Read A Little Ray of Sunshine for Free Online Page B

out the trash, and he was leaving. We talked a little bit.” She giggled and hopped up on her heels. “I’m so excited. I’m going to Twinkie’s wedding!”
    She tossed the backpack over her shoulder and hopped into the passenger side of the truck. I walked around to the driver’s side and got in.
    “That was a dirty trick.” I turned the key in the ignition.
    “You said anywhere.”
    “I meant —”
    “But you said —”
    “ Fine !” I clenched my fingers around the steering wheel. “Fine. I will take you with me to Colorado Springs—”
    Her eyebrows knit. “But the wedding’s in Oregon.”
    “—and I’ll put you on a plane to Portland from there.”
    “Oh, so we’re flying from—?”
    “No. You will be flying . I’ll be staying in Colorado Springs, investigating local dive bars where I can drink away all memory of this entire episode.”
    “But—”
    I held up my hand. “Some ground rules. One, no talk of the wedding.” She opened her mouth. I held my hand up higher. “ Ah-ah-ah . No. Talk. No trying to convince me to go. No making me feel bad about lying to Digs. None of that. Do we have a deal, or am I leaving you here?”
    Jess’s eyes narrowed in thought for a moment. “I don’t know. What are the other ground rules?”
    “What?”
    “Well, ground rule one was no talking about the wedding, which related directly to everything you said after that, so I assume there’s a two. What’s the second ground rule?”
    I white-knuckled the steering wheel. “No counting my ground rules.”
    She smiled and held out her hand, and we shook on it. I started the truck, figuring that if the Universe told Jess to kill me in my sleep, it’d be my own damn fault anyway.
     
    ***
     
    In the middle of the night, in an RV park on the western edge of Ohio, I found myself staring up at the ceiling of my Airstream, unable to sleep. Jess was snoring lightly from the twin bunk at the back of the trailer, but after six years of RV park living, I was under no illusions about what I was capable of sleeping through. The snore of a deluded angel was not powerful enough to keep me up on its own.
    I threw my legs over the side of my bed and stuffed my feet into my sneakers, then quietly opened the door and slipped outside. I took a moment to stare up at the clear, black sky, peppered with stars, and breathe in the smoky fragrance of a distant campfire in the warm summer air. It had been an RV park much like this one that had gotten me hooked on the things in the first place. Of course, most of the parks I’d lived in recent years had been nothing like this. Places like this were too far out in the middle of nowhere, and it was almost impossible to get any kind of viable employment within a reasonable distance, except during the occasional lucky summer when the park itself needed extra help. I glanced back at the private little nook where I’d parked the Airstream under the protective bulk of a giant willow tree, far enough away from any neighbors to provide a decent sense of privacy. I liked this park.
    Maybe, someday, I’d come back.
    In the distance, from the direction of the rec center, I could hear music playing, the sounds of people laughing, the erratic conk-plinks of two people playing Ping-Pong at the outdoor table. This was a family place, where moms and dads took their kids for long weekends and let them stay up late drinking sodas and feeding the jukebox. When I was twelve, Danny had taken Digs and Luke and me to a place like this for the summer while my mother did a TV movie-of-the-week for NBC and snared husband number three, a talent agent who, as it turned out, had no talent for agenting. But that’s another story. Anyway, Luke and I had piled our jukebox quarters together and gotten a pack of menthol cigarettes out of a vending machine, then walked down to the lake and tried to smoke them, to horrendous but predictable results. Eventually, we traded the remaining fifteen cigarettes to Digs in