When she was growing up, all she’d wanted was to settle in one place. Just some stability and not having to wonder what country you’d woken up in. Sometimes she’d wondered if she’d fallen for Mark simply because he represented that stability. Mark was from Oxford, which wasn’t all that far from Tupelo, and when she’d met him the farthest he’d ever traveled was to Daytona Beach for spring break.

Since being married, and never traveling any farther than Daytona, Barbara had started to notice how much she missed it. When the kids were young it was one thing; she was occupied full time taking care of them. But since they’d become more or less self functional for day-to-day activities, she’d started to crave something new. Which meant not going to Gulfport again.

Besides, U.S. 49 was a crawl from Jackson to Gulfport, especially on a Friday.

The traffic on I-55 was heavy with weekend travelers and she was reduced to a relative crawl of high seventies. She continued on 55 nonetheless, following it all the way down to I-10 and then striking out into the unknown. She followed U.S. 90 for a while and then took a side-road, heading into bayou country and trying as hard as she could to get lost. She had a GPS and checked that it was tracking, so no matter where she ended up she could find her way back.

However, the meandering on side roads with their sudden turns to avoid going into a swamp got wearying after a while. She’d had so much to do she hadn’t gotten on the road until around three and it had been a long nine-hour drive to the bayou country. So as midnight approached she started looking for sign of a hotel.

The road she was on wasn’t even mapped on the GPS and the very few stores and filling stations she passed were mostly closed. But, finally, she saw a Shell station with its lights still on and pulled in gratefully. She filled her tank and then went into the crumbling cinder-block building, wrinkling her nose at the smell of dead minnows and less identifiable things.