Chapter 5 - The Coffee Shop in Ozark
"Sit down, Roz," Boyd instructed gently, gesturing to the chair Trudy had just vacated.
Roz shook her head. "No, sir. I need to leave. If you do this, they’ll destroy the equipment. They’ll ruin the harvest just to prove a point. You don't know what Trudy is capable of when she's backed into a corner."
Boyd walked around the desk, stopping a few feet away from her. "I know this town, Roz. People bark loud until their paychecks are on the line. But what I don't know is the truth. Why did you come back to Dothan? If everyone hated you this much, why take a job in the belly of the beast?"
Roz looked up at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. "Because my father is in a nursing home in Ozark with stage-four Parkinson’s. The care facility costs four thousand dollars a month. Gaines Peanut Company was the only place offering full medical coverage from day one. I had nowhere else to go."
Boyd’s jaw clenched. He recognized that desperate look; he had worn it himself during Lee's final months. "Come on."
"What?"
"My shift is over, and yours is too. Get your purse. We're getting a cup of coffee somewhere outside city limits."
Thirty minutes later, Boyd’s battered pickup pulled into the gravel lot of a quiet diner along the highway near Ozark, well outside the jurisdiction of Dothan’s gossip circuit. The neon sign buzzed weakly in the dusk. They took a booth in the far back corner, the waitress dropping off two thick ceramic mugs of black coffee without a second glance.
Boyd wrapped his large hands around the mug, watching Roz fiddle with a paper napkin, tearing it into tiny, neat squares.
"Tell me about Clay," Boyd said plainly. "Not what Trudy thinks happened. What really happened."
Roz took a ragged breath. The weight she had carried for two years felt like an anvil inside her chest. "Clay was sick, Mr. Gaines. Long before I met him. Trudy thought it was just bad luck and bad friends, but Clay had demons that lived deep inside his head. He drank to silence them."
"I knew Clay," Boyd admitted quietly. "He played football with my younger brother. He was a sweet kid, but he had a wild streak."
"He wasn't wild," Roz murmured, looking out into the darkening parking lot. "He was drowning. For five years, I tried to keep his head above water. I hid the bottles. I paid his debts. I lied to his boss when he couldn't get out of bed. And all the while, Trudy told him he was an angel who could do no wrong. She blamed me for every bad mood, every hangover, every mistake he ever made."
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"Why did you stay so long?"
"Because when he was sober, he was the gentlest man I ever knew," Roz replied, a single tear escaping down her cheek. "Until the night he found out what his mother had done."
