Firefly Nights

“OUCH!” THE SOUND of her own scratchy voice woke Kitty from a fitful sleep. The steering wheel of the old pickup she’d purchased yesterday was poking into her ribs through her Juicy Couture jacket. Her neck ached because her head had been jammed against the driver’s-side window all night. Her right leg, draped awkwardly over the back of the front seat, was asleep.

She smoothed the wrinkles in her favorite eggplant-colored D&G sweatpants and was grateful she hadn’t picked a pair of tight jeans for the drive. Things could be worse. She and her twelve-year-old son, Adam, had been warm enough all night, which was another plus. It could have been the dead of winter in... She struggled to remember the last road sign she’d seen. Oh yeah, they’d made it to North Carolina, the boonies somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and probably still a hundred and fifty miles from Charlotte. It might as well be a thousand miles if a person was trying to get there in a broken-down truck.

Kitty squinted through her windshield at the rising sun, sat up, stomped her foot on the floor to wake up her toes and then reached over the seat. She groped for the mop of blond hair that would identify her son. “Adam, you awake?”

A groggy voice answered her, “Yeah. But that doesn’t mean I want to be.”

“Me, either. But I suppose we have to start this day anyway.”

Her son’s droopy-eyed face appeared over the seat back. He wrinkled his nose. “This truck stinks.”

Kitty sniffed and agreed. The truck did stink. It had that musty, road-weary smell of cracked vinyl and perspiration like most old vehicles.

“Why did you buy this piece of junk?” Adam asked. “Why didn’t we just take the Beemer?”

“I told you why. It’s the little matter of the title, which is in your grandfather’s name. Legally I don’t own the BMW.”

Adam fell back against the seat. “You don’t own anything important.”

An image of the clothes and accessories in the massive walk-in closet she’d left behind flashed in Kitty’s mind. She owned...or she used to own until this morning, dozens of pairs of shoes and too many designer blouses to count. She sighed at the image of her paychecks going to boutique stores. Many of the blouses she’d left behind still had the tags attached. A person couldn’t bring everything in one vehicle.

Trying to assert herself to Adam, she said, “I own this pickup truck. And I paid cash for it. Besides, if we’d taken the BMW, Grandpa would have put out a trace on the car, and we’d be back in Florida by now.”

“And that would be a bad thing?”

After last night, Kitty was still trying to convince herself that, yes, it would definitely be a bad thing. She had to stay focused on the bigger prize. She was removing her son from her father’s all-powerful grip. And this time would be different from her last effort to leave Richland.

Adam stared at her with heart-stopping doe-brown eyes that always masked the devilish intent behind them. She reminded herself for the hundredth time that she was taking this drastic step for Adam.

He jerked his thumb toward the ignition. “Have you tried to start it this morning?”

“No, but with the smoke that was pouring from under the hood, I don’t see much point.” Nevertheless she turned the key and cringed at the grinding noise.

“Tell me again how you got us into this mess,” Adam said.

Kitty dropped the worthless keys into her purse. “Which one?”

“Let’s start with the one that put us on this road to nowhere.”

“Give me a break. I wasn’t responsible for that oil tanker overturning on 285. I didn’t divert traffic off the Atlanta bypass.”

“But it was your idea to leave the main road and drive past every cow pasture in Georgia.”

Kitty was tired of defending herself, but she did it one more time. “I did that to get directions, remember? I thought we’d get good advice from a local business.”

“How’d that work out for you, Mom?”

Count to ten, Kitty. “Adam, it was nearly midnight. I’d been driving for eleven hours without benefit of a GPS.”

“You would have had a GPS if you’d driven the Beemer or turned on your cell phone,” Adam pointed out.

Ignoring the same tired complaint, Kitty continued. “It’s not easy to keep an eye on unending miles of blacktop while trying to read a map. Anyway, I thought we would get back to the highway eventually.”

He stared out the window. “I wish I had my PlayStation. I wish I had all the stuff in my room.”

Kitty couldn’t blame him. His bedroom at her father’s eleven-room Georgian mansion in central Florida was an adolescent boy’s techno paradise. She twisted the rearview mirror so she could see her face, and immediately regretted it. “Why don’t you wish for something we both can use?”

“Like what?”

“A bathroom.”

He screwed up his face. “Or a million dollars.”

She squinted hard to block the image of the bags under her eyes and the mental vision of Adam frantically shaking the contents of her purse onto the front seat a few hours ago and announcing that her wallet was not among them. Looking back, she wished she’d taken her purse into the convenience store instead of a couple of twenty-dollar bills to pay for gas. At least she would still have her wallet.

“If only you’d stayed in the truck like I told you or at least locked it when you came inside,” she said, repeating herself.

“Yeah, and then those guys might have stolen me. Besides, we’re not going to go through that one more time, are we?”

She sighed again, knowing the rehashing of events wouldn’t ease her frustration. She’d paid for the gas, bought Adam a soda and they’d returned to the truck. She’d seen two men running down a narrow side road, but it wasn’t until an hour later when Adam was looking for her wallet to pay for a motel room that she realized those guys had been making a getaway with her precious five hundred dollars. “No, we’re not. It’s history.”

“So, are you gonna call Grandpa?” he asked.

“No!”

“I wish I had my phone. I’d call him.”

“I know, and that’s why I made you leave it at home. And don’t even think of borrowing someone else’s or using a pay phone.” Realizing Adam needed some assurances, she added, “We’ll be fine. We’re not totally broke.”

“Right. We’re only practically broke.”

She glared at him.

“Well, how much have you got?”

She stretched her leg so she could get her hand into the pocket of her sweatpants and pulled out a wad of bills. She counted. “Thirty-seven dollars. There’s money on the floor of the backseat, too. How much is it?”

She listened to her son scrape his hand over the rubber mat and then heard the jingle of coins. “Eighty cents.”

“Great.”

“You’d better call Grandpa.”

“I am not calling him,” she stated with greater emphasis. “I’ve still got my bank card. We can get more money as soon as I find an ATM.” She quickly calculated what she had in the bank. Fifteen hundred for the truck, five hundred in cash. She had about twenty-seven hundred left in savings back in Richland. Plenty to get to Charlotte and enroll in school.

Adam set his chin on the back of the front seat and stared out the windshield at an unending panorama of pasture and trees. “Ought to be a lot of ATMs around here,” he said.

Kitty ignored him. If only Adam had used some of that intelligence to succeed in his schoolwork instead of coming up with sarcastic comments. After finally taking this positive step, she was determined not to crawl home to Daddy like the first time, eleven years ago, when she’d called Owen Galloway and begged him to send money so she could leave Bobby Watley and bring her one-year-old son back home. Her father had spent the past eleven years reminding her of the mistake she’d made marrying the down-on-his-luck golf pro. Owen had consistently pointed an accusing finger with one hand while handing her cash with the other—and she’d let him.