"How long ago did you last see your mom, anyway?

"Longer than I care to tell."

Scroll down to today's freewrite, if you're so inclined.

If you're new to the story, here is a bit of a recap:

DeLorean's husband lost his temper one time too many and put her in the hospital. That pesky nurse Sandy staged an intervention, so to say, and inspired DeLorean to make her escape at last. How far can she get before Dwayne catches up to her?

She had parked her Chrysler minivan

and slept fitfully through the night.... Dwayne would never find her here. Still, she checked the front window every few minutes out of habit.

She could sleep in the minivan, maybe advertise herself as Rent-a-Mom, and hire herself out to Ivy Leaguers who would pay for the motherly love their mothers couldn't send in the mail. It was all so sudden, she really hadn't thought it through. This was just an idea she dared to try out.

Part One: She Came in through the Kitchen Window - Day 577 - Prompt: window

NOTE: I never did write the scene where all hell breaks loose and she flees this "safe" haven and puts that idea of Rent-a-Mom on hold.

Everything is the mother's fault,

as they say, and so she might have blamed Mom for her unexpected lot in life, the submissive wife, the last thing anyone expected the little tart to become. But to be fair, the predicament she was in now started with a cat. That cousin Lenna, as a matter of fact, and Lenna's missing cat.... Day 585 - Prompt: tart

Rory was Lenna's youngest, going nowhere,

and with a name like Rory Runyan, it was no wonder... the little pipsqueak was barely five-foot seven, a hundred-twenty pounds, but nobody messed with Rory. Day 588: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: rodeo

If she drove all the way to Arizona only to find nobody left

at the Runyan ranch, she’d come up with Plan B. For now, it was Plan A for Arizona. Plan B might be for bullet, but if God was on her side, like Sandy said, she’d escape Dwayne’s rule without damning her soul to hell.
She packed a pistol in her purse, just in case. Day 591- Prompt: Rule

Sandy said a person could "change the narrative" of her life.

Sandy, that prying nurse who should be fired for bugging her at church, not just at Dr. Shandler's office, violating all those privacy laws, asking too many questions. Yes, DeLorean DeWitt got those bruises when Dwayne slammed her head against the window after smashing their GPS, but it was none of Sandy's business. Books like "Smart Women, Foolish Choices" made it sound so easy to just say "enough, already" ... Day 594 - Prompt: Not Normal
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Mom and Lenna shared the same grandma and grandpa,

the same way Rory and DeLorean had the same set of grandparents in common. It was kinda like thinking about how a horse can trot. The connections, the beats, the timing, the steps that led one at a time up to the predicament she was in now. Day 595 - Prompt: trot

The narrow road to the Runyan place

was about as desolate as ever. The little trailer house was no uglier than before. She hadn't seen Rory since 1985.There was no telling what he might look like now. She pulled up to a stop outside the door to the rusty old trailer house, but before she could even get out, a window cracked open, a rifle barrel jutted out, and a man's voice said
"Get the hell out."
Day 598 :5 Minute Freewrite: Monday - Prompt: Batter

"I'll take that as an invitation,"

DeLorean said after stepping out of the minivan and facing the rifle muzzle at the window...

... "The hell you want?" Rory said.

"I'm here to win your heart, screw you over, steal your money, and leave your scrawny flesh for the vultures. What do you think?"

"I ain't got any money."

"Said every hermit in the desert living in a tin can." DeLorean snorted but not with too much derision. "Seriously, I got my own money, Rory, and I'm here to made a deal..."

"Well, hell, who did you kill?"

"Nobody yet. I got out of Dodge before giving into that temptation." Day 599: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: yoga

A dog of indeterminate origins crouched at his side,

showing his teeth. The sliding doors groaned mightily as Rory pushed them with a casual finger. He had always been stronger than he looked. The cool, dusty darkness inside the shed came into view. Then the shapes of large mechanical objects with wheels.

"Here's the deal," she said. "I married a manipulative male chauvinist pig, and honored my vows for forty years." She pulled off her baseball cap. "These railroad-track scars are going down some, but not enough to keep me from remembering what Dwayne did the last time he ever got a chance to lose his temper with me."

Rory stared for a while, and it seemed the shadows of his thoughts moved in the blue of his eyes the way sharks moved in the aquarium.

"What the hell happened to your hair?"

"That's the first thing you notice?" she shouted. "Sheesh."
Day 602 - Prompt: show me the way home

"You're like two people,"

she dared to say this strange man, this virtual stranger, this short, wiry, long-armed son of her mom's cousin. "Sometimes you talk like Lenna, and sometimes you talk like someone in a book. More educated."

"I'm just full of surprises."

That he was. Those wild looking yoga poses, something he picked up from the nut house, not that he called it that. What had he called it? Not rehab. Sandy the nosy nurse would know. Anger Management facility?

... "You don't know my mom. Forgive us our trespasses, she mumbled while mopping floors or chopping cabbage for dinner, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and she'd look right at me. We all do our share of trespassing, one way or another, she'd say."

... "So where is she now?"

"Ain't none of your business where Mom is now," he said.
Day 605 - Prompt: moving to the city

"You greeted me with a gun,"

she said. "You wanna call that none of my business, I might call the sheriff."

Rory snorted. "Yeah, that's what Shirley did after I avenged Houdini's tragic demise."

DeLorean marveled once again at the way he'd segue from Lenna's blue-collar dialect to a more erudite kind of urban reject.

... "Mom was broken in spirit after what Shirley done," he said, lapsing back into Lenna-speak. "She quit eating three days out of every week, lost a shit load of weight, and wandered into the desert to pray, like John the Baptist, minus the horse-hair shirt. Dad was gone, so she took back her Catholic faith like Linus and his security blanket..."

... That skinny little bearded zealot with his weird dog, and his yoga goats wandering in the sand around them, bleating and doing their darnedest to get her to crack a smile. That Rory, standing there, daring to give her some sort of accusing look. She might just as well get back into that burgundy spray-painted minivan and drive back to Dwayne.
Day 606 - Prompt: nap

The old photo of the little girl with the rhino

struck something in DeLorean, some chord that vibrated in her soul and connected her by some invisible strand to Lenna's heart. Maybe it was just DNA. If you stretched the DNA in one cell all the way out, it would be about two meters long. All the DNA in all your cells put together would be about twice the diameter of the Solar System.

Rory was a distant cousin, a few removes from that genetic strand ... Rory was not someone she would visit if not for the invisible DNA they had in common. He was maddening, that lean, hard, sun-bronzed little man with the piercing Arizona-sky eyes.

"You haven't given me a clue where your mama might be."

His turn to shrug. "She walked into the desert for another one of her 72-hour fasts, and she hasn't come back yet."
Day 607: Prompt: Hippo

"Maybe I should ditch the van, drive to the Rio Grande,

and get a houseboat. I could live anywhere."

Ol' blue-eyes just blinked at her.

"Maybe you could sell me a mini-goat to accompany me. Me and a goat on a boat. Ha!"

"You sound just like Maw," he said.

"How long ago did you last see your mom, anyway?

"Longer than I care to tell."
Day 620 - Freewrite Prompt: Metal Butterfly

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That deranged pipsqueak Rory was a mine of information.

Not.

DeLorean did her best to stare like a cat at him, unsettle him, disturb him to the point that he'd spill whatever dark secrets he held tight in that skinny little body with the long, ludicrous gray beard. He stared back, unblinking.

Good Lord. A stare-down. She used to lose every time, when they were kids. Quickly, she turned her back before he might remember other embarrassments of their occasional family visits in their long-ago childhoods.

She got into her van, started it up with an alarming puff of smoke, and drove off. The dusty trail led to the main road, and the smell of burning oil, or something that wasn't supposed to be burning so hot, unsettled her. As if Rory had read her mind and deflected it back at her, and it bounced off her and onto the van, leaving her disturbed and possibly spilling dark oil over the road.

Well, hell's bells.

She pulled off the road under the shade of a rocky outcropping and shut off the engine. Now what?

Ask Rory for help? God forbid. She still had her throwaway phone.

The indignity of that man telling her to go pee behind a rock rather than invite her into his so-called home, that metal trailer. Nature called again. She started unbuckling, only to realize her pants were unzipped.

Oh Lord, what next. So that was why he kept staring at her torso. He could have just said something.

Her railroad track scars itched, her bruised face still hurt a little but not as much as her pride, and the sting of hot tears kept flowing down her face long after she'd run out of pee. The tears just poured without ceasing. She stood, zipped and buckled firmly, and sobbed with her forehead pressed against a red rock. Sandy had brought her to this predicament. She could have been home in her own kitchen. Better the devil you knew than the devil you didn't know.

You owe it to yourself, and no one else, to reclaim your spirit, Sandy said. Nobody is gonna do it for you.

Deep breaths in. And, what the hell, some yoga poses, like those Denise Austin videos. DeLorean found herself remembering most of the routine and some pilates moves as well. What a day. What a day this had been! The sun was lowering, the shadows deepening, and she wondered if she ought to just stay here, rather than push her old Chrysler past its limits.

Nobody here to see her. She grabbed a headlamp for later on, if it got dark, and her jacket, and her pistol from her purse.

Sunset in the desert. Lenna used to write long letters about such things, and Mom had muttered about how Lenna sounded like a Zane Grey novel. Mom always skipped the pages of description and cut to the chase. DeLorean soaked up every word. She could still call some up from memory:
Southward rolled the beautiful uplands, with valleys of sage and grass, and plateaus of pine and cedar, until this rich rolling gray and green range broke sharply on a purple horizon line of upflung rocky ramparts and wall and monuments, wild, dim, and mysterious.
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Lenna owned every Zane Grey novel. Maybe DeLorean would have to come back in the morning and demand that Rory sell them to her. If they'd fit in the van. What use did he have for books? Then again, how else to account for his occasional lapses into polished English? He must have been reading his mama's Zane Greys.

More words came back to her. Darkness and silence were tangible things. She felt them. And they seemed suddenly potent with magic charm to still the tumult of her, to soothe and rest, to create thought she had never thought before. Rest was more than selfish indulgence. Loneliness was necessary to gain conciseness of the soul. That was from The Call of the Canyon.

A glint of metal in the dying light caught DeLorean's eye. She tightened her headlamp, not that she needed it just yet, and started walking. Why, she couldn't say. Maybe it was some drug lord manufacturing meth in the desert. But this was too high up for that. In minutes, the glint was entirely gone, but she remembered the rock wall and hiked up in search of the source.

Had she imagined it?

Red rock country was full of rock walls, and those walls were full of crevices and niches. In her childhood, on family trips to visit the far-flung relatives once every so many years, she'd wonder what lived in all those holes in those rock walls.

A stone rose, or a rock that looked like a rose, marked the trail to where she had imagined a glint of metal. She kept climbing, until, impossibly, she reached the narrow opening in the rocks and glimpsed what appeared to be motorcycle handles.

And, even more impossibly, the silhouette of a woman with a cat in her lap took form in the shadows.

Day 621: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: stone rose

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Desert Rose, aka baryte is the colloquial name given to rose-like formations of crystal clusters of gypsum or baryte which include abundant sand grains. The 'petals' are crystals flattened on the c crystallographic axis, fanning open in radiating flattened crystal clusters. The crystals form a circular array of flat plates, giving the rock a shape similar to a rose blossom. Gypsum roses usually have better defined, sharper edges than baryte roses. Celestine and other bladed evaporite minerals may also form rosette clusters.