22:25

Renata put her hands against the steering wheel and flexed them hard, trying to work out the soreness. Then she turned her left foot in circles and, after gunning the engine hard for a second, quickly did the same with her right. She arched her back as far as her seatbelt would allow, then scootched around in her seat, trying to find a spot that didn't feel like she was stuck to it.

She squinted at the road ahead, but it was no use. There was nothing but the illuminated gray of the mist coming up from the road, caught in her headlights and the black of the night beyond it. No lights on this stretch of the 10, no cars, no stars. Nothing. And there would be nothing until Desert Center, if you could call Desert Center "something."

She punched the buttons of the radio, cursing under her breath at the frazzled bit of cord that used to be the cd adapter until she'd shut it in the car door at Indio where she'd stopped to get gas. Of course there was nothing on FM. She pressed Search, and the LEDs whizzed crazily around, stopping occasionally at a bit of static that was on the border of making sense, but not crossing it.

She turned over to AM, and hit search again. Search. The numbers marched purposefully forward, stopping at 70s elevator music, the cigarette voice of some right-wing talk-show host, the always-unexpected volume of a station playing Mexican country music. Her finger hovered over the button, ready to jab it if anything sounded promising. Search.

"...waiting for you to come home."

There was a brief pause after that bit of a sentence, long enough for Renata to want to know who was waiting, and who was coming home.

"Jesus knows you're coming," the voice went on.

"Aw, shit," Renata said, her finger jabbing for Search again and missing, breaking a nail against the faceplate of the radio. But she didn't hit the button again. The voice wasn't strident. Not berating or unkind. The voice wasn't admonishing her to admit that she was a bad person.
"Jesus is waiting for you, and weeping. Weeping for you like the mother who weeps for her lost child, because you are the lost children of Jesus, who loves you as no mother has ever loved her children with a love that is perfect and pure and blessed and will wash the stain of your sins away from your face and you will shine as the sun and sit at the table with Jesus who will feed you with his very hand."

She began to feel light-headed. She turned off the radio and thought about pulling over. She didn't remember what the last milepost had said, but she couldn't have been more than a few miles outside Banning, which meant that (excepting the bustling metropolis of Desert Center) there really wouldn't be much until Blythe.

Goddamn it. Why did I go to that party? They knew I was leaving tonight. I told them a million times. The truck was packed, everything was ready.

She peered through the rain, then down at the dashboard clock. She had left at eleven, fully four hours after she'd meant to. If she had just left right from home at seven, she'd be past Quartzite right now, and almost there. If it hadn't started raining, she'd be going more than sixty, cutting her travel time with every mile.

When she was a kid, driving this stretch with her father, she would look at every milepost and figure up how long it would take to get home. At sixty miles an hour, it would take one minute per mile, and with 285 miles left, it would take...If her father went a little faster, she was always delighted to see that they were ahead of her imagined schedule, and she was deeply put out by having to make gas stops. Stopping just to use the bathroom or, heaven forbid, sightsee was just out of the question. There was nothing to see here anyway. Nothing.