The Fugitive Grandma Lives

Chapter 5 - Fight While You Can

It was November, a few weeks before Thanksgiving. Stella Valentine had her mind on shopping. It was too early to get a turkey but she decided she wanted to beat the rush for some of the other staples, such as canned cranberries and pumpkin pie filling.

Stella was driving a dented Subaru nowadays. She backed it out of the driveway as Johnny sat beside her in the passenger seat. Same thing they'd done a thousand times over back in Santa Ramona only now it was a different town, different car and they all had different names.

She dusted off the prayer card that she always set by the dashboard, one of the few souvenirs from her old life in Santa Ramona, the one before she was transformed into Lucy Chase, a retired administrative assistant from Pittsburgh who journeyed west with her son and grandson per the well-rehearsed fiction.

The prayer card was from Saint Jude's, the church where she worshipped for thirty years when she lived in Santa Ramona and worked as a supermarket clerk. Her friend Millie gave her the card when she was diagnosed with cancer several years back. Jude was the patron saint of lost causes. And she'd felt like one of those many times in her long, tumultuous life.

Dear Apostle and Martyr for Christ, with good reason many invoke you when illness is at a desperate stage. We now recommend to your kindness for someone in a critical condition. May the cure of this patient increase their faith and love for the Lord of Life, for the glory of our merciful God. Amen.

Her beloved grandson gazed out the window. Life in hiding had been hard on the boy. Johnny was a kid who had always had so much goodness in him, the desired to love and be loved and help the people in his life. Now it seemed like the world had conspired to thwart that instinct and keep him trapped who his never allowed to come out of his shell.

"Things'll get better," Stella consoled, turning left at the traffic light onto Highway 111. They drove through the heart of Palm Valley, a city in the California desert basin between Los Angeles and the Arizona border. "You can't always be the hero. You can't always fight. It's like what happened to Rocky."

Johnny and Stella had spent many nights watching the Rocky movies over bowls of fresh popped popcorn. It was one of their all-time favorites alongside the Dirty Harry films.

"You remember Rocky don't ya?" she asked.

"Of course I do," he conceded.

"Remember?" Stella said. "Rocky beat those bad guys in the ring. Then he decided to hang up the gloves and open that Italian restaurant out in Philly."

"I remember," he grumbled. She had these points many times since they went into hiding.

"And you know why he opened the restaurant don't ya, Johnny?"

"Rocky knew he couldn't go on punching forever," Johnny said grudgingly.

"That's right. Those punches take their toll. Even on a tough guy like Rocky."

"I know," Johnny said. But he didn't really know. It seemed to him the whole point of the movies was the Rocky should've never retired from fighting to run some dopey restaurant.

"You're not the only one who hates using a fake name, Johnny. Heck, you think I like telling everyone my name is Lucy Chase? I spent my whole doggone life working hard to be the best Stella Valentine I could possibly be. Now I don't even get to be Stella, let alone the best Stella. Living on the lam, cooped up all day in that musty apartment with the curtains drawn. Heck, I didn't sign up for none of this malarkey."

Stella gripped the steering wheel tightly as the pulled into a strip mall in front of a giant Great American store. They both hated Great American but all the other nearby stores had shut down in its wake so there was no where else to shop. It seemed like a handful of companies had a monopoly on everything a person needed to buy to survive. Johnny knew it was like rubbing salt in the wound for his grandma to be forced to buy bread and milk from her old nemesis.