They Left Me Behind on the Road Trip, So I Got on a Better Ride novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Woman in the Red Hat
The runaway is Dot Abernathy, the photographer, and she hires Frankie at $300 a day to reshoot her 1971 loop over her grandson's objections, until her phone shows the fellowship finalists and Brody's lead image is Frankie's Mesa Arch sunrise.
The man in the suit looked at me for the first time.
He had gray eyes and the expression of someone reading the fine print on a contract he hadn't agreed to.
"She isn't your photographer," he said. "You don't have a photographer. You have a cardiologist."
"I have both now," the old woman said. "Say hello, Sawyer."
"Hello," he said to me. "I'm sorry for whatever she's told you."
"She gave me pie," I said.
"That's how it starts."
He crouched in front of the bench in his good trousers, right in the gravel.
"Grandma. You walked out of an assisted-living tour in Denver and got on a Greyhound. You turned your phone off for nineteen hours."
"I turned it off because you kept calling."
"I kept calling because you got on a Greyhound."
She ate a bite of pie and looked at the sky.
"Torrey's lovely this time of year. Did you know I was here in 1971? I slept in that orchard."
"I know. Everybody knows. It's in the book."
That was when it landed.
The red hat. The patches. The old Leica on the cracked strap.
The book.
My dad had kept a copy on the shelf over his desk, the spine split from being opened so many times.
"Forty Miles of Light," I said.
She turned and looked at me properly.
"You know it."
"My dad made me read it before he'd let me touch his camera. You're Dot Abernathy."
"I was the last time I checked."
Sawyer closed his eyes.
"Please don't encourage her," he said.
"You're the photographer who rode the whole loop alone," I said. "By bus and thumb. After your crew drove off."
Dot gave a small, dry smile.
"Funny how that keeps happening to girls on this road."
She stood up, brushed the crumbs off her jacket, and walked straight to the Audi.
She got into the back seat and shut the door.
Sawyer and I looked at each other over the empty pie box.
"I'm getting in your car," I said. "Mine went to a pool party."
He didn't laugh. But something at the corner of his mouth almost did.
"Fine. Get in. Please don't agree to anything."
He put my suitcase in his trunk next to a garment bag and a box of bottled water, sorted by size.
Inside, the car smelled like leather and coffee.
Dot leaned forward between the seats.
"Here's the job," she said to me. "I'm reshooting my loop. Same spots, same light, fifty-five years later. I need a second camera and a pair of young knees."
"Grandma."
"Three hundred dollars a day. Cash. You eat what I eat."
"Grandma, she's a stranger."
"She's a photographer. I watched her shoot her thumb before she got on that bus."
I turned around in my seat.
"You saw me in Green River?"
"I was on the bus, honey. Two rows behind you. You cried a little in Richfield."
I felt my face go hot.
"I did not."
"You did, and then you stopped and shot the window. That's when I decided."
Sawyer gripped the steering wheel at ten and two even though we were parked.
"You were on the bus with her," he said. "For six hours. And you didn't think to call me."
"I thought about it," Dot said. "I decided against it."
He pressed his fingers against his eyes.
"One night," he said finally. "There's a motel up the road. One night, and in the morning I drive you home, and I drive her wherever she wants to go."
"Bryce," said Dot.
"Fort Collins," I said, at the same time.
Dot sighed at me.
The motel had six rooms and a vending machine.
Sawyer paid for three of them on a black credit card and wrote down every room number in a little notebook.
He also bought me a bag of chips without asking, and set it on the counter in front of me.
"You didn't eat lunch," he said. "You were on a bus."
"How do you know?"
"Because nobody eats on that bus."
Then he went to his room and shut the door very precisely.
Dot knocked on mine ten minutes later.
"Show me your work," she said.
My hands shook a little when I opened the laptop.
I had never shown my pictures to anyone who mattered.
Brody had seen them. He'd scrolled through once, last winter, with a beer in his other hand.
"They're nice, babe," he'd said. "Kind of postcards, though. Don't waste money applying for stuff."
So I never had.
Dot sat on the edge of my bed and went through them slowly, one at a time.
Canyonlands at dawn.
My mom asleep in a hospital break room in her scrubs.
A wedding I shot with Dad's camera at nineteen, a groom crying behind a pillar where nobody else could see.
She didn't say anything for a long time.
Then she stopped on the groom.
"Who taught you to stand there?"
"My dad. He said the real picture is always ten feet from where everyone's looking."
She nodded slowly.
"These aren't postcards," she said.
I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything.
Her phone buzzed on the bedspread.
She glanced at it and frowned.
"My foundation," she said. "They post the fellowship finalists tonight. I told them not to bother me with it."
She opened it anyway and turned it toward me.
"Look. Five kids. Sixty thousand dollars and a book. Let's see if any of them can stand ten feet away."
The page loaded.
Five names.
The second one said Brody Hollins.
Under his name was the lead image of his portfolio.
A sunrise through Mesa Arch, the canyon under it glowing orange, one raven caught in the light.
I knew that raven.
I had waited two hours in the cold for it last October.
It was my picture.
← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend