Yesterday she had driven from Mansfield, Ohio to South Bend, Indiana. It had been a pretty spring day after the week of rainy driving she had endured previously. She ran Josh's credit card at a hole in the wall hotel in South Bend then off to Champaign, Illinois. She wrote a note on the match book cover of the hotel in Mansfield that Harry Stevens of Ohio had introduced the first hotdog in the 1900s. On the little diner matchbook cover from South Bend, she wrote "Home of Notre Dame." Today she drove through Illinois to Iowa, stopping in Cedar Rapids to run the credit card then driving further to Omaha, Nebraska to sleep. She neatly stacked her matchbooks back into the cigar box as she traced her finger along her journey for tomorrow heading north to Topeka, Kansas then sleeping in Belleville, Missouri. The names of cities, the stars, and the rectangles on the map were all starting to blur into an endless destiny of loneliness. Melanie was tired of driving and she was so lonely. Certainly the others had come up with a plan by now. Why hadn't they called her?
