Roxy danced around her feet, tail wagging as Eleanor clipped the leash onto her collar.
“Ready?” Eleanor asked.
The dog barked once, as if to say,Finally.
Eleanor swept out of the motel room, feeling ten years younger. Then stopped short.
She didn’t have a car.
Of course, she didn’t.
She turned back toward the front desk, her sandals tapping against the hot concrete. She was halfway to asking the sleepy clerk to call her a cab when a young woman in cutoff denim shorts and a gauzy white tank top caught her eye. Was she the same one who’d stopped her coming offstage the day before?
The girl was leaning against a beat-up silver VW bus with flowers painted on the side and a peace sign hanging from the rearview. She was eating a peach, juice dripping down her wrist. When she saw Eleanor, she broke into a wide, fruit-juicy smile—like she’d been waiting for her all along.
“Eleanor, right?” the girl called out. “You were amazing yesterday.”
Eleanor’s eyes widened, thrown off. “Oh. Thank you.”
“Mr. Moon asked me to come for you,” the girl said, pushing off the bus. “You made such a huge impression yesterday when you were singing during the open mic time, and he thought it would be really fun to open the show with you today.”
Just like that.
No hesitation. No questions about how she had even gotten here.
“Everyone’s talking about you,” the girl continued, dropping the peach pit to the ground and opening the van’s passenger door for Eleanor, before climbing into the driver’s seat.
“Talking about me?” Eleanor laughed, attempting to brush off her embarrassment as she climbed in and put Roxy on her lap.
“You’ve got a lot of talent.” The young woman glanced over at her, turning the key in the ignition, the van’s engine rumbling to life. “Where’ve you been hiding all these years?”
Eleanor smiled softly, eyes out the window. “At home.”
The girl tilted her head, clearly not understanding.
“Home” didn’t mean much to someone like her, Eleanor supposed. She looked at the young, wild woman, who wore her liberation like women of Eleanor’s generation wore perfume. She likely lived out of a van, probably hadn’t done a load of laundry in a washing machine in weeks, and used the word “free” like a religion.
To Eleanor, home had meant something very specific.
A husband.
A child.
A calendar filled with things that didn’t include her name.
“Well,” Eleanor said, smoothing her dress as a cue to change the subject. “Let’s get going then.”
She didn’t want to explain it. Not the detour of her life. Not the reasons she’d stopped singing. And certainly not the sharp, terrifying truth that she was on borrowed time. That the memories were already slipping, slow and quiet like tides pulling back before anyone noticed they were gone.
Liberation, she quickly learned, came with a lead foot.
The girl drove like she was in a race no one else had entered. The van screeched through a turn into the festival parking lot, and Roxy let out a yip from Eleanor’s lap, claws scrambling for traction.
“Good heavens,” Eleanor muttered, clutching the seat belt, which didn’t latch. By the time they came to a stop, her knees were shaky, and her hair had gone wind-wild.
She stepped out onto the dusty grass, trying to compose herself. “Thank you for the ride, dear,” she said politely, then added silently,Never again.
“Right this way, Miss Bell,” the girl said with a grin, clearly unfazed.
