Just like Eleanor. Just like Leanne.
Leanne didn’t want Nora’s fire to be dimmed by duty. Not the way hers had been. Not the way, now that she considered it, her own mother’s had as well, if, perhaps, not as obviously.
Leanne pulled the covers up to her chin and closed her eyes.
She wasn’t sure what was waiting for them in California. She wasn’t even sure she’d recognize her mother when they found her.My God,please let her be okay.Every stop they’d made, she’d asked if anyone had seen an older woman with a hairless dog, but all she got were quizzical looks and slowly shaking heads. She told herself that no news was good news.
Leanne rolled away from the flickering television and stared at the wall, her eyes settling on a hairline crack in the wallpaper. A narrow little fissure that begged to be scratched with a fingernail. Peeled back. Exposed.
She had the sudden urge to do it.
To tear it down.
To see what was underneath.
Because the real question wasn’t about Dean or the job market or how many female undergrads Yale had finally agreed to admit.
The real question, the one whispering at the back of her mind, was why shouldn’t Nora get to do what she wanted?
Why shouldn’t she have a career and a life of her own choosing? Why shouldn’t she skip the housewife part entirely if she wanted to? If she could?
She thought about the road trip. About what it meant—not just miles logged in a Lincoln Continental but the space it created. For conversation. For discomfort. For possibility. They were unraveling, bit by bit, the old stitched-together assumptions of their lives.
All while pursuing Eleanor Bell Strickland, the runaway grandmother.
Something had cracked in Eleanor too—made her pack a bag and walk away from everything she’d known with little clue as to where she’d gone.
Was it the dementia? Or was it something bigger.
Something truer?
The last flickers of lucidity? Or the first real act of clarity hermother had made in decades?
Leanne stared again at the crack in the wallpaper.
And wondered how many of them it would take to finally peel everything back.
Chapter Nine
Bleary-eyed and still half asleep, Nora made her way out to the Lincoln. She popped the trunk, tossed her overnight bag inside with a thud, and slid her backpack across the wide leather front seat. She couldn’t believe she had to spend another entire day in this car with her mother. Right now, Kelley and the girls were probably lying out and getting a suntan, gossiping about the hot boys at the lake.
A few rogue popcorn kernels from the night before clung to the upholstery. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, along with her jealousy, before climbing in, letting the door slam shut behind her.
The motel’s breakfast had been delicious. She’d opted for a stack of hotcakes doused in syrup, and her mother had a meager meal of toast and a poached egg.
A few miles down the road, her mom pulled into a gas station—one of those sun-bleached, two-pump places with a rusted Coke machine out front and oil-stained concrete beneath the tires.
“I’m going to try the pay phone here.” Leanne rolled down the window to signal the attendant. “The one back at the motel was occupied.”
“Occupied?”
Her mom hadn’t mentioned anything about that last night.
“Dad’s going to be worried.” Nora glanced at the station’s clock tower, its hands frozen at 8:32. Broken. Of course. “We were supposed to call him.”
Leanne nodded. “I’ll call him now. There was a drunk guy passed out in the booth last night. I didn’t feel like dragging him out. He was…not exactly polite.”
“What did he say?”
