They came back inside and began to carry out black plastic bags of her clothing. She didn’t want any of her clothes—her hippie days were over. She’d been the other half of a couple who stood for something, and now she was nothing but a woman who’d thrown away years of her life. This all had to be a terrible nightmare. She and Lyle would laugh about it when she woke up. He’d tell her that she was the only one he’d ever loved, and everything would go back to normal. She shook that idea from her head. This was the cold hard truth—reality in a two-minute phone call.

“The bastard didn’t even have the nerve to tell me to my face.” Anger washed over her as she rolled up on her feet, got a box of matches, and stormed outside. She emptied several bags of clothing into a pile in the firepit that she and Lyle had built last year and lit them up. As she stood there watching the outfits burn, Mitzi came outside and slung an arm around her shoulders.

“Do you want the chest of drawers in the guest room? You’ll need something to put the rest of your clothes in. The closet in the living room is pretty small,” she said.

“Mama might forgive me and let me—”

“No!” Mitzi shook her head. “She’d make you miserable if you moved in with her, and besides, we’d be worried sick about you.”

Paula tossed another bag of clothing into the truck. “You don’t want to live with her. You know what I’m enduring with my mother, even though I’ve moved out.”

“Yes, I’ll take the chest.” Jody nodded. “I’ll go through my things later and throw away a lot of those clothes because I’m not going to be that woman anymore. And I want to go to Greenville this evening for fried chicken.”

“You got it,” Mitzi said. “And we’ll have bacon for breakfast in the morning.”

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

I didn’t sleep very well. Maybe it was eating fried chicken after all these years of not having meat, or the fact that I couldn’t turn off my mind. One minute I wanted to take one of Lyle’s guns out to that ranch and shoot him dead, and the next I blamed myself for the whole thing. If I’d been prettier or younger or would have had children, maybe he wouldn’t have left,” Jody said as she entered the kitchen that Sunday morning.

Mitzi had been standing at the back door, staring out into the yard, and Jody’s voice startled her so badly that her heart had to slow down before she could speak. “Good mornin’,” she finally said.