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She couldn’t envision him letting his guard down that way with many other people.
    Lola sighed and took a picture of the twine ball with a digital camera she’d purchased. If she’d had someone to text it to, she would’ve sent it along with some witty comment. Of course, she would’ve needed a phone for that.
    “Want me to take one with you in it?” asked the woman with the ball-hugging man.
    “No, thank you.”
    “You sure? Take it from me—when you get home, the pictures with no one in them get old real fast.”
    Lola suppressed a smile. Everyone else was doing it, but she couldn’t help feeling a little ridiculous. “Okay,” she said. “Why not.”
    “Anyone you want in it?”
    Lola shook her head. “I’m alone.” She handed the woman her camera. When it was her turn, she stood just in front of the ball and smiled. She refused to hug it.
    “Good one.” The woman returned Lola’s camera. “You’ll be glad when you get back. That’s definitely going in the scrapbook.”
    Lola thanked her and left. During her trip, whenever she’d remembered, she’d taken at least one photo at each stop. At a rodeo in Wyoming, she’d sat in the stands with her cotton candy and watched a roping competition. Afterward, she’d won a goldfish at the state fair and given it to a little girl, making her hold it up for the camera. Lola had never been much of a moviegoer, but in Denver, she’d spent two days in the dark, gorging on foreign films during a festival. She’d photographed the sun rising between two gray mountains. A group of oddly-shaped pine cones. Tree trunks floating in the fog. Those were all from an early-morning hike she’d taken. She wasn’t in any of the pictures, though, and she wasn’t sure why she had them. They weren’t for a scrapbook—or for anything, really.
    Lola stretched her arms and legs before getting back behind the wheel. Driving an entire country could be hard on the body, and she was achy a lot of the time. She unfolded her map panel by panel, revealing America in seconds. Without a phone or GPS, navigation was a new skill for her. The options were many—Botanical Gardens in Des Moines, the St. Louis Arch, Chicago—but she’d already decided on the Ozark Mountains. After days of cities and crowds, solitude in nature sounded luxurious.
    Lola put the car in drive and hit the freeway. Hours crept by, as endless as the yellow, rolling wheat all around her. Clouds skidded across the blue sky and as she drove into the afternoon, they began to gather, low and gray on the horizon.
    Everything had darkened by the time she reached the Ozarks, even though it was only late afternoon. She scanned her way through radio static, searching for a weather report. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The map got fuzzy around the mountains, and she didn’t want to get caught in the rain looking for lodging.
    She pulled off the road at the first place she saw, her tires chomping as she found a place to park. In her Hey Joe hoodie and a jacket, the warmest things she’d brought from California besides her trench coat, she walked up to a tiny, hole-in-the-wall bar with a lit Fat Tire sign in the window.
    Inside, Lola blinked a few times to adjust her eyes to the dark. It was empty—nobody drinking his dinner yet. The interior wasn’t an exact replica of Hey Joe, but they were cut from the same cigarette-burned cloth. She walked up to the bar. Johnny’s third favorite Led Zeppelin song, “ Babe I’m Gonna Leave You ,” played in the background as if someone’d forgotten to turn the music back up after a conversation. Some postcards of Midwest attractions were tacked on the walls. The retouched photographs were more vivid than what Lola’d seen with her own eyes. The real thing had been good, but it could always be better.
    Lola hadn’t contacted anyone, though she’d often thought about it. A message that she was fine. Better than fine. Amazing. She was seeing things that were good enough for