Country Mile

RUDE AWAKENING

— Prologue —

The tale has been told many times before: city girl goes to live with her country bumpkin father and something about the southern hospitality and fresh air is suppose to automatically trigger a happy epiphany and all in their world is suppose to become "right", with rainbows and butterflies shooting out of everyone's ass. Right? Wrong.

Genevieve Lily Henderson was the quintessential city girl, and her father was most assuredly from the country, and she did have an immediate epiphany, however, happiness? She wasn't sure if she'd ever find that again.

The story of Genevieve, begins with her parents. Her mom was also a city girl; born and raised in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts. Her father was "born to work the land", or so her mother used to always say. He was from a long line of ranchers working the vast flats of Oklahoma.

When her mother was fresh out of photography school, she traveled to the Midwest. She would always say she was trying to find herself.

Relying on her lens as if it were her compass, she followed beauty, until she found love.

She happened upon a large ranch with day old foals frolicking about in a beautiful open field. She barely recalled climbing the fence so she could get closer, and she certainly didn't realize there was someone approaching her until their voice startled her.

That voice belonged to a man who would change the course of her mother's life forever. The two fell in love, she fell pregnant, and less than half way through her pregnancy, her mother realized a life on those lands with no way out was not the life she wanted for her daughter. So she packed a bag, left a note, and headed back to Boston.

Two months after Genevieve's 14th birthday, an aneurism ripped her life to shreds. It stole her mother. Her best friend. Her everything. One breath she was here, the next, she was gone.

Genevieve was immediately placed into a temporary form of foster care until her only living relative was notified and arrangements were made for her to pick up her life and move more than half way across the country. She was to leave everything she knew and loved. Her friends, her home, the only memories she had of her mother. She was to leave it all behind for her father's ranch. It was such a sudden blow, her mind just couldn't wrap around the fact that the nightmare she kept waking up to, was in fact, her life.

If he was expecting her to be full of rainbows and butterflies when she stepped into the baggage claim at the OKC airport, he was in for one hell of a rude awakening.