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Box.

Hoping you're having more fun than me, and not seeing how you couldn't be.

Darlene.

June 26 Winny girl,

Well, I've had a couple days to check out this town. Actually it took only an hour or so; the rest of the time I spent shaking my head in wonder. It seems that the town is literally neither here nor there. Half the town, it turns out, is in Illinois and other half is in Iowa. I'm not sure how that came about, but I fail to see the difference anyway. The town is completely surrounded by cornfields, which spread out in all directions so that it appears they never end. I took a long walk out of town yesterday. The sun set before I returned, and for awhile I had to walk in the pitch dark, in which all you could hear were crickets and the warm breeze whispering through the young corn stalks. All I had to tell me I was heading in the right direction were the distant dim lights that ran along Main St. It was really quite creepy, and I promised myself I wouldn't do it again.

I discovered that the only true action that occurs in the town is when the truckers come into The Truck Stop each evening. They come in one by one, like people coming into a church Sunday morning. They pull their semis in to fill them with diesel, and afterward they park them in an uneven line in the open field out back. Then the drivers stroll over to The Tavern, and don't return to sleep in the backs of their cabs until they are rip-roaring drunk and can just barely walk down the street without falling on their faces.

During the day, my parents never leave their room. All they have been doing is fighting. Of course, whenever I see them, they pretend that they haven't been fighting; they carry on in their usual way, with him silent and distant and her always detracted by small, irrelevant, things, like the stack of business cards on the front desk of the motel or whether or not it looks as though it will rain. But I know the truth; I can hear them through the wall, which is none too thick. They are actually fighting, and though I cannot quite make out the words, it is almost certainly about money. It will always fall back on the old argument, with my father insisting that he can't afford to send me to private school, not without falling short on cash for other things, like keeping the car properly maintained, and with my mother saying she would be damned if I was going to go to public school- it might be good enough for Mike, but not for me. So, naturally, when anything comes up, like

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