"What in TARNATION are you doing?!" Laney stood directly above Lucy's face, looking down on her with a bright ceiling can light behind her deep brown hair.
Lucy didn't say a word. Pressing her finger to her lips, she silently shushed her older sister, then pointed northwest through several Jeeps.
Laney quietly stepped over her sister, closed the Mercedes door, and walked away.
Lucy lay on her back two more moments and then flipped over, belly crawling her way behind a flowing curtain. She stood, slowly, clutching the translucent fabric with her sweating palms. If it were a wall, she would sink into it. Closing her eyes in her aloneness, she breathed a soft sigh of relief. Looking back over her shoulder through the thin crack of car light, she spotted Sneller making his way toward the other side of the show room, no doubt to look up some spokesmodel's tail-light.
Lucy kept her eyes peeled on the crack, just to be sure, as she began to walk further down the corridor toward the bathrooms.
She never saw the sweating Latino-ish man hauling a large trash can into her path until she actually landed in it, face down, staring at a pile of what could only be described as twice chewed corn dogs inches from her nose.
Shuddering, she pulled herself from the barrel, walking quickly away from the man who, at first shocked into silence, then began to laugh so hard it rattled the roll of replacement trash bags hooked onto a holster on his wide girth belt.
Lucy wiped off the back of her head and rounded a corner toward the restrooms, finding refuge on an abandoned bench beside an exit door. From here she could see the entire car show, with two gray curtains pulled half open in front of her and tied like some gigantic stage play scenery. It was a stage, after all, and she was the only actor who didn't know her lines. The rest recited them exactly the same way, year after year after year.
Cowboy walked in the exit behind her, and his shadow rested on the back of her head. He stopped, letting her beautiful profile rest easy in his shade, as his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light.
Suddenly he realized where he had seen her before.
It was a bus. A bus in California.
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