Pam glanced over at the crumpled sheet in the passenger seat for the fifth time in as many minutes. Eyes back on the two-lane blacktop with no turn offs she had to laugh at the futility. She was either on the right road or she wasn’t.
Early summer corn waved from straight, even rows clearly laid out by a machine as the breeze picked up snatching away the wisps the country station up the coast and turning the radio into static. The smells of farming – water and the chemical tang of commercial fertilizer – reminded her of summers at her uncle’s place, summers her parents had sent her away first so they could take full advantage of the swinging ’70s and later so they could fight over who got to keep the trappings of their happy, middle-class life Pam included.
She returned the wave of a cowboy farmer in a beat up truck less worried that her battered Toyota would cause trouble here in a place where people flew the American flag with no irony. Pam reduced speed as she came to an intersection that wasn’t on her five year-old map.
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