6/

“How do you survive? Let me let you in on a secret: identities are what I like to call, ‘trust-issued’. When you meet someone and they tell you their name, do you demand their ID? And if someone does push, just say, ‘What, are you paranoid?’ and they’ll probably leave you alone.”

She’s shivering. It’s spring; she’s managed to build a small fire under the overpass. “Me, I love making up new identities. When I met you, what was I calling myself? Sarah? See? You didn’t doubt me for a second. Maybe I’ll be Lily in the next town. People always askin’: why’d you leave, why’d you come here, wasn’t it so much better where you was? Makes me want to laugh. With that deadbeat? With how he hurt me? Yeah, right.” she wraps her arms around her knees and holds her face there for a moment, teeth chattering.

“First thing – take the train. The real train. Easy to get a ticket if you sit outside and ask for money, specially if you’re a girl and it’s cold and you make yourself look like you’ve been crying. It’s beautiful, the train. Slower than a snail but it’s warm and it goes lotsa places that are boring. The real trick to disappearing is going somewhere boring. Small town America will swallow anyone they can get who acts right.

“Now you’re not going to have any friends, so you’ve gotta make some.” She smiles for a moment, at the memory of meeting outside a gas station, her newfound friend sitting with a paper cup with a couple quarters in it, how they’d hitchhiked down I-80 in the back of a pickup and spent the whole time laughing, heads down, hoping they didn’t crash. “If you can’t make any friends, you have to talk to yourself. Actually talk! If you don’t you’ll forget how, you’ll lose your mind sitting in silence; that’s what they do to prisoners, you know, in solitary. Poor fools.

“Until you get where you’re going, tell everyone a different name. People can’t unite when they can’t get the story straight, so even if someone does come looking for you, they’ll be askin’ if people’ve seen Sarah when you was going by Eileen, or Eileen to the people you told you was Jodi, and on and on and on. You get it.” She waits a beat, sticks her hands out to the dwindling fire, pulls the tattered blanket tight around herself.

“But if you can — some of these small towns don’t have wanderers, but most of ’em have at least one or two — so if you can, get a friend. It makes the nights less cold. Keeps you sane. Keeps you human. Easy to lose your humanity out here, so you’ve gotta hold it tight.

“Once you get where you’re going, that’s when you really gotta settle on who you are. Because what people do remember is the stories you tell ’em, especially if you’re young and pretty and down on your luck. And especially in the small towns you’re going to be relying on the same people over and over. Lots are Christian, so hit up the churches first. Churches are pretty good for jobs, too, if you’ve decided you’re where you’ll stay. Now I’ve never been a God fearing gal — can’t believe in God when you’ve lived through what I have. A lot of them are hypocrites. But sometimes you’ll meet a good one, who really does follow Jesus, and they’ll give you a bed and some food and sometimes a little money. And that’s…that’s nice, sometimes.

“I’m trying to decide if this is the place I stay or not. We had so much fun in the back of that truck. I thought when I left Jay I’d never smile again — so what if I stole the hundred from him when I left. I had nothing else and what’d he have? Everything. Just everything. I tried so dang hard and what’d he do? He didn’t try at all. I’d try and try and try until I felt defeated, and then he’d accuse me of not trying and say he was trying, and then we’d fight and I’d just feel more broken. And yeah, he — he…” she pauses, her breath ragged before she stills it. “He did some bad things.”

The fire’s gone out. It’s dark, and she sits in the cold with the blanket, shivering. There’s a diner down the street, she can see the lights on, and the neon open sign. She drops the blanket into her bag and pulls her moth-eaten coat around herself and hauls herself up on her feet.

“So there you have it,” she continues. “You know I’ve done some begging and I’ve grown that hundred. Still have the original. People are generous if you look right and sound right and fit who they think of as down on their luck and tell ’em you got nothing. I’m lucky that way. You’re lucky that way. Were. Were lucky that way.”

The diner’s mostly empty, the woman gets a coffee at the counter. Looking out the window, she pretends the flashing of headlights are morse-code messages she can’t decode. She stirs cream and sugar into the coffee and holds the name of her friend on her lips as she raises the ceramic mug in memoriam.

“You out here all alone, darling?” the server says, refilling her cup. The woman nods, looking down at the counter. “Is it just you?”

“It’s just me,” the woman says.

“Well what’s your name?” the server asks. “You’re welcome at mine tonight, I’ve got a nice bathtub and warm tea and a soft bed in the spare.”

The woman smiles. “I’m Violet. It’s nice to meet you.”