Pink Neon Dreams

Evernight
Publishing

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2014 Lee Ann
Sontheimer
Murphy

 
ISBN: 978-1-77130-825-0

Cover Artist: Sour Cherry
Designs

Editor: Melissa
Hosack

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized
reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.
 
No part of this book may be used or
reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction.
All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

DEDICATION

This one is for all my
sisters of the heart, gal pals and cousins all.
 
Together, we live and love and dream!

PINK
NEON DREAMS

Lee Ann
Sontheimer
Murphy

Copyright © 2014

Chapter
One

Her
sleek 1971 GTO coupe, red as lifeblood, hugged the tight curves and skimmed
over the rugged Ozark Mountains, graceful as a soaring hawk.
 
Cecily drove like a demon possessed, but she
held the road and savored the thrill.
 
Everything
important she wanted or needed fit into the two big suitcases and one smaller
bag crammed into the trunk.
 
Her new life
would begin when she hit Branson, the tourist destination tucked into the
southern edge of Missouri, a place she’d heard plenty about but never
visited.
 
The curving roads widened as
the billboards increased along the narrow shoulders, but the drop-offs remained
sheer and deadly.
 
Breathtaking vistas
stretched out in every direction, but Cecily couldn’t catch more than a glimpse
while driving.
 
A heavy rain fell and
made visibility poor, but as the road veered downward with gradual slope, she
drove out from the downpour.

Sunshine
streamed through a break in the clouds and illuminated the town spread out
below.
 
Before coming, her cousin Nia
told her Branson was like a redneck version of Las Vegas, but Cecily didn’t see
any resemblance.
 
The highway ahead
snaked through town like a sidewinder, lined with restaurants, cheap motels,
and crappy little souvenir shops.
 
A few
hotels stood taller than the rest, and she could see the marquees of several
theaters but so far the natural scenery impressed her more than the tourist
clutter.

Cecily
slowed as she caught up with the traffic clogging the busy thoroughfare and
gawked.
 
Damn this place is worse than I thought it’d be.
 
She’d expected rustic, not the cheap
tawdriness she noted everywhere.
 
The
place reminded her of a cheesy carnival on a vacant lot, the kind that showed
up each spring to set up on any of the numerous vacant lots in the Washington
Park neighborhood where she grew up in Chicago. Misspelled signs with hillbilly
motifs loomed in all directions, advertising everything from pecan logs to
‘gen-wine Ozarks sorghum and molasses’ to sunbonnets.
Girl, if you wanted to get away, you sure as hell picked a strange
place.
 
No one’s going to know you here,
but you’ll stand out like a black sheep in a field of white lambs.

Damn
Nia and her notions.
 
She could’ve gone
to St. Louis, Memphis, Kansas City, or even Dallas instead of this small town
out in the middle of nowhere land.
 
But
her cuz thought Cecily would be better where a lot of tourists came and went
year round, where maybe eclectic wouldn’t stand out in stark silhouette.
 
If
she’s been to Branson, I’d like to know when ‘
cause
I
haven’t seen too many dark faces ‘round here.
 
Cecily sighed as traffic slowed to a crawl,
backed up from one traffic light to another.
 
Like it or not, she’d arrived.
 
First thing, she needed to find a halfway decent place to stay and get
something to eat.
 
Her long drive down
from Illinois exhausted her.
 
Maybe after
she ate and got some rest, she’d see things in a different light, but right
now, Branson seemed like a mistake of near Biblical proportions, almost as huge
as marrying Willard Bradford the Fourth.
 
But she’d been seventeen and he’d used unfair tactics to force her into
marriage.

With
dozens of eateries to choose from, Cecily pulled into the first likely one she
saw, a café called Country Home Cookin’.
 
She entered and the hostess sent her to a table along one wall.
  
A small steam table wafted delicious smells
through the place, and when the waitress arrived, the freckle faced young woman
explained customers could order the all you can eat buffet or order from the
menu.
 
“Whichever you want,” the waitress
said with a grin. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’d
like a diet Coke,” Cecily said.

Curious
what the miniature buffet might offer, Cecily got up and sauntered over to
see.
 
Fried chicken, some kind of fried
fish, a pan of corn, another of mashed potatoes, two vats of gravy, one brown,
one cream, a heaping bunch of biscuits, and some little green vegetable, also
fried.
 
She didn’t see any salads, but
there were a few pickles near the beginning of the buffet.
 

A
young man delivered more gravy so she asked, “What’s this?”

He
shot her an incredulous look. “That’s okra, ma’am,” he said.
“Fried
okra.”

“Oh,
thanks.”
 
It appeared to be something green
rolled in batter, not something she found appealing.

Although
the chicken looked both crisp and delicious, Cecily returned to her table to
study the basic menu.
 
It featured a lot
of fried items, too, including chicken fried steak, pork tenderloins, and onion
rings.
 
There were also sandwiches from
hamburgers to old-fashioned open face roast beef.
I need comfort food.
 

She
ordered the roast beef sandwich, served with a side of mashed potatoes and
doused in gravy.
 
As she waited for her
food, she sipped her diet soda and checked out the restaurant.
 
Everything appeared bright and clean but
they’d overdone the country theme.
 
Too
much calico hung at the windows as curtains, draped the tables to serve as
table cloths, and edged some of the old-fashioned items on multiple
shelves.
 
Someone had gone wild with a
rooster motif because the birds appeared everywhere, in framed pictures, in
dishes and even as a stuffed version up near the cash register.
 
Vintage advertising signs hung in every
available wall space along with old time photographs.
 

Cecily
also noticed the median age of the other diners ranked above fifty and over
half of the folks clustered at tables in twos and fours had to be past
seventy.
 
She wondered if the OATS bus
dropped over a load of senior citizens or if the place offered discounts for
older people. Either way, she felt out of place, both because of her age and
color.
 
At twenty-seven, Cecily had to be
the youngest diner in the place. No one else wore their hair in cornrowed
braids and the rest were whiter than the paper napkins on each table.
 
Although her skin radiated more of an olive
glow, her African-American ancestry was evident in her hair and in her dark
brown eyes.
 
She might be light, but she
still considered herself black and so did the rest of the world.

Someone
else might’ve felt ill at ease but since she’d spent the last ten years with a
Caucasian husband and in an upper crust rich world, Cecily relaxed.
 
She’d been the outsider in far more evident
ways and although she caught a few curious looks, no one bothered her.
 
After her meal, tasty but filling in a
heavier way than she normally enjoyed, Cecily left a healthy tip for the
waitress and paid her ticket.
 
With one
need taken care of, she needed to find a place to stay.

Since
she preferred to avoid the 1960’s era cheap motels, cinderblock one story rows
with parking out front, Cecily kept an eye out for somewhere she’d consider
spending a few nights.
 
She rejected the
obvious ‘cute’ places, the ones built in a faux Victorian style and anywhere
someone substituted “K” for a “C” on their sign.
 
As far as she was concerned, kozy, komfort,
and kool weren’t amusing enough to inspire a smile.
 
If the motels appeared rundown or the pools
murky, she rejected them on general principal.
 
I might’ve been raised poor, but
I’ve had the best money can buy for the last ten years. This girl’s not going
back to the past. It won’t be Willard’s way but mine.

Her
eyes searched for possibilities between the helicopter tours, the Ozark crafts
outlets, the convenience stores, the cafes, and chain restaurants and riveted
on a multi-story hotel located less than a block from the Highway 76 Country
Boulevard loop.
 
Cecily maneuvered over
to turn onto the smaller thoroughfare and pulled up in front of the
Radisson.
 
Now that’s my kind of place.