Mother Road Ch. 08 – Lost Highway by NewOldGuy77,NewOldGuy77

A huge look of relief swept across Sal’s face, and he walked over to kiss both of Laura’s cheeks. “Thank you,” he whispered, “I can’t tell you how much…”

Laura cut him off. “I want to do this, Mr. Bartolo. Before I met Tom I was a single mother with several small children. I know what your Jenny went through. We’ll keep those boys safe for both of you.”

Things had been decided; Laura’s word was final. We finished up our cappuccinos, said our farewells, and headed home.

April – Decorah, Iowa: The Last Terhune

Once upon a time when I was a newly-divorced architect, I loaded up the 2003 Gulf Stream Touring Cruiser Gulf Stream motorhome inherited from my parents and set forth on what used to be called the ‘Main Street of America’: Route 66. At 24 feet long, the Gulf Stream had seating for 9 people, but when I began my westward journey on what author John Steinbeck called the Mother Road, I was doing it solo.

I was a little sad and a little lonely, but on the bright side I was on the adventure of a lifetime, driving from Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier. Fate had other plans, however. I’d only made it as far as Wellston, Oklahoma when I stopped to pull a skinny kid and his bike out of a flooded ditch in the middle of a hellacious rainstorm.

I took the lost boy home and surprise, surprise, ended up falling in love with the kid’s mother, aka Laura Terhune-Watkins-Carlson-Palermo. She was the mother of seven at the time, but between her green eyes and that womanly body, by the time I’d married her a few weeks later, baby number eight, Pearl, was on the way.

Despite my initial reluctance, Laura talked me into number nine, Tom Junior. I got a vasectomy after that, but it didn’t completely take, and number ten, Ruthie, came to be. It was a high-risk pregnancy; the baby was 4 weeks premature and the delivery almost killed Laura. She survived but it ended her child-bearing days.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas City, there was this guy, Walter Connor. After 30 years as an enforcer for mob boss ‘Quiet Sal’ Bartolo, out of respect for three decades of loyalty, Walter’s boss retired him. The big man ended up as my business partner in my consulting firm.

Walter also became my brother-in-law when he saved my wife’s sister Dotty and her son from an attack by her meth-head ex-husband. To show her thanks, Dotty fell in love with Walter and promptly fucked his brains out, got knocked up and married his lonely ass. At this point, he was one happy fellow, and Dotty made damned sure to keep him that way.

Laura and Dotty were daughters of a poor couple in the tiny town of Rankin, Texas, Ruth and Silas Terhune. The couple was so poor they barely had two coins to rub together, so they rubbed other things together — repeatedly — and ended up with fourteen children, four boys, Matthew, Paul, Nicholas, and James: and ten girls, Laura, Deborah, Rhonda, Dorothy (aka Dotty), Diane, Dawn, Lilly, Leah, Janet and lastly, Connie.

My wife Laura was the oldest. Walter’s wife Dotty was fifth in line. Judging from some pictures Dotty showed me, the four Terhune boys all looked like their father; short, thin, and balding, with their faces pinched in perennial scowls. The Terhune girls, however, were another damned story.

Some were taller and some shorter, but each and every one of them packed a deadly combination of deep green eyes, red hair, and cute turned up nose. Every last one of the Terhune sisters could turn men’s heads so fast they probably kept the local chiropractor in business for years.

All this background leads me to how we ended up in the backwater known as Decorah, Iowa.

Given how our well our wives had reconnected, Laura and Dotty both decided to reconnect with the remaining dozen children of Silas and Ruth Terhune. Using online resources and several private investigators, eleven of the family had been located scattered across the US; Laura and Dotty had used so much bandwidth on videoconferences with them that our monthly internet bill increased by 30%.

Now only one remained undiscovered: the youngest, Connie Terhune. And that’s how Walter and I ended up in the wee hours of the morning sitting in a greasy spoon restaurant off Highway 52 near the Iowa/Minnesota border.

It was 2am; Walter and I were seated in an otherwise-empty place called The Henhouse Café, an all-night diner in Decorah. Decorah was one of those midwestern towns that was so small it had a two-sided billboard on the main road saying, “Welcome to Decorah!” on one side and “Thanks for Visiting Decorah!” on the other. You get the idea.

My brother-in-law and I had driven together in the motorhome for 10 hours from our homes in the Oklahoma City area to be here. This was no college-boy road trip across America though. Walter being 54 and me being 47, we were here on a quest solely at the behest of Dotty and Laura.