AN: Happy Birthday Lolitaray! ♥ Thanks to dontwanttosaygb for looking this over for me, on paper no less.
Disclaimer: The characters are not mine and I make no money from them
A Penny Saved
They were headed off to work, Lureen still fussin' with her hair while Jack tried to gage the weather out the front window. Hot, probably, it bein' August. Jack sighed, feeling as lonely as he was cold.
"Lureen, did you turn down the air conditioner?"
"Hot as hell outside. Tomorrah's supposed to be over a hundred," she yelled from the back hallway.
"Waste of money," he warned her. She didn't care what he had to say about it, and he didn't expect her to.
You forget what it's like bein' broke all the time, Ennis had said. Maybe, if Jack could save a little something... He knew he looked to Ennis like he had all the money in the world, but they were spenders, him n' Lureen. The dough they made, they spent, no savings to speak of. So maybe if he saved a little bit...
Deep down, Jack knew it wouldn't make a difference; it wasn't money that paved the thousand miles of distance between them and it never had been. Ennis wouldn't take it anyway, but that was a bridge to cross when he had it to give.
"You ready to go?," Lureen came up to th door and asked Jack like he hadn't been standing waiting on her for a good fifteen minutes.
"Yup," was all he said, swinging the door open for her.
"I thought I might come with you into town after work. Got a few things to pick up myself."
"Oh, I wasn't gonna go after all." He held open her car door and shut it behind her.
As he opened his own door, Lureen shot back. "Now, you know those tires of yours are about on their last mile."
"Aw, they got a little life in them yet. Besides, cost of tires these days..."
"Fuck." Officer Ames pulled the car to a stand-still on the side of the road and climbed into the suffocating summer air, a hundred and six in the sun. He walked to the shoulder where a truck was pulled over, but he'd already seen the corpse, blood drying, body bloating in the heat. The face was mangled beyond recognition. He poked it with the toe of his worn uniform shoes, not because it served a purpose, but because it seemed like what you were supposed to do, an innate need to touch the body, move it. "Fuuuuck," he groaned. He'd just gotten off his shift and was tempted to drive right by and pretend he hadn't seen the sweltering pulp, but he did decide to radio in its location before heading home to his wife's delicious pulled pork, perfect on an August night.
