Re: Bus stop: Misha & Lou
Lou had been hot-headed as long as she'd lived, before jail. Stone and bars had an effect of cooling blood that ran a couple degrees warmer than the rest of the population, and sure, she worried about the prison with bars that couldn't be bent, guards that couldn't be bribed even if her steps were steady as a rock on that road down toward the bus-stop. Lou didn't look back. Didn't look back at a whole lot of choices. She listened to the kid instead. Understood just how politely he told her she was wrong, and her smile cracked her face.
"Sounds like your hope, it's a little more substantial. You hope hard enough, like people well enough to think maybe the best will win out. I hope plenty. But the same way I guess I'd go about wishing. I have a cousin, I hope he's keeping out of trouble. Knows trouble can get him good, knows he's got a fondness for it, as far as I can see. And I hope he's staying out of it, isn't tripping anywhere he's going to wind up with more than a skinned knee. But as hard as I hope it, I don't think it'll come true. Fact is, I think he's probably in a mess of it." Lou took a seat beside him and she leaned her weight way back where the metal brace took the back and the base of the bench, until it creaked.
The kid unsnapped the case, and Lou turned her face into the sound, the carved, heavy line of her profile relaxed. "I've got nothing invested in a book being more than a book," she remarked. "My grandmother, she believed full out. This is her town. She went to the church, the one that ain't Catholic," and Lou hadn't set foot in it since the first weekend she'd been out there, "And she didn't believe in books as the be-all and end-all of faith, no matter how much she liked the one she got."
She smiled at the kid. "I said the wolf was violent to survive, but it's a wild animal. Not me. I was violent. Maybe I am a little, still. But I'm making choices a little slower these days. There are other answers to the problems I got. That's real pretty, kid. Your favorite, or it just appropriate to the moment?"