Homesick Creek by Diane Hammond

but when Hack laid hands on, it had looked to him like pure evil—and not just because it was a Camaro either. He’d dealt with plenty of Camaros; if he hadn’t made his peace with them, exactly, he had at least learned to walk on by. It had taken two years to get that hell car off the lot, and later Hack heard that the kid who bought it crashed the car and died in a nine-foot-deep ditch just south of Hubbard. Hack knew how to read them. He always had.
    Rae Macy, on the other hand, had no feel for cars, but then again, that’s not what he’d hired her for. He’d hired her because he wanted to look at her some more. She had a narrow waist and a strong back and that fairy hair, fine and white as spiderwebs. If she turned around one day and he saw angel wings, he wouldn’t be surprised.
    So Hack planted a few car and truck sales a month to keep her spirits up, except that it wasn’t working as well as he’d thought it would—not because of her poor sales performance but because it turned out she was ambitious, something he’d never seen before in a woman, especially when she’d chosen a man’s job to begin with. He’d have to find something else for her to do, and soon, before she found another job. That nightmare with Bunny and the phone last week had brought Rae down, a long way down; he could see that. He wouldn’t have expected it, but then it had never occurred to him that Rae might call the house in the first place; she was naive that way and so had made a mess of his home life for a few days. He’d had to promise Bunny a long weekend at Eagle Crest Resort, over in Bend, and a trip to Cabo San Lucas for their fourteenth anniversary next year.
    Hack still remembered their wedding as if it were yesterday. They’d gotten married at the Elks over in Sawyer, and Bunny and Anita and Shirl, Bunny’s mother, had spent hours putting up crepe paper streamers and an arch of white helium balloons they walked under for the ceremony. Bunny had made him buy a new pair of cowboy boots for the occasion, and his feet had hurt the whole damn time; that and the rented pants of his blue tux had been too tight, which had given him gas. But Bunny had been in heaven, wearing a long fluffy white dress Shirl had made her that reminded Hack of Little Bo Peep, but of course he’d never said it, just told her she looked beautiful—and she did look pretty, still being in possession of her overbite. Him and Bunny side by side, her in that dress and him in a tuxedo shirt that had looked like one long cascading ruffle, a fussy waterfall frozen in cloth and lace. Bunny had dressed Vinny in a dress that matched her own, only cut down to a six-year-old’s size, and she’d also given her a little basket of rose petals to drop along the way to the arch of balloons, like a trail of bread crumbs, only classier.
    Even that long ago Vinny had a perfect face and tiny elf bones, which Bunny attributed to Vinny’s father, JoJo, who was a small man. She had cried when Hack slipped the wedding ring on Bunny’s finger at the end of the ceremony, but Hack had second-guessed that and pulled a little silver ring from his pocket. He’d gotten down on one knee and slid the ring onto her finger, shining in the light of her smile.
    Vinny. She’d had his heart that very first day, when he’d first met her and Bunny at the park. He hadn’t found much to smile about until then. He’d bummed rides and bounced around and washed himself in plenty of gas station bathrooms, passing through places he’d never been to before and never would return to again, and where he never seemed to find anything to hold him down. His memory was of one long tavern stretching from Seattle to Sawyer, until he’d found Bunny and Vanilla on that hillside like God had put them there to rescue him.
    When Hack sat at Bunny’s feet that day, still half drunk and watching Vinny, it had taken all he had to keep from breaking down. Little girls had a way of skipping, a way of