Leaving Unknown by Kerry Reichs Read Free Book Online Page B

burritos. I’d attract customers. We’d make you a reputation as the best burrito in town! Peoplewould think Bunn, and crave a burrito.” It was a thin argument. Burritos occupied a wafer-thin slice of Bonnie’s menu, which was heavier on baked goods than sandwiches, never mind Mexican entrees. I’d had better success at Loco Taco in Loco, Oklahoma, and Bell-A-Burrito in Uncertain, Texas. But Bonnie offered the only burrito in Ding Dong, Texas, so I had to give it a shot. I was a little desperate. Given the distance between West Texas towns, I didn’t want to leave Ding Dong without plenty of money stockpiled. It was a long way to Noodle.
    Bonnie wasn’t convinced. “You mean like the guy used to walk around in the cell phone suit in front of Hank’s place?”
    I was about to launch into an emphatic explanation of why Hank was a brilliant marketer, when I stopped. “Used to?” I said instead.
    “Haven’t seen him in a while.”
    “Where is Hank’s exactly?”
    Five days later my guilt as I drove off in the middle of the night with Hank’s cell phone suit was eased by the fact that I’d lured fifty people into his store, and my use of legalese in the IOU approached official. More important, I had enough gas money to get to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, which had both a Mexican restaurant and a cell phone store.

Chapter Four
Unknown and Surprise
    I tapped my pencil against my teeth as I studied the map. Unknown, Arizona, looked pinprick tiny. I was seasoned at route planning now, triangulating desired towns, available campgrounds, and potential burrito, cell phone, and (after Sunshine, New Mexico) chicken restaurants. The small towns were the trickiest. I’d arrived at faded crossroads “towns” to find they no longer existed, their entire memory reduced to a dot on an outdated map, dependent on lazy fact-checkers for this fragile proof they had ever lived. It shook my self-assuredness that something as seemingly substantial as a town could fade just like that. If we can’t keep a town alive, how vulnerable was something fragile like me? I reapplied SPF 70 sunscreen.
    I could go the lower Arizona route, entering at Portal and passing through Paradise to Greaterville and Tombstone, before reaching Unknown. Beyond the irresistible Unknown wasthe equally alluring Why, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation.
    “Tohono O’odham, Tohono O’odham, Tohono O’odham,” I said three times fast, just to see.
    My other option was the northerly route, through Superior, Carefree, Surprise, and Nothing. There was also the appeal of a little town named Brenda near the California border. I wondered if the whole town dressed in dowdy clothes and was secretly resentful of a prettier older sister town somewhere named Betty.
    It was a difficult choice. I called my sister.
    “It’s early, cruel wench,” Vi mumbled into the phone.
    I looked at my watch. Oops. “Sorry. I’ve driven across three time zones in two weeks, including states and Native-American reservations that don’t observe daylight savings. The actual time can ricochet wildly within sixty miles, so my understanding of it has devolved to ‘diner open’ or ‘diner closed.’ I’m in a diner.”
    “Diners allow birds?” Oliver was talking up a storm, wooing me for some pancake.
    “This one does.” Diner was a strong word for the folding chair I occupied in the back of the local Texaco store, but the Pancake Breakfast #2 Thelma had whipped up for me between register sales was good. It was a $3.99 splurge, but a stomach riot was incipient at the prospect of another hard-boiled egg and I’d had a lucrative cell phone stop yesterday in Rodeo.
    “So what’s up?”
    I explained my dilemma.
    “Brenda is tempting,” she agreed. “You could see if the residents wear funny outdated hats. But Superior, Carefree, Surprise, and Nothing denote a negative emotional trend from vain purposelessness to unanticipated emptiness. It sounds like bad