“And you—what’s your story?”

After setting four glasses on the bar, Felicia drops ice into each glass, then grabs the bottle of Maker’s. Turns it upside down and starts filling each glass. “My story . . . Well, I’m from here, went to University of Kentucky for five years. My father got sick. I came home to help my mother look after him.”

“Sorry to hear that. What’s wrong with your dad?”

“Something similar to Sid. Alzheimer’s disease. He got to be a handful for my mother.”

“That’s tough. I can only imagine. My grandfather suffered with dementia just before he passed and I left for the service.”

“Yeah, tough, but then, that’s why I’ve helped Sid. I don’t mind it. He can’t help whatever it is he’s got going on. In my mind, he’s recalling someone he loved and lost, who did something none of us know about. His mind won’t let what she did pass.”

“Hence why he’s arguing with her.”

“Love is tough,” she says. “It can drive us crazy.”

“You’re right about that.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Any tough love driving you crazy?”

Laughing, Hunter tells her, “No. There’s love, but it’s not tough by any means.”

“That’s too bad,” Felicia says, “you already having someone.” She chuckles.

Grabbing the drinks, Hunter tells her, “Maybe in another life.”

And Felicia tells him, “Definitely in another life.”

Taking the drinks back to the table. Hunter approaches everyone, wondering why he’s never heard about Blake.

JACK

JACK

Every footstep over the sunbaked hardpan road hurts Jack’s feet. Like electric splinters traveling up his shins, knees, thighs, and into his hips and lower back. Sweat burns his eyes like strong soap as he approaches the dull yellow semi’s red brake lights on the side of the road. He reaches for the pitted chrome door handle, pulling it open. The artic breeze of cabin air feels like heaven itself. Looking up into the interior, he sees a man with close-cropped black hair. Bent over the steering wheel, smiling, he asks in accented English, “Where you going?”

Jack tells him, “I am headed anywhere north of here.”

“Sure. Get in.” The man waves Jack aboard.

With one hand already gripping the door’s handle, the other latches on to the vertical grab handle, and Jack steps up and swings himself inside. Pink-faced and groaning, limbs shaking, he realizes once he’s in the seat that he should have taken off his pack first. To lessen his weight.

Thumbing the plastic latch across his upper chest, sliding his arms out of the straps, he shrugs off the pack and holds it on his lap. Twisting around in the seat, he pulls the door shut. Breathing hard. Cold air dries his sticky skin, forming a glaze of body and road grunge.