They stood off to one side of the excited throng who were cheering and holding up hand-lettered signs as the TrailWays Bus pulled into the church parking lot. Val chewed at the skin around her nails. When she saw Mark watching her, a tight smile crossed her face.
“It’ll be okay?” Her eyebrows raised in question. “He’ll be a good kid. Right? The Fresh Air people wouldn’t send him if, you know, he had problems . . .”
“That boy Carlson is a liar and a rogue,” I tell my daughter Eve on a Saturday night, as she primps to leave for a house party in Brooklyn. “I wouldn’t go near that boy with a ten-foot pole . . .”
Tami didn’t even count her night’s tips before she shoved the wad of coins and damp bills into her purse and went out the back door of Chevy’s Pub just minutes after closing. She gunned the Fiesta past her apartment, past the Sidney city limits, heading straight for the used RV she kept down by the river. She knew she’d find Dale with that slut who had been hanging on him all night . . .