was real. But when she stepped up to pet it, the dog wagged its tail.
“This is Mumford,” the woman said.
“Hello, Mumford.” Delilah scratched Mumford behind the ears, becoming Mumford’s new best friend.
Strolling away from Mumford and his human, Delilah explored the intriguing piles on each table. She poked through small appliances, tools, games, puzzles, electronics, and clothes, finding a black leather jacket that intrigued her until she sniffed it and got a nose full of stale mothballs. Wandering to the next table, she found herself in the “toy section.” A glance at a pile of fashion dolls darkened her already precarious mood because the dolls reminded her of how impossible it was to prevent other foster kids from playing with her stuff when she was growing up. Blocks made her think of a little foster brother she’d gotten close to in foster home number three, only to lose him to adoption a week before she was moved to a different home. She was getting ready to walk away from the table, in search of home decor items, when her gaze landed on a different doll.
With brown curly hair, big dark eyes, and plump pink cheeks, the doll looked almost exactly like the baby Delilah had envisioned having someday with Richard. At the start of their marriage, her baby was as real to her as anything in the physical world. She’d been sure she was going to be a mother, so sure that she named the baby before the baby was even conceived. Her name would be Emma.
Intrigued, Delilah circled the table to get closer to the doll. Tucked in a large wooden box full of plush toys and electronic gadgets, the pretty baby face was partially shadowed by the doll’s blue hat. The hat’s wide brim, fringed in pink ruffles, looked incongruous wedged between a game console and what looked like a remote-control airplane. Delilah had to shift both items to free the doll, which was about two feet tall.
Wearing a puffy-sleeved, 1980s-era bright blue full-skirted dress with pink ruffled trim and a big bow around the waist, the doll was much heavier than Delilah expected her to be. When she examined the doll, Delilah realized this was because the doll was electronic.
