No Ring, No Roof

Dana Whitlock rode on the back of her husband's bike for eleven years. When she filed for divorce, she learned her name was never on the house — so she took a room at a motel that rents by the week and a night shift dispatching tows for a rival club. The radio is older than she is. The chair is a barstool. For six weeks she listens to men argue about chain and diesel and learns which voices lie. Then her husband's crew starts price-fixing every tow in the county, and Dana's written log becomes the only clean record in town. She never planned to use it. Then a nail strip goes across County Road 9 and a school bus hits it, and Dana is the only one with the photographs. She will not run, and she will not be rescued. She will hand the log to a commissioner and a reporter, and she will keep the dispatch job she built — even when the mechanic who has been bringing her coffee at 3 a.m. asks her to leave.