Mr. Big Shot (Mr. Big 1)

e watched me for a few moments. I felt her eyes on my face and tried not to say anything more. I didn’t want to get into the whole business of my cheating fiancée, because it was a real downer and I wanted to put it all as far behind me as I could.

"Unlucky in love," she said and watched the passing scenery. "Join the group."

"You too?"

"I don’t talk too much about it. I think it's better that way." Then, she glanced back at me, smiling softly. "The two of us are like the walking wounded."

"Not me," I said and took in a deep breath. "I'm completely over it. Never think of it unless someone brings it up. When they do, I try to put it out of my mind as soon as I can."

"That bad?"

"Worse."

We drove in silence for a moment, and I knew she was curious and fighting her desire to ask me more. Hell, I was curious about her sad story, too, and would have really liked her to tell me more.

Instead, I asked her about her family, and she told me more about them and her life traveling around the country with each posting her father got.

"It sounds like a great life," I said, thinking about how much I missed my own real parents, and how Dana and I used to imagine what it would have been like to have both of them still alive instead of two adoptive parents.

"It was a great life. I saw a lot of the country, met people from all over the world. My father taught me about responsibility and duty, and how important a strong family can be. He was a very lucky man to have been able to fly jet planes all his life. He stuck in the military rather than get out and go commercial like a lot of his fellow pilots did. He became a career military officer. He loved the life."

"I'd like to meet him. I bet he has some good stories to tell."

"Oh, yeah," she said and smiled. "Lots of them."

"Tell me one," I asked, wanting to pry more info out of her. "Tell me your favorite story of his."

She smiled and twirled a strand of hair, thoughtfully. "He and a couple of other pilots were on a cross country trip to Nashville, returning a visiting pilot to his home base. They went out that night and visited Hank Williams Jr.'s grave. It was past midnight and they were technically trespassing and very drunk, but they wanted to visit it while they were there. The police found them and were going to arrest them for trespassing and drunk and disorderly conduct. They asked for my father's ID and he saved the day. He was an honorable Colonel in the Confederate Army and had this joke ID card they gave out to people. The cop saw it and shrugged, followed them back to the hotel instead of arresting them."

I laughed, imagining the whole thing in my mind's eye.

"He was an honorary colonel in the Confederate Army?"

"It was a joke, of course. Something he got when he was in Louisiana or someplace on a cross country. He wasn’t really a supporter of the Confederacy or anything but it did save their asses."

I smiled and wondered what kind of man her father was and whether we'd get along. We came from very different backgrounds, but I thought I'd probably like the man regardless.

"What would your father think of me?"

She glanced at me quickly, and then looked away, chewing on a nail. She narrowed her eyes at me. "I don't know…" She smiled. "He'd probably tell you that he has a shotgun in the closet and knows how to use it."

I laughed at that. "He would?"

"Oh, yeah." She laughed. "You don't know how many times he pulled that one on my new boyfriends. Sometimes, he'd be cleaning his rifle when they came by, really slowly and methodically so they could watch him check the sight. It was so blatant. He was always so serious about it, but then he'd laugh his head off if he saw any fear in the guy's eyes and confess he was just kidding. One of my boyfriends actually bonded with him over his rifle, asking if he could help, that he was an expert marksman and wanted to join the Marines and become a Scout Sniper. My dad wanted me to marry him."

I could imagine it, smiling at the image in my mind's eye.

"But you didn't want to marry him?"

She glanced away. "I was almost going to. Things didn't work out."

"What happened?"

She looked back at me as if she was considering how much to tell me.

"You don't want to know, believe me," she said finally, her voice soft. She looked back out the side window, resting her hand on her chin. "He's the reason I'm here instead of Oregon or California. I also got accepted at Stanford and UCLA but I wanted to escape. Let's leave it at that, okay?"

Oh, so she left Oregon to escape a bad relationship? It was interesting to me, of course, but I knew enough not to pry. We both had bad experiences, but hers hadn't soured her completely against romance, while mine had. I put it out of my mind and turned my attention back to the road.