Las Vegas Savior

In the beginning of August on her third summer on the run Emily found herself driving down the highway through Idaho. She was tired of running and the gas and the meal she had bought that morning had been almost all of the money she had left from her last job, so she had to work or go hungry after that.

Her savings were getting dangerously low, in fact of the over five thousand dollars that had been in there when all this had begun was now down to less than a thousand and she had promised herself that she would not touch it anymore. In fact, she hoped to be able to start adding to it again soon.

She had driven all morning and her gas tank was almost empty and her car was making a noise she had never heard before which had her slightly concerned. She pulled off of the highway at a small town she had never even heard of to fill up with the last few dollars in her purse.

She had pulled into the gas station and walked inside to tell the man she was going to fill up and to look at what they had to eat. The little convenience store didn’t have anything she wanted to eat so she headed back outside and lifted her hood.

She knew very little about cars other than where to put the water and the oil when it was needed so she had no clue how to tell what it was that had made the noise so she closed the hood with a prayer that it was not going to become a problem and was just leaning up against her car, waiting for the pump to finish filling her tank when she spotted the help wanted sign in the window of the diner across the street.

She had gone in and asked what kind of help they were looking for. Shelly had told her they needed a lunch counter waitress and Emily asked who she had to talk to about applying for the job. The owner of the diner had come out and interviewed her and had hired her on the spot.

They had given her a badly fitting uniform and she had started right away. Shelly had been working the morning shift since the other waitress had up and quit recently. She would have to be back before the dinner rush but she had stayed to help Emily learn the set up and kind of show her the ropes.

The manager had also allowed her to eat something and to stay on a cot in the back room until she could save up enough money to find an apartment. That had been fine the first few nights but then one morning she had woken up to find Oscar, the dishwasher, watching her sleep and it had crept her out so much that Emily had gone back to camping.

Emily knew she had to come up with the money to fix her car and decided that she was going to save enough money for a couple of tanks of gas and money to feed herself until she could find something else, somewhere else. She was getting so tired of running and being on the move all the time.

She was hoping to be able to spend Christmas with Connie and her family this year. She had decided that she was going to finally come clean and tell Connie what had happened over the last 3 years, starting with meeting Derrick.

The diner was usually the busiest in the mornings because truckers were their main source of income. The rate of pay was minimum wage and the tips during the lunch “rush” were just barely getting her by but she was able to eat for free so she saved every cent she could in the hopes that maybe she would be able to get her car fixed and back on the road again.

As the weather began to change and it began to get cold, Shelly had told her that she had heard of a place that Emily could afford to rent on a month to month basis for which Emily had been very grateful.

She hadn’t planned on staying in town this long but with her car making the unidentifiable noise, she was afraid that it might leave her stranded somewhere so she had gotten an estimate from the mechanic at the station across the street.

He told her that she needed a new transmission and it was way more than she could afford, even if she emptied her savings account. All she could do now was pray that she could get enough saved to have it fixed before it broke down and left her stranded here!

When she was in a city, Emily had learned to never park her car where she was living. She would always leave her car in a public parking area a block or more away and would walk back to wherever she had been staying. But now her apartment was more than 2 miles from the diner. After being on her feet for the past 6 or more hours straight, her feet usually hurt too much to walk over 2 miles to get back to the apartment.

Her “apartment” was actually a large wooden utility building on the back of her landlord’s property. When she had moved into the barn style utility building this past August, she had thought it was charming from the outside with the big oak tree hanging over it, keeping it cool inside during the warm summer days.

She had thought she could deal with the barn look on the inside and it had never occurred to her that the “barn look” had also meant that the building had no insulation and would be freezing cold in the winter months, but then she hadn’t planned on staying here that long.

But before she knew it September was over and she still hadn’t made enough money to get her car fixed. October and November seemed to fly by. She had spent Halloween walking with Shelly and her son, Bobby, as he trick or treated in his neighborhood. He had been such a cute Power Ranger trick or treating and it had been such a novel experience, since her father had never allowed them to trick or treat as kids.

Shelly had invited her for Thanksgiving dinner and while Emily had been glad that she didn’t have to spend the day alone, she was getting discouraged. She definitely didn’t want to be stuck in this little one horse town for much longer.

She wasn’t sure where she was going to go next but for the past couple of weeks she had felt edgy. She tried to tell herself that it was just because the Christmas holidays were getting close but she always tried to trust her intuition, and she just knew it meant Derrick was getting close. Her sixth sense about him had always served her well in the past but she hoped that she could work for just another two weeks, at least, before she had enough money to fix her car and then she could leave.

Emily knew that she had already been here for too long. It was dangerous for her to stay in one place too long. She had to keep moving or he was going to find her. Maybe if she could just make it to the next town, there would be a mechanic there that could fix her car for less than the crook across the street wanted to charge her. She had a feeling that there wasn’t as much wrong with her car as he had tried to sell her but she was afraid to chance it.

Emily and Shelly had gotten quite close in the few short months that Emily had been here. She had baby-sat for Shelly’s son, Bobby, a couple of times so that Shelly and her mother could have some much deserved me time to go Christmas shopping for Bobby.

Shelly’s husband had been killed in an accident when Bobby was only 2 years old and Shelly’s widowed mother had moved in with her to be there to get Bobby off to school and to be there when he got home, if Shelly had to work late or run errands after work. Bobby was now 7 and in the second grade at school.

He was quite the artist and Emily’s small fridge at the apartment displayed several pieces of this artwork. Shelly had the insurance money from her husbands’ death in a savings account that she tried very hard not to dip into very often. She wanted her son to have a chance to go to college when he was ready.

The days came and went and were beginning to blur together. The first couple of weeks of December went even faster than October and November. Her hopes of spending Christmas with Connie and her family were starting to fade.

The only reason she had stayed here for so long was because her car had needed some attention but she couldn’t afford the price the mechanic at the service station had quoted her. She knew that getting out on the open road with her car acting up could be more dangerous than if she just stayed put so she had resigned herself to spending the holidays with friends instead of family.

Then the week before Christmas Shelly’s younger brother, Andrew, came home on leave from the army for the Christmas holidays’. Andrew was a mechanic in the army and he had taken a look at her car and told her that the mechanic had been lying about her needing a transmission, that all she needed was a tune up and a new fan belt.

She had paid for all of the parts and tried to get him to name a price for his services but at first he had refused to let her pay him. She finally told him that her feelings would be hurt if he didn’t take something for his time, especially since he had to stand out in the freezing cold to change the oil, spark plugs and put the fan belt on her car that he had finally accepted fifty dollars from her and then turned around and spent the money on a bike for Shelly’s son, Bobby, for Christmas. She didn’t find out about that until after he had left to go back to his base that he had put her name on the gift tag of the bike.

Now, thanks to Andrew, her car was back to running smoothly again and Emily was hoping to get back on the road soon. She was planning to tell Shelly that she was going to work another week to finish off the pay period, just to give her more of a cushion, when she went in to work the next morning. She sat looking around her tiny apartment and thought about all the nice furniture that she had left behind at her apartment in Seattle. It was now in storage and she was paying the storage fees out of her savings account.

The utility building apartment had come partially furnished with an old, lumpy, rock hard double bed, a dresser and a small table with 2 chairs. The rest of her furnishings had come from either the side of the road or the thrift store in town.

She now had a futon couch, an old recliner that didn’t recline anymore but was pretty comfortable to sit in, and a small old fashioned TV that sat on a rickety microwave cart that she had to keep tied together with some rope she had found up in the loft.

Maybe the landlords wouldn’t be so upset at her quick departure if she left them with more furnishings. She didn’t even want the old TV that she had found on the side of the road that needed its vertical hold fixed.

There were no pictures of her or her family around. No nick knacks or other personal items that she cared anything about. She didn’t get mail so there wasn’t even that she had to worry about being a way to trace her. No one that came in after she was gone would ever be able to tell that she had been the one living here.

Other than that, her possessions consisted of what she had come to town with, an old backpack with two changes of clothes, an old nightgown that was now so threadbare from being washed over and over again that it was barely decent anymore. Some travel sized toiletries that she kept replenished from Walmart, her hair brush, a toothbrush that needed to be replaced soon and a sleeping bag that she used as a blanket on the lumpy rock of a bed.

She kept her back pack with her at all times, even when she went to work, in the back of her car. If she had to run without going back to her apartment, then the only things she would have to forego would be her sleeping bag, which she had already had to replace twice now and her camp stove, which would be harder to replace because of the cost. Even though she had been living here for 4 months now, she still kept her “go bags” ready in case she had to run at the drop of a hat, which she’d had to do several times in the past three years.

She had gone to bed that night, thinking about how glad she would be to be able to check into a hotel with heat as she pulled the sleeping bag over her head. She didn’t even bother with her nightgown, since it was so thin, it didn’t offer any warmth so she slept in her old sweats and two pairs of fuzzy socks that she had gotten at the dollar store.

She had hoped that the trucker she had waited on that day hadn’t given her his cold. He was coughing and sneezing all over the table. He must have consumed at least 6 glasses of water and barely touched the bowl of soup he had ordered. She had hoped that washing her hands and using hand sanitizer over and over again would keep her from getting sick.