Annalisa’s Highway Blues

Annalisa’s Highway Blues opens on a day that Annalisa Rochon would like to forget. On that one miserable Friday, her career plans fall through, she breaks up with her boyfriend, and the family business suffers a major setback. Since theRochons have a history of self-reliance, not self-pity, Annalisa enters a profession that can provide the kind of income her family will need in order to get through the crisis. She reluctantly enters the male-dominated world of long-haul trucking, where she finds danger, hard work, loneliness, and something completely unexpected out on the road—the kind of romance she had always dreamed of (but can’t really deal with right now).Mike Cindik, fresh out of the Marine Corps and slotted into his father’s corporate domain, has a contentious meeting with Annalisa on a Chicago loading dock but finds himself absolutely bewitched by this exotic, strange-talking,truck-driving Louisiana girl, and he pursues her with great determination (guilt and fear, too, since he’s engaged to a very manipulative and influential debutante).The last thing Annalisa needs is a guy like Mike—cute, rich, kind of nice and completely out of her league—complicating her life, which is screwed up enough. The pesky fairy tale dream persists, though, and generates a series of unlikelyadventures, misadventures, romantic misses and near misses, from truck stop to truck stop along Midwestern highways.Annalisa’s Highway Blues is a story about finding the courage to do what you know in your heart needs to be done, no matter how difficult or scary, and trusting the outcome to fate (or faith).