Free A Change of Heart by Philip Gulley

your yard. You just give me a call.”
    Kyle Weathers, who’d been eavesdropping on their every word and was now on the scent of a new customer, turned to Ellis. “You tell your brother that new customers get their first haircut free.”
    Ellis thought for a moment. “I think his wife cuts his hair.”
    “What is it with this town, anyway?” Kyle grumped. “Griping all the time about having to go to Cartersburg to buy anything, but won’t support their local businesses.”
    Five minutes later, the Hodges were climbing in their truck, Peanut Buster Parfaits in hand. Ellis pulled out onto Main Street. “So when were you going to tell me my parents had come home?” Amanda asked.
    “Yes,” Miriam asked, “when were you going to tell us?”
    “I didn’t think it was all that important,” Ellis said.
    Miriam, normally a peacemaker, reached up and smacked Ellis on the back of the head, causing his nostrils to be buried in peanuts, chocolate sauce, and ice cream. “What do you mean, it’s not important? Of course it’s important. Have you spoken with them?”
    Ellis wiped his face with a napkin, then decided to make a clean sweep of everything. “Just once. They came out to the house the night of the wedding rehearsal wanting to see Amanda. I asked them to leave, told them that no good could come from it. Then last week Owen Stout called to tell me they were in town and they wanted to see you, but I told him no.”
    “Shouldn’t that have been my decision?” Amanda asked angrily. “They’re my parents. Everyone knows my mom and dad are in town except me. You know how that makes me feel? Where are they staying?”
    “I’m not sure,” Ellis said, as they neared the tourist cabins on the edge of town. A rusty, white car was parked in the gravel lane that ran between the cabins. Whatever they had done with the money he’d mailed them each year, it was obvious they hadn’t spent it on their car. The rear bumper was crumpled and the rust holes so large and numerous Ellis was surprised the vehicle hadn’t collapsed in a mound of corrosion. He accelerated and passed the tourist cabins as quickly as he could.
    They drove on in silence. One mile, then two. They came within sight of the trailer where Ralph and his wife had lived five years before. Theirs was the next driveway, but Ellis wanted to keep on driving, far away, on to Illinois, through Missouri and Kansas, and into Colorado. And never come back. Start all over somewhere else, where Ralph and Sandy would never find them.
    He and his father had driven it once, the summer Ellis had graduated from high school. It had been his dad’s idea. The crops were planted, and the summer months stretched before them, an unbroken expanse of time. He’d proposed it on a Monday morning at the breakfast table and by noon they were sixty miles west of their farm, on Highway 36, crossing over into Illinois in their Ford pickup. They camped that night outside Hannibal, Missouri, pitching their tent in a farmer’s field, staying up late into the night, cooking over a fire, watching an occasional stray spark rise from the flames and ascend to the heavens.
    The next day they reached Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the lower forty-eight states, and paid twelve dollars to stay the night in a tourist home a block off Main Street. Ellis still remembered the high mahogany double bed with the crisp, white sheets, the worn, Oriental rugs over the polished hardwood floors, and the clawfoot bathtub. Twelve dollars for a room, supper, and breakfast. After breakfast, they drove north to the marker and stood beside their truck in the center of the United States while a man took their picture. Ellis still had the picture, sitting on his chest of drawers. He saw it every morning when he pulled out a fresh pair of skivvies.
    Ellis and his father reached Denver the next day and stayed at the Brown Palace Hotel that night, which reduced them to paupers. The rest of the trip they