Trust

The Happy Ending was a dive bar out in the desert that had no address and no signage. Basically, you could go there only if you’d been there before. The logic of this appealed to me for some reason, and so I agreed to go with my friend Kendall after work one night, though an hour into our driving around finding nothing but vast stretches of desert that looked perfect for burying a body or two, I asked Kendall if she was sure she could find her way back to the place.

“I have a perfect sense of direction,” Kendall said, arrowing her Mazda into an empty cul-de-sac where, for a split second, her headlights illuminated the silver-yellow eyes of a coyote before it flinched away. “This looks familiar.”

“It’s a dead end.”

She put the car in reverse and then paused a moment to stare me down in the dark car, her forehead wrinkling prettily. “You, my friend, have real trust issues.”