Road to Nowhere Read Online Free Page A

“Is there any way to persuade her?”
    “I’ve already thought about it, Charlie. I don’t think so. It would probably backfire.”
    “Well, do whatever you need to, a deal or cash or anything. Five thousand would be nothing.”
    “I’ll see what I can do. Hey, bribe me. I’d take five thousand.”
    “I already own you, Wade.”
    You don’t— Wade bit off his answer, just barely. “Look, Charlie, tell you what. After the vote, I’m coming back to Raleigh.”
    “You’re moving back?”
    “Cornelia’s a sport, but we’ve both had enough. Four years.”
    “We’ll talk about it later.”
    “Yeah. Once the road’s built you won’t need me to sell houses up here. Everybody in the office there will want to. You can take your pick.”
    “Then get the road built.”
    “I will.”
    Somehow.
    The milk was hot, so Louise put it in two mugs with some cocoa and marshmallows. She gave Byron his and settled herself back into her big soft chair, and there they were, two big marshmallows themselves.
    It was just a little room and filled with cute things, and she loved it. New houses didn’t have shiny varnished paneling like this, or the red linoleum in the kitchen that looked like a brick floor. It was all so cozy.
    The basketball game was ending on the television.
    “And you’ll never guess what we voted on tonight,” she said. “They might go ahead and put through Gold River Highway over the mountain.”
    “Believe it when I see it.”
    “Well, sure. It probably won’t happen. But you should have seen Randy and Wade, like cats and dogs.”
    “I see plenty of that every day at the furniture factory,” Byron said. “And I can read it in the newspaper if I want to, and I won’t want to.”
    “I’ll want to see what Luke puts in his newspaper,” Louise said. “He sure got excited about the road.”
    The news had come on. She stared and listened for a minute. “Oh, turn it off. I don’t want to hear that.”
    It seemed like every night it was the same pictures and the same story. “He’ll be all right,” Byron said.
    “I still worry. And Angie does, too.”
    “Matt can take care of himself.”
    “I don’t like him being there . . . wherever that is.”
    “Baghdad. In a big army base.”
    “Angie says we should get a computer so he could send us e-mails. He sends her one every day.”
    “She’s his mother. And who’d show you how to use a computer?” That was about the last thing Byron would spend money on.
    “I could learn,” she said. “The girls at the salon could show me. They send e-mails.”
    “It’s a bunch of nonsense. They had computers at the furniture factory and they never worked right.”
    She was up again, taking the mugs, and she patted his shiny bald head. “I think you’re the one who doesn’t work right, you old stick-in-the-mud.”
    “It’s the computers. When Jeremy left, nobody took care of them.”
    “Well, can’t Mr. Coates find someone else who likes computers?”
    “He wouldn’t want to. It was Jeremy that put them in. Mr. Coates never trusted computers. That’s part of why the two of them fell out, Jeremy always wanting to change things around and Mr. Coates not wanting any of it. When Jeremy left, Mr. Coates took them all out.”
    “Those two. It’s a shame they can’t get along.”
    “No one can fight like a father and his son,” Byron said. “And those computers were one more bone between them.”
    She was tired of fighting. “There are too many bones, and mine are tired. I’m getting ready for bed.”
    January 3, Tuesday
    Randy McCoy was having a somewhat unpleasant morning.
    “Now look, Everett,” he was saying, but it wasn’t much use, as the gentleman was not listening.
    “You voted for it?”
    “It wasn’t exactly that I voted for it . . .”
    “It says right here that you did.” Everett Colony slapped the newspaper with the back of his hand, and Randy knew just how the poor thing felt.
    “It was just a first vote,” Randy