You Only Get Letters from Jail Read Online Free

a truck coming through. I wanted to run down the white center line as fast as I could, run between the trees and suck down the air until my lungs burned and I had to run with my mouth open just to keep my breath.
    When I put the key in the door, Oscar jumped up off the backseat and started barking and lunging at the glass, and Candy screamed and jerked her hand out of my grip, but then Oscar saw that it was me.
    â€œMy God that scared the shit out of me,” she laughed. “Is that your dog?”
    â€œHe was my mom’s dog,” I said. The past tense had caught up with me. It had only taken a day and a night and already it came second nature.
    â€œHe’s cute,” Candy said. She knocked on the glass and Oscar let out a sharp whine and tried to lick her hand through the closed window.
    I opened the door and Oscar jumped over the seat and tried to jump on me. Candy kept holding her hand out toward him and saying things in a singsong voice that I couldn’t understand. “He probably has to pee,” I said. I hooked my fingers into his collar and pulled him down from the seat, and when he was out of the car, Candy started rubbing his head and scratching behind his ears and he rolled over in the dirt.
    â€œHe is so sweet. I love him. What’s his name?”
    â€œOscar,” I said. I gave a sharp whistle and Oscar jumped to his feet and tried to sit without touching the gravel. “Go on. Go pee,” I said. I pushed at him with my knee and pointed him toward the brush that edged the parking lot in front of the car. From the glow of the lights around the lot, I could see that there was a low scrub of bushes and tree trunks, and then the land sloped up and away from the parking lot and became a hillside and then a mountainside as the ground cover fell away in favor of rocks. Oscar put his nose to the ground and disappeared in the trees.
    â€œGo ahead,” I said. I pulled the driver’s door wide and swept my arm toward the seat.
    She sat down behind the steering wheel and tried to slide to the other side, but there wasn’t an inch of slide to be had and she was firmly wedged between the wheel and the seat and to get her to the passenger side from there wasgoing to take a lot of pushing. “We’d be more comfortable in the back,” I said quickly, and I reached behind her and pulled the lock on the back door and she stood up and smoothed her shirt front, and then she was able to get herself onto the backseat and with some hard breaths and a few kicks against the floorboard was able to move to the other side and make room for me.
    I shut the door, and we were in the quiet, and the car smelled like dog and dog food. The combination reminded me that my stomach was full of nothing but cheap beer and distant handfuls of Doritos, and my stomach did a slow turn that made me swallow hard. I reached for the window crank and then remembered that it was broken off. “Can you roll your window down a little,” I said. She turned the crank a couple of times and the air came in and cooled the car and cleaned out the smell in one breath. Outside the car I could hear Oscar’s tags rattling and the occasional sound of snapping brush as he walked around in the bushes.
    Candy put her hand on the seat between us and in the bright light from the parking lot I could see how white her skin was. I reached out and touched it with my fingertips. It was warm, and I could feel the uneven ridges of veins, but they were soft and rolled away from the pressure of my fingers and I knew that I would have to press hard to find her pulse.
    Candy turned toward me, but there was a lot of her that had to come between us and it was going to be hard for me to reach her with my mouth if kissing was the next thing to do. I would have to get up on one knee on the seat and climbup a little, but she seemed okay with that and helped me get into position, and I closed my eyes and fumbled through the best