Mothers and Other Liars by Amy Bourret

other two walls are lined with glass shelves that hold a collection of pre-Colombian artifacts; the glass and precision lighting create the appearance that the pieces are levitating under an ancient mystical spell.
    A fiftyish man, poet’s beard, jeans and white turtleneck, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, steps from behind the drafting table centered between the windows on the far wall. “John Brainard,” he says. “John.” The hand he extends is calloused, not the hand of someone who sits behind a desk all day. A gardener, Ruby thinks. She tries to still the quaking in her own hand as she holds his.
    “Angela was a little vague about what you need.” He motions her to a low-slung leather chair next to an old chunk of wood—probably a piece of gating or a window shutter—that serves as a coffee table. He takes the seat next to her, picks up a crisp yellow pad and pen off the table. “What can I do for you?”
    Ruby clasps her hands in her lap, sits ramrod-stiff in the slinky chair. “It’s confidential, what I tell you. Right?”
    “Unless it involves a future crime—say you tell me you’re about to murder someone and tell me exactly who—then, yes, I am bound by attorney-client confidentiality.”
    She looks around the room, trying to get a fix on this poet-lawyer-antiquities-collector-gardener, whether to put her trust in him. Her grandmother used to say something about faith, about jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down. Ruby isn’t sure that she can craft wings big enough for this mess, but she doesn’t know what to do except jump.

TWENTY-ONE
    For so long Ruby had been alone with that macaroni necklace of a center line, tugging her through the void, away from Iowa and Nana’s too-fresh grave, away from what she considered her second life, even if she could barely remember the first. Then, just as the blackness was fading to purple, the oasis appeared, a rest stop right there beside that sorry excuse of an interstate. Her parched throat urged her to exit.
    She steered past three slumbering trucks, their amber bulbs glowing like animal eyes in the half-light. Two drivers in gimmee caps stood to the side, jumped back in mock terror as Ruby maneuvered up the narrow lane. At the top of the hill, she stepped out of her shiny new Jeep, stretched to reshape her body from a question mark into an exclamation point, then walked behind the rented trailer to give the padlock a quick tug.
    The vacant pavilion wasn’t much of a rest stop, just a couple of picnic tables and a bathroom ripe with bleachy stench. But it did have vending machines, and after feeding them with lavender-scented coins scavenged from the bureau drawer and administering one swift kick, Ruby held a sweaty can of Coke and a Clark bar. One person’s pin money was another’s breakfast.
    Down at the bottom of the hill, engines coughed and yellow lights lit up the humps of the semis, modern-day camels leaving the oasis to cross an asphalt desert. She stood there for a moment, feeling very alone in that breezeless Oklahoma air. Then she drained the can in a few gulps, the burbling stream trickling down the desert of her throat with a burn comforting in its familiarity.
    If Ruby hadn’t been such a strident litter-loather, she would have missed her entirely. But when she tore off the end of the candy wrapper, a bit of paper clung to her fingers, still moist with condensation from the can, so Ruby stepped right up to the mesh barrel—tilted for drive-by tosses—to flick the scrap into the mound of trash.
    “Holy shit!” Ruby’s voice was a rifle shot through the still of dawn as she jumped back from the barrel. “Ho-ly shit.” She stepped closer, peered into the pile of trash. Maybe it was dead, so unblinking were those saucer eyes. She looked back at the pay phone, where a receiver-less cord hung next to an empty, blue phone book jacket. She looked down at the entrance ramp, hoping to see another car, someone, anyone,