She guessed she’d need maybe seventy-five dollars for gas, food, and at least two nights at a hotel. She’d started putting part of her Bell money into the taped envelope before Christmas, not knowing what was going to happen to her and Charlotte if the rumors proved true. Well, the rumors were true. Edward had admitted it and apologized. He claimed he’d never known the marriage had been legitimate in the first place. “We were young and just joking around,” he’d said. Vivian wondered if she just had the wrong sense of humor. At any rate, Edward was finally in a conciliatory frame of mind that Vivian planned to take full advantage of.

Conciliate:

conciliated; conciliating

transitive verb

1 : to gain (as goodwill) by pleasing acts

2: to make compatible : reconcile <It is hard to conciliate the views of labor and management on this point>

3: appease

The Buick pulled into the Sunoco station at a slow crawl, and Vivian pressed the toe of her new fur-lined ankle boot firmly onto the brake pedal to stop behind the powder-blue Lincoln Continental. She had expected to be the only car at the filling station at that hour on a Thursday morning. Saturdays were usually the busy days at the Sunoco. When the Lincoln pulled away, Vivian eased the Buick up next to the gas pump and rolled down her window.

“Fill it please, Albert.”

“Sure thing, Mrs. Dalton.”

Vivian rolled the window back up and rubbed her gloves together, shivering more out of excitement and nervousness than physical chill. It was something she’d done hundreds of times, filling the car with gas, but today was different. She’d wrapped a couple of ham-salad sandwiches in waxed paper for herself and packed a thermos of coffee, feeling like she should try to drive straight through and just get there before she had the chance to change her mind. She jumped at the knuckle rap on her window. It was just Albert. She rolled the window back down.

“Going somewhere special today?” he asked as she pulled five dollars from her pocketbook.

“Up to Akron,” Vivian lied, again, with a smile.

“Well, drive careful! A lot of snow on the roads up there!”

There had been a massive snowstorm in northern Ohio two weeks earlier, and the temperatures had remained below freezing so nothing had melted.

“Thank you, Albert. Have a good day.”

Albert Hixson was a little shit who tried to pretend he was a good boy. She knew the type. All polite smiles and brown-nosing to grown-ups, and when no one was watching he’d swipe a pack of cigarettes, stick up a middle finger behind your back, and run his smart-aleck mouth off to his friends. It wouldn’t surprise Vivian one bit if Albert ended up married to two, or even three different women at the same time.

She stuck both middle fingers up as she held the steering wheel with her other fingers. No one was around, but it felt good. Gutsy. Strong. East Bowman Street stretched out ahead of her as she left Wooster, and would soon turn into Akron Road. Edward always drove when they went up to Akron, or in the summers when they’d head up to Fair Haven, so Vivian had tucked the Ohio and New York maps under the driver’s seat before leaving the garage.