Miss Julia to the Rescue by Ann B. Ross

I’m thinking Monday at the earliest.”
    “Just stay in touch,” he said in his serious manner. “You have your cell phone?”
    “Oh, my goodness, no. I forgot it.”
    “I’ll get it. You ought to keep it in the car or in your pocketbook. And the charger. I’ll put that in your suitcase, so don’t forget to plug it in every night.”
    “Thank you, Lloyd. Is there anything else I’m forgetting?”
    “No’m, I just wish I was going with you. If I could drive, I’d even go by myself. Then you wouldn’t have to.”
    I drew him to me and held him close. It was not something I frequently did, both of us preferring to express our affection in other ways, but the boy needed reassurance. He loved Mr. Pickens dearly, and I knew he would fret until we rolled back in with the daddy he’d only recently gained with his mother’s marriage.
    “I better go, honey,” I said as he straightened up. “Etta Mae will be waiting for me. You take care of everybody and try not to worry too much. I’ll let you know what we find out and when we’ll be home.”
    “Yes, ma’am, we’ll be all right. And don’t you worry, either, because I’m gonna be praying for y’all to have travel mercies the whole time you’re gone.”
    I quickly turned and lifted the suitcase from the bed, not wanting him to see the tears that had sprung up in my eyes. From the way both of us were carrying on, you’d think I was flying off to the Holy Land instead of making a road trip to Mill Run, West Virginia.

Chapter 12

    Etta Mae, grinning and waving, bounded out the door of her single-wide as soon as I pulled up beside the awning. She was dressed for travel or for anything else that came up. I could tell because she was wearing what she always wore when she wasn’t working: tight jeans, plaid cotton shirt and pointy-toed cowboy boots, which she called her Dingos.
    It wasn’t until we’d loaded her suitcase in the trunk, buckled ourselves in, tapped in instructions on the GPS and pulled out of the Hillandale Trailer Park, where she lived, that it hit me.
What in the world were we doing?
Heading off north-northeast, according to Lloyd’s map, into unknown country to meet with strangers, hoping to wrest Mr. Pickens from their clutches—it was enough to give a person pause.
    But not me. I gritted my teeth and kept driving. We were packed and on the way, wholly committed to our rescue mission. But first I pulled into the drive-through at a McDonald’s on the edge of Delmont so we could get coffee to go with James’s bacon biscuits.
    “Etta Mae,” I said, as I merged onto Interstate 26 West, “when you finish eating, reach into that tote bag in the back and get the map and the directions Lloyd got for us. You’ll have to help navigate because I’d feel better having a backup to this electronic voice. I’m not sure I trust some satellite roving around up there.”
    “Me, either,” she said, leaning between the front seats to retrievethe papers. “We need some idea of where we’re going. Even,” she said with a giggle, as she brushed biscuit crumbs off her jeans, “some idea of where we are at any given time.”
    After several minutes of studying the map, Etta Mae folded it up, then read the printed directions with an intensity that meant she was memorizing them.
    As we approached Asheville, barely thirty miles from Abbotsville, I took an off-ramp. “We better fill up,” I said. “I get nervous when the tank’s close to half empty.”
    Etta Mae proved her worth again, self-serving the gas as efficiently as she did everything else. I took advantage of the ladies’ room, then she decided she should do the same.
    Once we’d cleared Asheville and were on the beautiful stretch of interstate north of the city, Etta Mae said, “Now tell me again where we’re going and what we’ll do when we get there.”
    So I did, recounting to her each step that had brought us to the current point. “So you see,” I summed up, “somebody has to do