Free The Daddy Dance by Mindy Klasky

into the passenger side before she had raced the engine. She had laughed as she sped toward the county road, flooring the old Ford until it shuddered in surrender. Rachel had laughed at Rye’s shouted protest, jerking the wheel back and forth, crossing the center line on the deserted nighttime stretch of asphalt. When a truck crested a distant rise, Rachel had taken the headlights as a challenge; she had pulled back into their own lane only at the last possible instant.
    He had sworn every curse he knew, hollering until Rachel finally pulled onto the crumbling dirt shoulder. He’d stomped around the truck, glaring as she slid across the bench seat with mock meekness. He’d dropped her back at her house, pointedly ignoring her pursed lips, her expectation of a good-night kiss.
    And he’d broken up with her the next morning.
    He would never have believed that Rachel and Kat were related, if their faces hadn’t betrayed them. Their personalities were opposites—a tornado and an ice storm.
    He cleared his throat, certain that his next words would lock another sheet of Kat’s iron control into place. “All right. Let’s go out on the road.” He wasn’t disappointed; she clenched her jaw tight like a spring-bound door slamming shut.
    “I can’t do that,” Kat said. It was one thing to drive in an abandoned parking lot. It was another to take the truck out onto the open road. There would be other drivers there. Innocent pedestrians. Maybe even a dog or two, running off leash. She could cause immeasurable damage out on the road.
    “The computer store isn’t going to come to you.” Rye’s laugh made it sound as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Come on, Kat,” he cajoled when she stopped in the middle of the parking lot. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
    “A fifteen-car pileup on Main Street,” she said immediately, voicing the least bloody of the images that tormented her.
    “There aren’t even fifteen cars on the road at this time of day. You’re making excuses. Let’s go.”
    There. He’d set their goal—she would drive them to the store. She knew the strategies—she needed to put the truck in gear, to turn out onto Elm Street, to navigate the several blocks down to Main. She was familiar with the rules, had observed them all her life: stay on the right side of the road, keep to the speed limit, observe all the stop signs.
    At least there weren’t any traffic lights, dangerous things that could change from green to red in a heartbeat, with scarcely a stop at yellow.
    She took a deep breath and pulled onto Elm.
    For the first couple of blocks, she felt like a computer, processing a million different facts, arriving at specific conclusions. She had never realized how many details there were in the world around her, how many things moved. But she completed her first turn without incident. She even followed Rye’s instruction when he suggested that she take a roundabout path, that she experiment with more right turns, and a single, terrifying left.
    She wasn’t thinking when Rye told her to take one more left turn; she didn’t realize that they were on the county road until after the steering wheel had spun back to center. There was oncoming traffic here—a half-dozen cars whooshed by at speeds that made her cringe.
    “Give it a bit more gas,” Rye said. “You need to get up to forty.”
    She wanted to yell at him, to complain that he had tricked her onto this dangerous stretch of road, but she knew that she should not divert her attention. She wanted to tell him that forty was impossibly fast, but she knew that he was right. She could see the black-and-white speed limit sign—she presented more of a danger to them, creeping along, than she would if she accelerated. She hunched a little closer to the steering wheel, as if that motion would give her precious seconds to respond to any disasters.
    Maybe it was her concentration that kept her from being aware of the eighteen-wheeler