Page 117 of Grown-Up Second Chance

“Means he’s good and dead,” she answered. “But I’m still on the right side of the grass. Definitely not dead yet. This girl still has a lot of life left in her. So do you.”

“One mistake doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself for the rest of your life,” Liz said, her face soft, and her eyes a little out of focus … wistful.

Her secrets went well beyond what she was painting.

As for Kathleen, her relationship with Michael at the end must have been very difficult for her to be so eager to move on.

I didn’t know my sisters at all.

“So you think I should go.”

“You need to go,” Liz said.

Kathleen nodded her head.

“But how do I get there?”

“Rent a car,” they said at once.

~ ~ ~

Renting a car proved to be a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated. It seemed that rental car places had decreased their stock during the pandemic. Now that people were back on the road, the fight for rental cars was fierce.

My sisters convinced me to use ranch funds to buy a used car.

“We’re going to need two,” Kathleen said. “Liz wants to do more painting, and now that you have that camera, you’re going to want to get out as well.”

“But what about you?” I asked.

“I’ll be happy to see your backsides so I can have some peace and quiet,” she said.

Liz packed me supplies for a two-day trip. I’d spend a night in Casper to break up the almost nine-hour drive. While I was tempted to make it a three-day drive, there was far too much open space in Wyoming to find accommodations.

With my route locked into my phone, a playlist set up for the long drive, coffee and water in their appropriate holders, and a quick text to Joe, I set off for the Badlands to see if what I felt for Joe really was love.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Wyoming is lonely country, especially if driving alone in a small car. Semis roar bay, slow for the upgrades, then roar by again, on their way to somewhere else to make a delivery or greet loved ones. Wind howls across the treeless ground, which itself isn’t the least bit level. Instead, it contains small ridges, water-blasted fissures, and cliffs gouged by huge machines to extract the minerals that lay below the surface.

Mud-covered trucks zoom by, occasionally pulling horse trailers. The sleeker, newer trucks pull RVs that are barely held on the road during a sudden wind blast. The rest of us dodge the traffic and focus on where we’re going, not where we are.

In between moments of panic when a wind-pushed vehicle strayed into my lane or a semi cut too close after passing, there was way too much time to think.

It was great that Joe wanted to see me to talk about our future, and polite that he’d found separate accommodations. But he hadn’t said he loved me.

Maybe he’d reconsidered and decided all he need was a few nights of wild sex.

But why the separate accommodations then?

Was I being too pushy about sex? Did Joe think less of me? Did he consider me a “brazen hussy,” a term my mother occasionally used about a woman in town who took too much interest in other women’s husbands?

“Nympho” was the term Larry had used about me.

My chest twisted when I remembered that. Just like all the other name-calling he’d done, that one pierced my soul. I’d bought into it, quietly crying out my shame in our marriage bed after he’d turned his back on me.

I couldn’t go through that again.

A black pickup came within inches of my front bumper when he pulled into my lane.

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