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considering that he was two feet away.
“Haven’t you ever fantasized about just getting away from everything? Just starting over somewhere?” Nancy cast a look at Shebby who looked back at her with the expression of a man who’d just found a twenty dollar bill on the pavement. “While you two were sleeping, we talked and talked, and I don’t care what you two think. I’ve got nothing behind me and everything in front of me.” She exchanged that same deliriously dazed look with Shebby.
I knew there would be no convincing Joyce, but somehow Nancy’s words were beginning to sound slightly less crazy.
“I’m gonna take her to Branson,” said Shebby, nodding.
“Branson? You’re taking her to Branson?” Joyce pushed abruptly past Nancy’s legs and lowered herself down from the truck. On the ground, she muttered to herself, but I couldn’t make out what she said.
I leaned forward and crouched next to Nancy. “Are you sure? This is going to change everything.”
“I sure hope so.”
I stayed there, squatting behind Nancy for a few more seconds before reaching around her for an awkward hug. Once back on the ground, I called up to Shebby, “Thanks for the ride.”
He answered simply, “My pleasure. Ladies,” and did the pretend tip of his hat again. “I got a nice little place up just outside of Topeka. It’s not much, but it could use a good woman like this lady right here.” I think he was going to say more, but Nancy pulled the door shut.
“You reckon he’ll kill her?” muttered Joyce. “Or make her happy. One or the other.”
Joyce and I stood back while Shebby put the rig into gear again and Nancy waved to us until they eased onto the road and we couldn’t see her chubby, white arm any longer.
Adams’ latest novel, A Body’s Just as Dead, was published by SFK Press. Her writing has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is a short story writer with publications in The Saturday Evening Post, Utne, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Barely South, Five on the Fifth, Southern Pacific Review, and forty-six other jour- nals from around the world. She earned her MFA at Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University, Washington.
‘Haven’t you ever
“
just getting away from everything? Just starting over somewhere?’ ”
fantasized about
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