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was late.”
    “You were lucky you weren’t fired.”
    “I was.” With that, she laughed. “Seriously, how do you go to work at five o’clock in the morning? Are you a vampire or something?”
    “Our first plane rolls out at six. I have to get it loaded and fueled.”
    “In your little orange vest.”
    “Now you’re making fun of me.” Joy had no problem being teased as long as she was sure that’s what it was. “You wouldn’t want me to get crushed by a 737, would you?”
    “You wouldn’t believe the getup they made me wear when I worked at Taco Loco…it was one of those Mexican ponchos. It looked like a rug with a hole in it for my head. And at the Friendly Mart, they gave me this blue smock with half the snaps broken off. It had coffee and grease stains all over it that wouldn’t come out. So nasty.”
    “My orange vest is sounding better all the time.”
    “How did you end up working at an airport? That actually sounds kind of fun, except for the five o’clock part.”
    Joy’s hand crept over to pet Skippy, who eyed her nervously but for the first time didn’t growl. “I was a plane handler in the navy. I spent nine years working on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt. We called it the Big Stick, because that was TR’s motto. ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick.’ It was my job to get all the planes in position to launch and then put them back in the hangar.”
    “You lived on a boat for nine years?”
    She cringed at what most in the navy considered an epithet. “The TR was not a boat. It was a Nimitz -class nuclear powered supercarrier. But yes, we were deployed at least six months a year the whole time I was in the navy. Over five thousand of us on board. It was like a floating city.”
    “I don’t know how you did that.” Amber shook her head vehemently. “I’d go crazy looking out at nothing all the time.”
    “That’s only if you were lucky enough to look out. Some of those guys in the ship’s company stayed below deck for weeks at a time. They lost all sense of day and night. At least those of us in the air wing got outside nearly every day.”
    “Yeah, I’d probably kill myself if I never got to go outside.”
    “There were a lot of days going out on deck wasn’t much fun. We’d have rough seas and winds so strong we had to wear tethers on our belts to keep us from getting blown off the deck. Man, it was something else.”
    “More power to you, but there’s no way they’d ever get my ass on one of those things. I like my feet dry, thank you very much.” Amber wiggled her toes, which sported dark red nail polish.
    “It’s not for everyone.” She shuddered to think how fast someone like Amber would wash out in boot camp at Great Lakes. She’d barely make it off the bus before they sent her home.
    Conversation died as the sky darkened and heavy rain began to pound the windshield. For more than an hour they crept along the highway with everyone else, barely keeping up with the taillights in front. All the time Joy had banked doing eighty was lost, and then some, putting Evanston out of reach for the night. As the storm finally broke, they found themselves crossing the Colorado state line.
    Joy resumed her chatter but Amber had lost interest in conversation. By the worried look on her face, she was coming to grips with the reality of life in the middle of nowhere. When they stopped for lunch at the Colorado Welcome Center in Burlington, she stood in front of the truck with Skippy, staring into the horizon. Only seventy-nine miles to Limon and still not a mountain in sight. And hardly a tree, for that matter.
    “You getting excited about seeing your friend?”
    “I reckon,” she said, without a trace of enthusiasm. “You really think Limon’s as flat as this? It’s like one gigantic vacant lot out there.”
    “There might be a rolling hill or two, but mostly…yeah, it’s a lot like this.”
    “I guess beggars can’t be choosers. I just