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had been running on fire and dreams.
    Lord, he said into the silence inside himself, where did all the fire and dreams go? Where in the world did eighteen turn into forty-three?
     

Chapter 3
     
    Standing On The Edge Of Good-bye
     
    Molly circled north, avoiding the town. She kept thinking that she couldn’t believe she had left Tommy Lee, that here she was just driving along, towing Marker, and her heart still beating and the sun still shining. She felt as if something had taken hold of her, some dark force, and was leading her down the highway, down her mother’s long, crushed gravel driveway and straight to her mother’s house.
    When she caught sight of Aunt Hestie’s cottage sitting off to the right, a pain shot in her eyes and down to her chest. She averted her gaze and pulled around back of the big brown Collier home. She jumped out of the El Camino and raced up the steps and in the back door.
    “I need to use your phone, Mama.”
    She breezed past her mother, who stood at the kitchen sink in her fuchsia robe, her mouth open in surprise, and went to use the phone in the downstairs bathroom. Her mother had a phone in every single room of the house.
    Molly had four sisters, but it was Rennie she called and Rennie she babbled to, certainly not making much sense. She knew she had awakened her sister, and she thought she heard whispering in the background, a man, which was a little embarrassing but not unusual. The more lonesome a man looked, the more susceptible Rennie was.
    Rennie said, “I’ll be right down,” just as Molly had known she would. “I have to shower and get dressed. No more than an hour.” Rennie lived up in Lawton, was an economics teacher at the junior college there.
    Molly hung up and sat there with her hand on the telephone, thinking of how she was going to have to call her children. The thought made her sick. Whatever in this world was she going to say to them? Whatever in the world was she doing?
    A scent caught her attention then, and she noticed the small bottle of Lysol sitting on the side of the sink with the cap off. Her mother did that sometimes because the room was an eighty-year-old converted closet with no window.
    Suddenly, staring at that bottle and smelling that scent, Molly was remembering the first time she had ever seen the woman who was to be her mother-in-law. She had been about five and her daddy had taken her with him to the Hayeses’ farm to ask permission to fish in their pond. It had been at bare first light, and Virginia Hayes had been down on her knees and scrubbing her front porch with a brush and Lysol water. There was no mistaking that scent, and the little brown bottle sat right on the steps. Molly had thought that the strangest thing, someone scrubbing a wooden porch with Lysol, and by the front porch light, because the sun wasn’t up yet.
    She had also thought that the woman resembled the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz —coarse dark hair pulled back into a bun, dark print dress and stout shoes and an expression that sent Molly hiding behind her daddy’s pants leg, something that she had never, ever told Tommy Lee. She didn’t think it would be a nice thing to say to him about his mother.
    Later Molly had come to learn that Tommy Lee’s parents revered getting up and going to work hours before the sun, as if they would get points in heaven and the rest of humanity were slackers on the road to hell.
    Molly’s mother was of a different mind. “Only activities to relax the spirit—prayer, fishing, sex, things of that sort—should be done before eight o’clock. Anything else is extremely unhealthy” was her proclamation.
    Everyone knew that Odessa Collier, Collier being her maiden name and held through her marriages, was next to a sage. She had studied philosophy for a semester at the University of the South and published articles in New Age thought magazines. Since retiring from her bookshop, she went about lecturing at spiritual retreats up in