Ten minutes later, I was done with her first foot and was switching to the second. I was just as grossed out by the way Rose would would, shout, and wiggle. At one point, she was damn near panting. Crash stood up behind me, and I felt her lips at my ear.
“Keep going on like that, and those magic fingers of yours will be making her moan louder.”
I smirked. “Don’t be jealous, Crash. They’ll be back on you later.”
She laughed softly and slid past to use the restroom.
When I finished, Rose was fully relaxed and fanning herself. I spent a good five minutes washing my hands in the bathroom, scrubbing them with soap and some spray cleaner I found under the bathroom sink. Then we all climbed into Rose’s old Buick and hit the road.
“Ya’ll like Elvis?” she asked asDon’t Be Cruelplayed over the car’s speakers.
“I love Elvis,” Crash said from behind me since Rose insisted on my riding shotgun.
Rose looked over at me. “You remind me of him, you know?”
I frowned. I looked nothing like Elvis. I think Rose was still lost in the afterglow to see things clearly.
“I bet he had strong hands, too. Those musicians usually do. I should know. I’ve had them all. Guitar players, drummers, pianists. Whooo, the pianists have some quick fingers—I’ll tell you what.”
“Didn’t you… I don’t know, ever get married or have children or something?” I asked.
“I married. I was fifteen, and Daddy needed the cattle Lester offered. He was an awful man—always drinking, smoking, gambling, and sleeping around. It didn’t take long for his lifestyle to catch up with him, and once he passed, I inherited everything. Been a happy little whore ever since.”
I widened my eyes as I looked at her.
She grinned and nodded. “I got around now. There wasn’t a musician in a two-hundred-mile radius that didn’t know me by name.” She smoothed her hair into place. “That was a long time ago, though. Things have changed.”
“Wow. You have a very colorful past.”
She grinned. “You have no idea. It was a lot easier to get away with things back then.”
“What’s that mean?”
She shrugged. “I just meant that we didn’t have a camera in our hands at all times. Nowadays, you kids can’t do anything without documenting it. It’s a shame, too. Some things you just want to do and forget about. Now you can’t learn any lessons in fear, a picture of it will bite you in the ass down the road.”
I chuckled. “You have a point there.”
“If I could go back to the way things were, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Nobody needs internet access all day long. Go out, cause trouble, and have fun. That’s the way I grew up.”
Rose kept going on and on about the good old days. She was so happy to be talking that she didn’t even seem to care that we weren’t talking back. Listening to her stories was entertaining as hell, though.
At one point, she had me believing that she even got away with robbing a bank and murdering her husband, but it was hard to tell what was true and what was only true in her own mind. Either way, I didn’t give it a second thought because she was just a little old lady. She wasn’t a danger to society. Not anymore, at least.
She dropped us off on a corner of Main Street, and she carried on down the road.
“I don’t know about you, but I kind of liked that lady. She had one hell of a life,” Crash said.
“That she did,” I agreed. “Come on. Let’s find some place to chill for the night.”
We walked through town, taking it all in. Neither of us found a motel, so we finally asked a local. Of course, there wasn’t one in town, and the closest one was a thirty-minute drive away. We accepted the ride he offered, wanting to get as many miles as we could. The town he took us to was much bigger, but still not big enough to be considered a city. We purchased a new disposable cell phone, grabbed some dinner, and rented a room.
“Hopefully, we get things done soon because we’re running low on cash,” Amelia said, sitting across the table from me as we ate our canned ravioli.
“How much is left?”
“Three hundred and forty-seven dollars,” she answered, bending down and untying her boot. She kicked it off. “How long do you think it’ll take us to make it to L.A.?”
I shrugged and took a sip of my water. “If we leave first thing in the morning and we drive all day, we might be able to make it by late tomorrow night.”
