THE WALK GiGi Huntley Alma was six miles past the old country bar when the sidewall of the tire ruptured. It was after midnight, and she was still wearing her dirty forest ranger uniform. Good thing it came with comfortable shoes and a warm jacket, because the bar was the only place close, and the spare was never replaced after the last blow out. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. For her, worse things had happened during the day, and being a ranger meant she carried a gun. She grabbed a lashlight from the glovebox and started the trek. Coyotes yipped from the river below; owls hooted from the hill above. It was beautiful. She thought about how her husband Ed would have loved it — a dark walk, animal sounds, only the half moon and stars providing light. She clicked on the lashlight. She missed him every day. Cancer had taken him from her ive years before. Being alone meant she kept the ranger job even when she should’ve retired. She was good at it, so no one pushed. The skin on her face showed every year. She joked that her wrinkles were a map of every gravel road she’d ever driven, every creek she’d ever ished. She igured it would take a couple of hours to get back to the bar. She wasn’t as quick as she once was. “Well, the old truck is still getting me where I need to go. Can you believe it? The odometer has probably turned at least twice since we bought it. I had to clean the carburetor a few weeks ago. Good thing I remembered how. Too bad I forgot to put the spare back, huh?” He never answered, but she was always talking to him. She wished sometimes that he were a ghost, following her around, laughing at the way she reused tea bags still. “You know that Lipton is pretty cheap stuf, right? We can aford for you to use more than one bag a day. Treat yourself !” he would kid her. She chuckled, swatting at a moth that came for the lashlight’s relection on her glasses. Life wasn’t always easy. Dad was a drunk who used prospecting as a way to avoid family life, only coming home to get Mom pregnant or yell that
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