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Thelma Louise didn’t stay long but she was there long enough to make the cracks in Dixie’s heart start to mend. For the first time in her life, she had a friend. Taking the older woman’s advice, she dumped her powdered tea down the drain, followed Thelma Louise’s steps for sun tea, and placed the pitcher outside. There was plenty of daylight hours left to set it to brewing. That task completed, she turned up the radio. Humming to herself, she stepped out into her little, side yard and started to dance. She didn’t care who saw her. She didn’t care that she was covered in dust. She didn’t care that she lived in a trailer park in a single-wide of an unsightly shade of green that defied description. All she cared about was someone had reached out to her, touched her, the first someone besides Mama.
Dixie had always thought there was something wrong with her to be treated the way she had been by Owen. Get put down enough times and you tended to believe it. He’d convinced her she was nothing, a nobody going nowhere. Getting away from that…monster… made her see what she could not before. Her mama had been the sweetest, most wonderful woman in the world, yet Owen had hurt her the most. Owen was the problem, not Dixie or Mama. Enough. No more wasting energy on that man. He was not even worth the time of day. Dixie pushed him aside and lost herself in the music.