And much as she loved being with her friends, she wanted them to have their own life, too, without her hanging around. She didn't want them to feel as if they had to invite her to join them for dinner every weekend or go along anywhere they went, whether ice skating or to a museum. She would not strain their friendship by becoming an obligation to them, though she knew they would never admit it.
Newlyweds need to be by themselves. I shouldn't be in their way. Then, too, she realized, she was not only fleeing that part of her life that had denied her Paul, the man she loved. She was fleeing from Chet, the man she despised, and now even feared.
Paul's words came back to her again as she drove: "Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love."
Easier said than done. How can you put love into anyone if your heart is like my gas tank, running on empty? But she was basically a positive person, she reminded herself. If you don't live with hope, what is there to live for? With every mile of the past she put behind her, she became more determined to escape and forget. In the place of everything else that had kept her from being happy -- men -- she would focus her new life on two loves she was more confident she could find happiness in: horses and flying. She told herself she firmly believed, even if she did not quite yet: they would lead her to a greater happiness than she had ever known.
She certainly had not found any happiness along Route 66 or any detours to California. She had been propositioned or worse by a traveling salesman of hair tonics in St. Louis; a traffic cop in Wichita; and a rodeo rider in Alamosa, Colorado. Just the night before, a not too shy teenage bellboy at the hotel she stayed at overnight in Las Vegas, Nevada, gave her the "come hither" eye. She was glad she hadn't driven any further west, but could not imagine what lay ahead for her later in what some along the way called the Promised Land.
Put love? Yeah, sure!
Barbara's destination was one she could hardly find on a map. Mohave, California was almost a whistle-stop town along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. Barely out of the desert in the shadow of the Tehachapi Mountains, a spine of the Sierra Nevada's, the town stood in an area called Antelope Valley. It sounded picturesque on the map, but looked considerably less than that from her car.