“Okay,” she said in a very mousy voice. “Okay, thanks.”
She hung up, and I felt like a complete failure.
It was only after I’d gotten back in bed and apologized to Otis for the disturbance that I realized I hadn’t told Alanna that I was on the road.
~
Another early morning, hitting the highway by six-fifteen, and our goal, if the traffic gods showed compassion, was to make it as far as Nashville, Tennessee, by that evening. It was doable, according to the app on Otis’s phone: the pixelated highway lines were sprinkled with lots of yellow interspersed with all the red. Staving off the claustrophobia of the car (we’d already come to the morose realization that this trip was going to take a lot longer than we thought) involved a steady rotation of entertainment and escape: his iPod, the r
