Page 412 of Small Town Firsts

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Why did you quit? For real?

Unsincerely Yours,

Ryan G. Moon

Sunday 3:21 am

Ryan G. Moon,

You forgot your abbreviated form of speaking. I almost thought you were an imposter Goddess.

Sincerely,

Preston Michael Shaw, Esquire

Sunday 3:33 am

Miss Moon:

Preston, tell me.

I finally called her half an hour later. I hadn’t known how to answer.

It was a hell of a thing to drop the bricks you’d carried around your whole life. To share that load with someone, knowing full well they might not want to keep toting them the rest of the way with you.

But I had to do it anyway.

“Hi,” I said quietly when she answered.

“Hi,” she whispered back.

“Are you going to hang up on me again?”

“Depends. If you make me cry again, absolutely.”

I smiled in the dark. “Normally, I would hate making you cry. But in this case…”

“Sadist.” I could hear her smile.

“Can you talk? I don’t want to keep your mom up.”

“She has headphones in with her Gregorian chant music. She uses that to reach her alternative aural space.”

“Okay.”

“That’s my mother, man. She’s on a whole different plane. Now stop stalling.”

I released a slow breath. “I never wanted to do divorce law. Not for one goddamn day. I finally just…stopped.”

She gasped. “You walked out?”

“I said I quit. I didn’t say I had a lobotomy.”

Her soft giggle was breathless. “Can you return the car? That’s a lot of thrusters for a guy without a job.”

“I never owned it.”

“What the fuck, dude?”

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