The Blues & Billie Armstrong 29
JAMES + EVIE
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
But there was something different about her that day, something changed, sharpened, something beyond the uniform—a new aura of competence and intent, the stride of someone who could see the path ahead. As Grandma Junia would say, she walked like she had a purpose in life. But it felt like she might be walking away from me.
My father and Darlene were out the door early Sunday morning for a drive to Santa Rosa.
Their day trips and date nights had become a regular thing—part of the piecemeal honeymoon strategy they devised because the Call & Record couldn’t put out a newspaper without my father, or so said Grandma Junia. But I was the accidental beneficiary of these outings, left on my own without adult interference more often than I’d ever been in the past.