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“Thank you for your time, Edna.” Cash lifted his hand in a wave as we turned to go.
“Don’t be a stranger.” She pointed her cigarette toward Cash once more. “Ya hear me, old blue eyes.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He dipped his head in a nod.
We walked back to the truck and now that all of the adrenaline I’d felt from the thought of possibly meeting my father was gone, I realized that I had to pee. Bad. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the drop of adrenaline and Brutus had just inspired me.
“What do you want to do now?” Cash asked as he opened the passenger door for me.
“Pee.” I was practically crossing my legs as I climbed into the seat.
The corners of his lips turned up in amusement. “There was a gas station down the street.”
“Good.”
We didn’t speak on the short drive to the Shell station. I don’t know what cat had his tongue but my silence was due to the fact that my bladder was about to burst. When we pulled to a stop, I grabbed my purse and sprinted into the women’s restroom.
After taking care of my business, I washed my hands and caught a reflection of myself in the mirror. I looked rough. Not as bad as the morning after Billy’s wedding but definitely not good. It took me about five minutes to transform from hot mess to presentable mess.
Once the immediate threat of wetting my pants was over, and I had run a brush through my hair and put on some lip gloss, my priorities shifted once more. Food and caffeine were at the top of my list.
I’d planned on asking Cash if he wanted to hit up the Denny’s across the street, but when I got back in the truck I found a bag with a bagel in it on my passenger seat and a coffee in the console for me.
“Thank you so much.” I picked up the bag, climbed in, and set it on my lap. After shutting the door behind me I turned and found Cash holding an envelope in his hand.
“Is this where you got Wayne’s address?”
He turned it around toward me. It was the envelope I’d taken from the bar. It must have fallen out of my purse when I grabbed it in my bladder-bursting hurry.
“Yes.”
A knowing smile spread on his face.
“What?” I asked looking back down at it and reading the address again. The house number and road matched what I’d put in the navigation system.
He handed me the envelope and pointed to the state’s abbreviation. “This is an I not a T.”
“An I?”
“Wayne lives in Nashville, Indiana.”
“There’s a Nashville, Indiana?”
“Yes.” He pulled up his phone, typed something and then smiled. “And he definitely lives there.”
He turned his phone so I could see the screen. On it I saw that Cash had searched the address and Wayne’s name had come up in the results. I probably should have done that. I’d thought about it but I was scared if I saw his picture or discovered something about him that I didn’t like or intimidated me I would have aborted my mission.
If I had googled him, it would have saved us a wasted trip. Although now that we’d met Edna, I couldn’t exactly say it was wasted. She was something else.
Cash typed something else into his phone. “His place is a couple of hours north of my mom’s.”
I stared at him blankly.
“And It’s only about three and half hours from here. We’ll head up there first and then go see my mom,” he stated as if it wasn’t up for discussion.
“No.” I shook my head. “I can’t go to your mom’s.”
I already felt bad enough that my personal crisis had caused Cash to push back his trip. I wasn’t going to crash her birthday.
