Turtle Doves | Joel Miller

Chapter Twenty One

A few days later, Joel is ready to get back on the road. And I'm ready as well. We all but cleared out the town's ration supply and though the food was bland, I feel the tiny bit of added weight on my hips. My body isn't used to taking it easy and having excess calories, so it clings to the extra. Too bad it'll probably all sweat off as we continue west.

We're at the point in our journey that there's nothing of great interest to be found anywhere. The land is almost completely flat and there's nothing but open fields ahead, save for the few abandoned cars here and there and the occasional hole-in-the-wall-town. And according to the map we've got a long way to travel before we reach the next point of interest. With the blistering summer heat, I'm sure it'll take us at least two weeks to get to Omaha.

To occupy myself as we continue on, I study over the clues we've found so far. By now I've committed them all to memory and I'm eager to see if we can find anything else. If we're following the same path these people took, then we're bound to find something sooner or later, right?

"How did you and the girl pass the time?" I ask, needing to know how they were able to take the long stretch of nothingness. Joel shrugs his shoulders,

"I didn't have to do much of anything. She doesn't know how to shut up." A ghost of a laugh follows his answer.

"What did she talk about?" I inquire, needing something new to stimulate my mind. If I keep pondering the same pieces of information I fear I might actually start sleepwalking. Joel slows his pace to walk next to me and he meets my eyes.

"She collected these joke books whenever she found them. Full of the most awful jokes you've ever heard. But they filled the silence and made her happy." He tells me and I nod, getting a better understanding of who this girl is. I'm curious to know her name, but I feel like that still might be too intimate of a detail for him to tell me. After all, he's very intent on protecting her.

"I'm sure you remember some of them, run 'em by me." My hand comes up to block the sunlight from my eyes so I can get a clear look at his face.

Joel and I had decided to stop travelling at night after the night he got stabbed. While the weather was certainly nicer, we realized that we very well could miss dangerous things like another trap. So we started travelling by daylight again.

"Do you want to hear a joke about pizza? Never mind, it's too cheesy." He grimaces as the words come out of his mouth and I can't help but to smile.

"You're right, that is pretty bad." I agree with his earlier statement and he shakes his head, as if to rid himself of the joke.

"The thing is, she doesn't even know what pizza is. She didn't get it." He chuckles and I join him.

"It's so weird to think that there are kids out there that don't know what pizza is." I say, remembering when pizza was a go-to party food, or Friday dinner.

"Don't I know it. Girl was only three when everything happened." He adds, looking back down to where he's walking so he doesn't trip.

"So she's about thirteen then, right?" I ask, knowing my math is right.

"Yeah." Joel confirms.

"She's right around Lucas' age. That's so weird to think about. What he would be like as a teenager." I think out loud, realizing I never gave much thought into the idea. It's always hard for me to think about things like that, it always seems to reopen the wound that will never truly heal.

"Sometimes I wonder what Sarah would be like. She'd be in her early twenties right now." He shakes his head in disbelief. I sigh, understanding how he feels.