Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [86]
Had he loved Christine, or had he simply needed her? Needed someone to steady him, stabilize his life, and force him to adjust to the demands that had ruled his existence since that day with Jimbo Powers’s red balloon.
But there had been love, Milo knew. He had loved the idea of the marriage and all that it brought to his life, and he still did. It was this love that had him trying to resurrect his relationship with Christine, or perhaps, more accurately, to establish a relationship based on more than just need and dependence. Milo had needed Christine in order to feel normal and safe, but now he found himself in a hotel room, alone, with placebo blazing away in his mind like the crimson Vacancy sign outside the hotel. At any moment, the need to crush a Weeble or pop a straw into a juice box or peel a price tag could strike, and yet he was relatively relaxed.
At ease, even.
This would all soon change.
chapter 21
In the film My Cousin Vinny, Vincent Gambini and Mona Lisa Vito arrive in Beechum County, Alabama, to find the town set around a main square, with the courthouse, hotel, diner, and the rest of the town’s businesses all essentially positioned within view of one another, a slightly updated or seriously downgraded version of the town square in the Back to the Future films (depending on the film and Marty’s position on the space-time continuum). Though there are undoubtedly other parts of Beechum County that remain unseen in the film, a visitor to this fictitious town could conceivably park his car in the town square and walk for the duration of his stay. This is how Milo had envisioned Chisholm, North Carolina, population 4,833: a small southern town with a centralized square. But as it had with his road trip playlists, the real-life version of Milo’s cinematic imagination had proven to be quite different.
Though Chisholm had a Main Street populated with many of the town’s businesses, this street stretched for more than five miles from end to end, making a walk from the Kroger’s grocery store on the south end of town to the post office on the north end a lengthy trip. The entire town was larger and more spread out than Milo could have ever imagined, with more than a dozen restaurants, fast food joints, and diners along Main Street and its immediate vicinity. Milo’s vision of walking into the town’s only diner, chatting it up with the busty, redheaded waitress who knew everyone in the place by his or her first name, and determining the location of Tess Bryson with a couple of cleverly framed questions had all but disappeared.
Adding to the difficulty of the situation was time. Though he had hoped to arrive in Chisholm by noon, several barriers had been placed in his way. The first had been Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Rising with the sun, Milo had moved quickly, hoping to get an early start. He showered, dressed, and packed his clothing and toiletries, all while listening to Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer juggle the incongruence of an interview with the secretary of defense alongside a story about a cat that had supposedly befriended a mouse in a West Virginia medical laboratory.
After a complimentary continental breakfast in the hotel lobby, he was on his way out the door, just after seven A.M., when he passed by a video rental kiosk near the hotel’s entrance. Displayed at eye level were six films, one of which was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie that held the same allure for Milo as episode 3 of the Star Wars prequels. It was the story of two bank robbers and their rise and fall from grace after seeming to tempt fate one too many times. Milo had seen the movie dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times, at first simply because he loved the film, despite its utterly bizarre musical sequence featuring B. J. Thomas singing “Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head.” But later on, Milo had found himself needing to watch the film, one of those insatiable demands linked to a hope, an expectation, that the end of the film, in which Butch and Sundance are gunned down by Bolivian