We drove around the outside of the city of Austin. I’d never seen so many big buildings. Jets were flying low overhead and landing somewhere nearby. The map was open on my lap as I navigated for Angie. Bunny wound around my feet protesting being replaced by a map.
“Here, turn here!” I shouted. “Go right.” Angie cut across two lanes of traffic just in time to catch that exit. Then we headed away from town and up into the hills.
Civilization thinned out pretty quickly and we didn’t see much in the way of houses or other people. Ranch after rocky ranch. What I did see were bulls in the pastures with the biggest horns I have ever seen. One of them stood by a fence and he raised his head as we drove by—honest to God, his horns were so big he looked like an airplane. I remembered the cows crowded in the truck on the highway. If those cows had had giant horns, nobody could have ever forced them into a truck. I wished I had giant horns, then the Catfish could never have put me in his car and dragged me to Hot Springs.
I was worried about Eleanor Rose refusing to accept me, but I didn’t want to spook Angie; she was going out of her way to help me. Still, I screwed up my courage and said, with some hesitation, “You know, when we get up there and find my aunt, I want to be the one to tell her who I am.”
“She doesn’t know who you are?” Angie kept her eyes on the road, but I could tell she wanted to turn and look at me.
“No, we’ve never met,” I said.
“No photographs even?”
“There was a falling-out,” I said. “In the family, before I was born.”
“I see. Well, okay. I understand…” But when I didn’t say anything, she squinted at me. “Is something else bothering you, Ruby Clyde?”
I really wasn’t going to tell her that my mother and aunt’s strangeness from each other was all my fault. If my mother hadn’t been pregnant with me, Eleanor Rose wouldn’t have gotten mad and left. Angie might not want to take me and leave me where I wasn’t wanted. She was an angel and all, but she might decide to take me back to the police and the orphanage.
“I just need her to help my mother, that’s all.”
“I’m sure she will,” Angie said.
But I wasn’t sure at all.