Excerpt: On the Right Side of a Dream

Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book On the Right Side of a Dream: A
Novel
by Sheila Williams
Published by One World/Ballantine; April 2005; $12.95US/$17.95CAN;
0-345-46475-3
Copyright © 2005 Sheila Williams

Chapter One

A wise woman said that there are years that ask questions and there are
years that answer. For a long time, I was a sorry soul caught between the
two -- never going forward and afraid to look back. Wedged in between a rock
and a boulder and going nowhere. That's a waste of a life and you don't get
it back. But, I'm a slow learner so none of this wisdom penetrated my hard
head until I was past forty. By then, the years of questions had added up.
And I didn't have any answers. All I had was a beat-up suitcase, a
tired-looking shoulder bag, and a few pennies. And the courage it took to
listen to my own heart when it told me to take the first step, even though I
was scared to death.

I ran away from home. Did not stroll, skip, or saunter. I ran as fast as I
could. In my journal, I wrote that I was running away from my old life. But
I was really running away from no life.

Now, my family was not having any of this running away stuff. You see,
they'd been so used to me being a part of their dramas that it never
occurred to them that I might want a drama of my own. And not the bad kind,
either.

"What's wrong with you, Juanita?" my sister asked me. "Have you lost your
mind?"

My son, Randy, asked me, "Are you ever coming back?"

My kids acted as if I was leaving them to starve to death even though they
were grown and living life their way on my dollar and my emotions. I had to
fight them to get out the front door. The second-shift supervisor at the
hospital where I worked could hardly keep her no-lips from curling up into a
Snidely Whiplash smirk.

"Don't think you can get this position back when you run out of money,"
she'd told me. "In this economy, I can fill your job with the snap of a
finger." When she said that, it was my turn to smirk. Exactly when did a
nurse's aide job become a "position"?

The man in the bus station looked at me funny when I told him I was going to
Montana to see what was there. He probably thought that I was an early
release from a mental hospital. But the little man at the pawn shop hit the
nail on the head.

"New life?" he'd asked, handing me the receipt for the suitcases I had just
bought. "Where's that?"

I left to find out.

Some months later, I left Paper Moon, Montana. It was a rainy fall morning
and I sat in the cab of Peaches Bradshaw's truck, crying my eyes out because
I was leaving a man who loved me and folks who thought I walked on water and
didn't cook too bad, either. But I wasn't running away this time. Oh, I
still carried a suitcase, a tote bag, and a purse without much money in it.
But for this trip, I had something else along that I hadn't had before. I
had a life. And I wore it proudly like a woman wears a big pink hat to
church on Easter Sunday.

"I'll keep your side of the bed warm," Jess had told me when we'd said our
good-byes in the early morning. Those were the only words I needed to hear.
What can you say to a man who'll do that for you? All I could do was bury
myself in his arms. If you are loved it's enough by itself.

Millie Tilson, Paper Moon's resident eccentric, glamour girl, and innkeeper,
had given me the benefit of her advice and many years of life. However many
that was.

"Ohhh, I wish that I could go with you, but the Doc and I are headed to
Vegas in a few weeks and we're taking tango lessons. Did I tell you that?"

"The Doc" was Millie's "boy toy," Dr. Angus Hessenauer, a seventy-something
retired internist who'd grown up in Lake County, made good in Boulder, and
was now back to renovate and live on the old family homestead. Their
relationship (Millie said it was an "affair," not a relationship.
"Relationships are what people have with their bankers nowadays.") was the
talk of the town. No one knew exactly how old Millie was but everyone was in
agreement that she was at least ten years older than Doc Hessenauer. Maybe
more.

"Yes, you told me that," I said, watching as she unpacked a UPS box. It was
her latest order from Victoria's Secret, a lacy little number in red and a
few other very small pieces that could loosely be called "clothing." That's
all I'm going to say about that.

"Oh, well," Millie sighed as she checked over the invoice with the focus of
a C.P.A. "Be sure to go places that you've never been before. That's when
you have the best adventures."

I laughed. That would be easy.

"Millie, I haven't been anywhere before."

Her dark-blue eyes twinkled with mischief and wisdom.

"Then you're going to have a marvelous time, aren't you?"

I was. Everything would be new to me, every sight, every smell. But would it
be "marvelous" as she said? Or, would "marvelous" have to share a space with
"boring" or "sad" or "awful"?

"Sometimes, it all comes together, Juanita," Millie reminded me. "It's what
you do with it. That's what matters."

She was right.

A long time ago, it seems a hundred years ago now, on the bus trip from
Ohio, I'd made a list of the places that I wanted to go in my life. A wish
list. Looked them up on a map, circled them with a highlighter: Los Angeles,
the Yucatán, Jupiter, Tahiti, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Ursa Major, Beijing, and
Auckland. I had bright orange lines crisscrossing the atlas. When I showed
the list to Peaches, she laughed.

"Juanita, I don't think the Purple Passion will make it across the Pacific.
Flotation is not a strong suit of the Kenworth," she'd told me, referring to
her bright purple truck cab. "Beijing! Tahiti! I can see you now in a hula
skirt!"

I could see me, too. It was a comical sight.

"Can't help you with Jupiter. You'll need an engine bigger than mine for
that."

"Oh, that's OK," I said. Jupiter was just a silly thought that popped into
my head. If you're going to make a wish list, make it good. You never know.

"Would you settle for Los Angeles? Or the Grand Canyon? And I think I might
be able to manage Denver, although I don't usually pull the eastern jaunts.
Stacy does those."

Stacy was Peaches's partner both professionally and personally: a tall,
skinny thing with the vocabulary of a truck driver (which she was) and the
heart of a poet. She got weepy over Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Peaches grinned. "'Course, in a few months, I'll be heading to San Diego.
How about going south into Mexico? Stacy could fly down and meet us if she
doesn't have a run. I have a taste for some real tequila and a few days on
the beach," Peaches commented with a sigh. I knew that thoughts of limes and
frosted Margarita glasses danced around inside her head.

"It's a deal," I'd agreed.

The plan was to head west through Idaho and Oregon, then south into
California on I-5. Peaches had a delivery in Redding, then planned to take a
detour so that I could see the ocean.

But it rained a lot that fall. And plans are meant to be changed.

"Any other time, I'd say we were lucky to have rain," Peaches yelled over
the roar of the huge engine, Bonnie Raitt's deep, bluesy voice, and the
swooshing sound of the windshield wipers that reminded me of the eyelashes
of a giant giraffe. "It could be snow. Shoot, this is October, it should be
snow!" she commented, squinting as she tried to see through the sheets of
water that poured over the window. "This rain is not a good thing."

Excerpted from On the Right Side of a Dream: A Novel by Sheila Williams.
Copyright © 2005 by Sheila Williams. Reader's Guide Copyright © by Random
House, Inc. Excerpted by permission of One World/Ballantine, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author
Sheila Williams was born in Columbus, Ohio. She attended Ohio Wesleyan
University and is a graduate of the University of Louisville in Louisville,
Kentucky. She and her husband have two grown children and make their home in
northern Kentucky.


For more information, please visit the author's Web site at
www.sheilajwilliams.com