Anna Lou Caudill

Annie (family only)
Lou (what most regulars at Husker's call her)

Twenty-seven // Pisces // March 3rd

Female

Bisexual

Waitress and occasional bartender at Husker's, picking up whatever shifts need covering

14 Shady Hills Lane (her parents' trailer)

Dennis Caudill, father, 54, formerly employed at Parton's Lumber Company for nineteen years. He's quiet and not much of a complainer. Takes the bus to the Dollar General now for the few shifts they'll give him and doesn't say much about how that feels. Anna Lou gets her conflict aversion from him.

Lorraine Caudill, mother, 52, works part-time at Lou's Diner. She's warm though also a little worn down. Has never once said she wishes Anna Lou had left. Has also never once said she's glad she stayed.

Anna Lou possesses the kind of warmth that makes a room feel incrementally cozier the moment she enters it. Were you to voice this observation aloud, however, she would likely demur out of embarrassment. She is, by constitution and by choice, a deeply interested person: attentive to others, adept at listening, and quick to offer a laugh that sounds as natural as a reflex. At Husker's, she knows most of her regulars by the small, telling details of their lives, like their go-to order or the names of their pets. People gravitate to her like moths to a flame, and she likes them back, though always with that careful buffer she maintains between herself and the world.

That buffer is the part Anna Lou never discusses. Not with her mother, not with her oldest friends, and certainly not with the affable, uncomplicated men who occasionally ask her for a drink after her shift. On the surface, she appears ever-present; below that surface, a small but stubborn distance persists. It is not dishonesty that drives this, as she would never deliberately mislead anyone. Rather, it is a hard-won instinct for self-preservation, cultivated through a thousand minor, unmemorable moments. When conflict arises, her first impulse is to apologize and to soothe. Only later, in the late hours of the night, staring at the water-stained ceiling of her room, does she allow herself to sort out what she actually feels.

She is not unhappy. Instead, Anna Lou lives in a murky land of contentment and its discontents. She loves Pines Holler with a bone-deep loyalty, and she loves her parents. She does not regret staying, not entirely, and certainly not in any language she lets herself articulate aloud. But sometimes, in the lull between the early afternoon crowd and the dinner rush, or while wiping down the same sticky counter she has wiped down a thousand times, she feels a strange tug, and she catches herself wondering what her life might have looked like if she had pushed on her desires a little harder.

Anna Lou was born and raised in Pines Holler, the only child of Dennis and Lorraine Caudill. She grew up in the same single-wide trailer she still sleeps in, a modest home with a squeaky porch step and a kitchen window that catches the morning sun. She went to the same school everyone went to, knew everyone's business, and had her own known in return. It wasn't a hard childhood, not in any dramatic sense at least. Her parents were steady and kind; they worked hard and meant well, and even as a kid, she understood that kind of decency was something worth being grateful for.

In school, Anna Lou was a decent student, which suited her just fine. She had friends, went to parties, and stayed out of trouble because she didn't need it. So, the dream of leaving was never a huge, specific thing. It was more like a direction she kept meaning to walk in. At seventeen, she applied to a handful of schools and got into two of them, including a state school two hours away. At the time, that distance felt reasonable: far enough to taste independence, close enough to drive home if the world felt tilted. She was going to study something—communications, maybe, or education; she hadn't quite decided. But then Dennis threw out his back, and the timing seemed wrong. She deferred for a year. The year turned into two. And by the time her father was back on his feet, the momentum had dissipated.

Now she is twenty-seven, and she still tells herself she'll figure it out. She's not dead, after all. But the figuring-out keeps getting postponed for the same reasons it always has. Meanwhile, Parton's has closed its doors for good. Her father picks up whatever shifts the Dollar General will give him, his work boots heavier than they used to be. The cost of living also went up three hundred dollars overnight, a sudden pinch that turned every grocery trip into a calculation in her head before she gets to the register. Anna Lou looks at the window she always assumed was still open—the window marked someday, eventually, when things settle—and from where she's standing now, it seems to have changed. The glass is still there, but the light coming through it looks different. Smaller. More like a mirror.