Bag of Bones: Chapter 7 (pages 93-106)

Chapter seven introduces us to the cute little girl, Kyra, and her mother Mattie. A few things of note struck me when I was reading this chapter. Mike Noonan goes out to get a burger and almost runs into a little girl walking down the center lane of the main road. Noonan rescues her and meets her hot twenty-something mom.
King uses a dramatic incident to introduce us to the little girl, but there's very little drama in the way King tells it. Noonan almost runs the child over but when he goes up to talk to her (she's three), she speaks in cute, precious and frankly unreadable baby-ese, so there's goes the drama of the life or death situation. "I go beach. Mommy 'o'nt take me and I'm mad as hell." Not sure a three year old would say that and it's hard to give King any leeway here. As in most of his stories the kid is too precious to be real. She's a blond white child name Kyra. I've never heard of the name Kyra, and it doesn't sound like a good name to me and I'm even more startled when Mike Noonan declares that if he had ever had a girl with his wife he was going to name it Kia. This book was written in 1998 and I'm not sure if the Kia car company was in America at this time but I laughed aloud when I read that. I laughed even harder when Noonan declares that Kia is an "African name" meaning "season's beginnings." I wonder if the Korean car makers are aware of this? I just like the idea of a kid walking around named Kia.
Mike Noonan saves the child and meets the mom who is driving around looking for her. King goes to great lengths to establish that Mattie (who is around twenty and looks like, "a young Grace Kelly") is not not NOT trailer trash even though she's living in a trailer. She's better than that because she doesn't spank her child and is a fan of Oprah. And, what a coincidence, one of her favorite authors is none other than Mike Noonan. Also her husband's dead just like Mike's wife is dead and she's going through a difficult time. I'm smelling romance here! And just to make abundantly clear what's going to happen, King makes sure that Mike "accidentally" feels her breast while trying to help her put Kyra in the car seat. If that's not romantic I don't know what is.