“Yvonne, your folks is going to tell them kids you their real mama when they get grown. You done waited this long, what’s a few more years? Be glad you ain’t in Joyce’s shoes. She ain’t got no kids at all. After tonight, she probably never will have any—at least not by Odell.” Milton laughed, and after thinking about his last comment, I laughed, too. But I could tell from his tone and body language that he was just as exasperated as I was. Laughing lightened it up a little bit. “Let’s concentrate on our future.”

“All right then. You know, I never expected Joyce to take off running away from that restaurant,” I said. I didn’t care how tired Milton was about this subject. I was going to keep harping on it as long as I wanted to.

“Why not?”

“I thought the least thing she’d do was go up into that place, pick up a chair, and bash it over Odell’s head. That’s what I would have done. I bet every other woman would have done the same thing, or something worse. It would have been nice to see Joyce show some gumption.”

“Yvonne, something just came to me.” Milton cleared his throat and slapped the steering wheel. “If we don’t know nothing about what happened to Joyce by morning, let’s drive back over to Hartville.”

I looked upside his head, wishing I could see inside it. Maybe I could figure out what made him come up with such a outlandish notion. “Why would we do that?”

“We got this ball to rolling, and we need to find out where it went. We’ll talk to them waitresses and find out where Betty Jean live at.”

“Milton, what good would that do?”

“If Odell don’t know Joyce was there, or us, he don’t have no idea what’s going on. We can go to that woman’s house—”

I cut him off right away. “Hell no.” I couldn’t believe my ears. Milton said a lot of stupid stuff from time to time, but this was way over the top. What he’d just suggested shocked me so much, my heart almost busted out of my chest. “We can’t go to that woman’s house while Odell is there and rub in his face what we done. I say we should wait and see what happens when we see them again. If we ever do . . .”

“You right,” he agreed.

By now I was so exhausted, I reared back and went to sleep.

CHAPTER 39 - MILTON

CHAPTER 39

MILTON