The Wild Ways Read Free

getting her own place. There’d been rumors that the apartment over the coffee shop next door to the Emporium would be available sometime in the fall and she couldn’t think of anything more perfect. She’d gain a little privacy while changing almost nothing about how she lived.
    “Broken Wings?” Donna’s question jerked her out of her thoughts. Apparently, her fingers had moved on without her. “Chica, I wasn’t suggesting you play depressing country music. I mean, sure, there’s nothing like starting the day with a song about a woman trapped in a . . . Shit!” Swerving onto the shoulder, she somehow missed the car suddenly in their lane trying to pass an oil truck headed north.
    Charlie hit a quick A minor 7th and managed to get all four wheels back on the pavement.
    “Know any songs about assholes on the road?” Donna wondered after they’d spent a moment or two remembering how to breathe.
    Charlie could feel a faint buzz under her skin. As though the adrenaline rush had plucked a string with its action set too low. “I know a few . . .”
    Almost eight and a half hours and an uncounted number of assholes slowing them down later, they reached Edmonton. An hour after that, pulling out of a gas station onto highway 2 on the south side of the city, Charlie gripped the bus’ steering wheel and smiled. She could feel Calgary, feel the branch of the Gale family newly anchored there tugging at her. Anticipating home, she could almost ignore the lingering buzz.
    “Fifty says I can make it to Tony’s place in less than three.”
    Before anyone could point out that a legal speed would take closer to four hours, Jeff, the bass player, took her up on it.
    Two hours and forty-seven minutes later, they unloaded the essentials off the bus in Tony’s driveway.
    “If I hadn’t seen it,” Jeff muttered, handing over a twenty and three crumpled tens, “I wouldn’t have believed this hunk of junk could make a lateral move across four lanes of traffic at one twenty.”
    “I didn’t think it could do one twenty,” Tony grunted, loading the last of his drum kit onto the bus’ old wheelchair lift. “All right . . .” He straightened and stretched, twisting the knots out of his back, damp streaks of darker gray staining his pale gray T-shirt. “ . . . since I’m pretty sure you lot are as sick of the sight of me as I am of you, let’s give it a couple of days, and say Tuesday evening for the debrief at Taylor’s place.”
    Taylor waved a finger but allowed the offer of her apartment to stand.
    Weighed down with two guitars, her mandolin, her banjo, and a duffel bag of dirty laundry, Charlie waved an entire hand and then staggered down the driveway to where one of the younger members of the family had left her car.
    “Allie, it could easily be stupid o’clock in the morning when we get in.”
    “Yeah, and they have these things called phones, you know. You could call when you’re close.”
    Gale family phones began as the cheapest pay-as-you-go handset available, spent quality time with the aunties, and finished as free, reliable cell service—where reliable meant the aunties saw no reason to allow an absence of signal to interfere with their need to meddle. In the right liver-spotted hands, tech sat up and begged.
    Charlie’d rolled her eyes in her cousin’s general direction. “Or you could just have one of the kids drop my car off at Tony’s Sunday afternoon.”
    Given that their younger cousins considered the car theirs while Charlie was touring, they’d gone with the second option.
    Embracing the clichés of playing in a country band, she’d intended to buy a pickup, but safely transporting more than one instrument at a time turned out to be more important than a faux redneck image. Sitting behind the wheel, everything securely stowed, Charlie sighed and glanced up at her reflection in the rearview mirror. “I have a station wagon.”
    Her reflection wisely did not point out that the amount of crap