Page 8 - My FlipBook

shaking his shoulder, and telling him to go to bed. Instead, she
grabbed his keys from the hook by the door and headed out.
She drove slowly, the old truck grumbling down the back
roads of Juniper Hills. Dubs had told her when the casino was
built everyone in town was certain it was going to flush their
area of rural Connecticut with money. They believed real estate
prices would go up, downtown would fill with new blood, and
the schools might even get a little better. There was a small
economic boom, but after a year or so everything went back
to normal: the houses and shops still run-down, the schools
understaffed. Dubs always liked to say the town had character.
But Fit knew that “character” was just another word for shithole.
The night was dark, no moon to speak of, and the houses
became less and less frequent the farther she got away from
the center of town. A headlight had gone out the day before,
Dubs cursing under his breath as he ordered a replacement bulb
because the local auto parts store didn’t have the right kind,
so she could only see a few yards ahead. She felt suspended in
space, like the only objects in existence were her, the truck, and
the small bit of pavement lit up in front of her.
She drove until she found herself on Windward Lane, the
dead-end street where she spent the first three years of her life.
She parked in front of her old house at the end of the cul-de-sac
and turned off the engine. The one-story Cape Cod style house
was well maintained. The freshly mowed lawn, the light blue
exterior, the dogwood tree in the front yard: it all looked the
same since the last time a nightly drive had brought her there.
Fit looked at the garage. Her hands tightened on the steer-
ing wheel, and she couldn’t think about anything but being
inside that house, that garage. She started the truck and ripped
away from the curb.
“You’re a queen,” she said under her breath as she pushed

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