Chapter 5 – Chickpea “You are alone, the whistle moans, Turn back heart, You are on a train bound for nowhere” “Oh my, he still wants me near him.”  She swooned comforting herself that she made the right choice.  They pulled up to a light in the circle of Indianapolis. He leaned in and kissed her. At first she thought it was a kiss from one who loved her, but then she was too quickly reminded of kisses that she had received from friends or family.  Regardless, it was familiar.  She needed familiar. "Stars!"  Even with all the lights from the buildings towering over her, she saw stars.  “I haven’t seen stars in so long! You don’t see stars in Chicago between the smog, the light pollution and the impending cement headstones that loom overhead there is rarely a glimpse of stars.” She thought to herself “How far are we from Cicero?”  Her mind drifted back to the first time she asked that question.  The first answer received was, “only 4 and a half hours, I have longevity in my family, so I think I can meet for a cup of coffee sometime over the next forty years!”  She chuckled to herself, “boy, was I hooked easily by that line.”  Now, she really wanted to know as sitting next to him, that close was actually making her Very nervous, uncomfortable.  She felt there was a stinging trap being set.  “Maybe, just maybe, he is not the gentle man I thought he was.”  He broke into her thoughts, “it is about an hour’s drive to Cicero.”  Silence. A little chickpea, (that is really all it was a little chickpea in the middle of the crossroads of America).  Its only claim is that its settlers were well versed enough in Roman mythology and history to have known that this little town would be nothing more than a chickpea on the face of the crossroads much like Cicero’s ancestors wart on the end of his nose. She was breaking yet another one of her cardinal rules. She would never go back to Cicero again, too many bad memories, but it was necessary to regain what she lost there. “Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.” Cicero, 106 BCE