Under the Blue Moon

Contents TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE DEDICATION EPIGRAPH 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGMENTS EXCERPT Ad for Rivers Trilogy WHAT READERS SAY Rivers 3 Rivers 2 Rivers 1 More by Joan Schweighardt Guide Contents Start of Content UNDER THE BLUE MOON A Novel Joan Schweighardt This is a work of fiction. Apart from well-known personages, events, and locales mentioned in the novel, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current situations or to living persons is purely coincidental. ISBN-13 978-1947044357 e-ISBN 978-1947044364 Published in the United States of America. © 2023 Joan Schweighardt. All rights reserved. Except as permitted by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author. Cover image: Wavy abstract mountains from iStock.com. Book and cover design by Five Directions Press Five Directions Press logo designed by Colleen Kelley For Judy and David, always, always in my heart “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” ―Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi 1 Lola absent The first thing Lola noticed upon impact was that she had lime green paint under her fingernails, and in that instant she couldn’t remember why. The second thing was that her car was still in motion even though she was no longer driving it. Her foot was on the brake—hard, in fact—but it wasn’t helping because she was moving not forward but sideways. There had been people sitting all along the curb that she was heading into—deranged looking people, she’d been thinking a split second earlier, with wild hair and wide eyes—but now they were all screaming (she assumed they were screaming; their mouths were open, though she couldn’t actually hear anything over the horrible screeching noise her car was making, over the pounding in her ears), scurrying to their feet, jumping out of the way. Her car hit the curb and bounced once before stopping, jerking Lola forward for a second time. Her head didn’t hit the steering wheel, but bobbed near it, and as her fingers were still clenched there, she noticed the paint under her nails once again. With everything else going on, her awareness of this detail was peripheral at best, but it would come back to haunt her later; it would be there whenever she went over the particulars in her mind. Her first conscious thought was the curb, of course, whether everyone had gotten up off it in time or if there were still some people there, their legs crushed between it and her car. She made herself look in that direction. Her eye fell on the brick building on the other side of the sidewalk. Leaning up against it were black plastic trash bags in a row, a few grocery carts filled with more plastic bags, a cardboard sign on which someone had written I used to be your neighbor, and another one, on which ANYTHING HELPS had been printed in large black capitals in the middle of a circle of sloppy-looking happy faces, and in the midst of it all, a seriously overweight golden retriever with matted yellow hair, curled up, asleep. She assumed no one was trapped between her car and the curb because the people who were gathering around her car—closing in on her like zombies, really—were looking at her. No one was looking down where a pinned body might have been. Her second conscious thought was for the driver of the car that had struck her, the car that had pushed her off course. She glanced to her right to look out her passenger window, most of the glass of which was in fragments on the passenger seat. The car that had hit her was old, dirty, grayish brown, maybe an early model Ford Taurus, if she had to guess. The driver—it was a man, a dazed-looking man, she could see that much even through his filthy windshield and the steam rising up from under his now protracted hood—had to have been going mighty fast, and right through the stop sign, to have broadsided her like this. Someone opened her door, and immediately her nose filled with the smells of burnt rubber, oil, gas, chemicals, while her ears filled with voices, male and female, the people who had been on the curb, all yelling at once over the persistent hissing coming from under her hood. “Are you all right? Are you all right?” everyone was asking. “I’ll run in and call for help,” a man shouted. Someone else said, “Her airbag didn’t deploy. Why didn’t her airbag deploy?” Someone answered, “It don’t always happen like that. She wasn’t going fast enough.” “Yeah, but—” the previous speaker said, “shoulda. Shoulda deployed.” Some of the people had gone to the other car, the Taurus, and a few were screaming at the driver. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” a man shouted. “Didn’t you see the fucking stop sign?” Suddenly there were hands on Lola. They seemed to be everywhere at once. She looked up into the faces that went with them. They were black, white, Hispanic, Native, and Asian, their ages ranging too: a virtual poster for diversity. She saw black holes where teeth belonged, cheeks streaked with dirt and drawn with hunger, smudged eyeglasses held together with strips of red duct tape, sweat-stained baseball caps, hair straggly and greasy. She smelled cigarette smoke and body odor. She began to swat at the hands, some of which seemed to be moving across her chest. She continued swatting even when it sunk in that they were only trying to undo her seatbelt, ease her out of her seat. Now she heard a new sound. It took a few beats for her to realize it was her, moaning. She thought she