Myra had no compunction whatsoever against winning her arguments with her fists. She was a bully born and bred, and confirmed by endless practice. Not only that, she was over twice Alan’s weight and towered over him by more than a foot. It would take a gun to give him any chance against her and barring a lucky shot, a hell of lot of bullets to bring her down.
Alan’s most fervent dream and endless motivation was to escape her tyranny once and for all, to just slip away into the night as his father had done. That was the real reason he pounded the streets from dawn to dusk: not to get a job in order to subsidize his hated stepmother, but to earn enough money for an apartment of his own or even a one-way bus ticket across the state. Unfortunately the country was in the worst recession in gen
