Stella’s Jeep, a sweet little green Liberty with chrome aluminum wheels and a sunroof, had been her husband Ollie’s pride and joy. He bought it new less than four months before he died and never let Stella drive it once. Ollie said she didn’t know how to handle a car that sat up off the road like that, so she kept driving the crappy little old Neon that Ollie himself had creased along a guardrail after a few too many beers coming home from a fishing trip.

Once Ollie was gone, Stella sold the Neon to a neighbor’s teenage daughter for a few hundred bucks and drove that Jeep like it had fire in the wheel wells. It never failed to light her up to take it out on the highway, with her favorite music cranked, rural Missouri flying by outside the windows.

“Love is like a cloud holds a lot of rain,” Emmy Lou sang as Stella drove, and she hummed along. There was just nothing in the world like old Emmy Lou’s drank-me-some-razor-blades-along-with-my-whiskey voice to smooth out Stella’s own rough edges and ruffled feathers.

And today was turning out to be that kind of day. It wasn’t just the hot flashes and the mood swings, either. Stella wasn’t anybody’s poster child for the Serenity Prayer on her best day, but thinking about Roy Dean’s pretty wife Chrissy sitting in her living room trying not to cry, wearing long sleeves on a hot day to cover up the evidence of her husband’s displeasure—well, that just made Stella’s heart hurt.

Emmy Lou launched into “Sweet Old World.” Stella sang along, squeaking on the high notes. Emmy Lou had no trouble taking her alto voice up into soprano territory, but Stella’s own voice hunkered somewhere south. “Not much of a range” was how her junior high choir teacher put it, before making Stella a prompter, her only job to stand in the wings holding up cards during the performances. Well, screw Mrs. Goshen—Stella figured she’d sing any old damn time she wanted now.