“Yeah,” Walcott said, starting up his mower shattering the stillness of the night. “Exactly.” Then he turned the mower and steered it down the hill, raising one hand to us in a wave before he disappeared from view.
We all just watched him leave, the three of us looking where he’d gone, as though we were waiting for him to come back. Then Roger picked up his Freddy’s cup, and I passed one to Drew. I took a cautious bite of mine, and then another. The frozen custard was thick and cool and sweet, and felt soothing on my throat. It was richer than ice cream, but had the consistency of frozen yogurt. And at that moment, it was exactly what I wanted.
“Sorry about Walcott,” Drew said after a moment. “I probably shouldn’t have said that. But he doesn’t see that he’s just wasting his life hanging around here. And he’s never been anywhere, or done anything….” He turned to Roger. “Back me up here, Magellan. I mean, you have to leave where you’ve come from. You have to go and see stuff. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t know where my home is. That’s bullshit.”
“But,” I said, curling my legs up underneath me. I hadn’t planned on joining in this conversation, but I found that the words were tumbling out before I could stop, or rehearse them. “But what if your home has disappeared?” I thought of the Realtor’s sign, and the WELCOME HOME message that wasn’t meant for me or my family—none of the people who’d actually lived there. “What then?” Roger looked over at me, forehead creased.
“I guess then your home is the people in it,” Drew said. “Your family.”
“But what if they’re gone too?” I asked, looking straight ahead at the rolling greens and not at him or Roger, making myself say it, trying to keep my voice steady. “I mean, what if your family isn’t there either?” Drew glanced over at me, and I saw surprise and a little bit of pity in his face.
“Then I guess you make a new home,” he said. “Right? You find something else that feels like home.”
After a few moments of silence, as though we’d agreed on a time to leave, we all began to pack up the last of the trash, and when the tee showed no evidence that we’d been there, we walked back across the golf course. We were almost to the end of it before I realized I’d left my flip-flops behind.
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot my shoes. I’ll meet you back by the car?”
“Want me to come?” Roger asked.
I shook my head. “I’ll just be a minute,” I said, and headed back to the tee. Seeing the open expanse of green in front of me, I broke into a run, feeling the dense grass beneath my feet and the cool night air on my face, feeling my hair stream behind me as I ran faster, past sand traps and over hills, until I reached the tee of the twelfth hole and had to bend over to catch my breath. I picked up my flip-flops and turned back, walking this time, feeling my heart hammer from nothing except exertion. When I passed the seventh hole, I heard the sound of the mower again, and a moment later Walcott crested the hill behind me. He pulled up next to me and pushed his headphones back again.
“Want a ride?” he yelled over the sound of the mower. I shook my head, and he killed the engine, filling the night with silence. “Want a ride?” he repeated, apparently thinking I hadn’t heard him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks, though.” Walcott shrugged, then reached back to pull on his headphones again. “Walcott,” I said quickly, before he left and before I could think about what I was doing. I rested my hand on the mower, which was surprisingly hot. “Do you like driving this? Is it fun?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling at me. “It’s a good time. You want to give it a shot?”
I looked up, and heard my father’s voice in my head clearly, as though it hadn’t been months since I’d heard it at all. “There’s an art to this, my Amy,” I could hear him saying. “I’d like to see you give it a try.”
“That’s okay,” I said, hand still on the mower. “My father—” My voice snagged on the word—it felt rusty. I forced myself to go on. “He would have wanted to. He would have loved that.” I felt my breath begin to catch in my throat and knew that I’d reached the point of no return. I looked up at Walcott. “Can I tell you something?” I asked, hearing my voice shake, feeling a hot tear hit my cheek, and knowing there was no going back.
“Sure,” he said, climbing down from the mower.
I closed my eyes. I hadn’t said this out loud yet. To anyone. But now it wasn’t that I couldn’t say it—it was that I couldn’t not say it any longer. “He died,” I said, feeling the impact, the truth of the words hit me as I said them out loud for the first time. Tears ran down my face, unchecked. “My father died.” The words hung in the night air between us. This wasn’t ever how I imagined I’d say it for the first time. But there it was, like Walcott had said. A truth, told to a stranger, in the darkness.
“Oh, man,” Walcott said. “Amy, I’m so sorry.” I heard that there was real feeling in this, and I didn’t brush it away, like I had everyone else’s condolences. I tried to smile, but it turned trembly halfway through, and I just nodded. He took a step closer to me, and I felt myself freeze, not wanting him to hug me, or feel like he had to. But he just took his headphones off his neck and placed them over my ears.
Loud, angry music filled my head. It was fast, with a pounding beat underneath driving the electric guitars. There were lyrics, but no words I could make out, and after all my talky musicals, it was something of a relief. I placed my hands on the side of the headphones and just let the music sweep over me, pushing all other thoughts from my head. And when the song was over, I took the headphones off and handed them back to Walcott, feeling calmer than I had in a long time. “Thanks,” I said.
He slung them back around his neck, then turned to his mower and pulled down a black patch-covered backpack. He unzipped it and dug around until he came out with a CD, which he extended to me. It looked homemade, in a yellow jewel case. “My demo,” he said. I reached for it, but he didn’t let go, looking right into my eyes. “You know what my grandma used to say?”
“There’s no place like home?” I asked, trying again for a smile, this one less trembly than before.
“No,” he said, still looking serious, still holding on to his end of the CD. “Tomorrow will be better.”
“But what if it’s not?” I asked.
Walcott smiled and let go of the CD. “Then you say it again tomorrow. Because it might be. You never know, right? At some point, tomorrow will be better.”
I nodded. “Thanks,” I said, hoping he knew I didn’t mean just the CD. He nodded, climbed back up on his mower, started the engine, and headed off again.
I took a moment for myself, alone in the darkness by the seventh hole—par five—of the Wichita Country Club. Then I put my flip-flops back on and headed back. Drew and Roger were waiting for me where the course began and grass met gravel. Roger looked worried, and my face must have betrayed something of what had just happened, since he didn’t stop looking worried when he saw me.
“You get lost?” Drew asked.
I held up the CD. “Ran into Walcott,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “He gave me his demo.”
“Told you!” said Drew. We headed out, and I saw that the girl on the practice court was still there, now practicing her serve, tossing the ball high up above her head before slamming it back to the wall.
Drew insisted on driving us back to the car, saying that it was on his way out. It seemed that while I’d been gone, Roger had been telling him about Highway 50, and they picked up this conversation again.
“You can’t believe it,” Roger said. “It just goes on and on, and you think it’s never going to end.”
“But then it does,” Drew said. “Wow. That’s a great story, dude.”
“I’m serious!” said Roger. “You think it’s going to last forever.”
“But nothing lasts forever,” Drew said, and then he and Roger sang together, “Even cold November rain.” I looked from one to the other, baffled.
“Seriously??
?? asked Drew, catching my expression in the rear-view mirror. “Magellan, get this girl some GNR.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I didn’t have time to ask, because a few seconds later, the car stopped outside the country club gates. I looked out and saw the Liberty, parked in a pool of streetlight. I was unexpectedly glad to see it again.
My house might be in the process of being sold by an overly friendly Realtor, and my family might be gone or scattered across the country, but the car seemed welcome and familiar and, mile by mile, more like home.
We all got out, Drew pulling the front seat forward for me. He extended his hand again, and this time I took it, giving him a small smile that he returned, broadly. Drew and Roger hugged and hit each other on the back a few more times, and then Roger walked to the Liberty, leaving me and Drew alone. “It was nice to meet you,” he said.
“Thanks for the NuWay,” I said. “Crumbly is good.”
“Didn’t I tell you? Do me a favor,” Drew said, slamming the driver’s-side door closed and leaning a little closer to me. “Keep an eye on my friend Magellan, would you? Be his Sancho Panza.”
I stared at Drew, surprised. My father had suddenly intruded into this conversation, when I hadn’t been expecting him. “What did you say?” I asked.
“Sancho Panza,” Drew repeated. “It’s from Don Quixote. The navigator. But listen. The thing about Magellan is the thing about all these explorers. Most of the time, they’re just determined to chase impossible things. And most of them are so busy looking at the horizon that they can’t even see what’s right in front of them.”
“Okay,” I said, not really sure what he meant. Was he talking about Hadley? “Will do.”
“Drive safe,” he called to Roger, who, I saw, was already in the car and nodded in response.
I had just opened my door when I heard Drew let out an impressive stream of expletives. I turned to see him peering sadly in through the driver’s-side window. “Keys?” Roger called. “Seriously?”
Drew sighed and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Don’t worry about me,” he said with a shrug. “Go on. I’ll be fine.”
I climbed into the car, shut the door, and looked around its familiar gray interior and, most familiar of all, Roger sitting behind the wheel, smiling at me. “Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” I said. I took Roger’s glasses out of his case. Seeing the smudges on the lenses, I gave them a quick polish with the hem of Bronwyn’s shirt. He put them on, started the car, and we pulled out onto the road. In my side mirror, I could see Drew waving. He continued to wave as we drove away, until he got smaller and smaller and finally faded from view.
Where they love me, where they know me, where they show me, back in Missouri.
—Sara Evans
Around midnight, it started to rain.
We’d been driving through Kansas in the dark for three hours, not speaking much. I’d been looking out the window, feeling the reverberations of what I’d told Walcott still coursing through me, like aftershocks following an earthquake. I’d said it out loud. I had. And it hadn’t made things worse—the world hadn’t ended. But I didn’t feel a lot better, either. It was almost as though by saying the words out loud, I’d summoned it in a more real way, because I was now having a hard time thinking about anything else. My mind kept circling around and around the things I wanted to think about the least.
The rain was a welcome distraction. I leaned over and showed Roger how to adjust the wiper settings, and I looked ahead to the highway, obscured and made somehow beautiful by the rain streaking across the windshield, blurring the red lines of brake lights ahead of us and the white lines of headlights to the left of us, no sound in the car except Roger’s mix and the constant, muted thwap of the windshield wipers.
The rain was light at first, just a few droplets, but then it was as though the endless sky above us had opened, and bucketful after bucketful was being tossed down onto the car. “Wow,” Roger said, fumbling with the wiper settings again. I leaned over and turned them up so they were going at their fastest setting—thwapthwapth-wapthwapthwap. “Thanks,” he said.
“Sure.” I leaned back and looked out into the darkness, at the rain droplets streaking diagonally across my window. I’d always felt safe driving inside cars at night when it rained. I knew most people—like Julia—had always hated being in cars when it rained, especially at night. She said it scared her. But it had never bothered me. Especially since I now knew that the worst could happen in broad daylight on a sunny Saturday morning, fifteen minutes from home.
“You used to drive this car?” Roger asked, glancing over at me.
“Sure,” I said, propping my feet on the dashboard.
“If you ever want to drive,” he said, a little tentatively, like he was considering each word before he spoke it, “I mean, you absolutely could. I would be fine with that.”
I put my feet down and sat up straighter. “Should we stop?” I asked. “Are you too tired?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said. “I’ve got at least two more hours in me tonight. I just … wanted to let you know that I’d be okay with you driving.”
Something about the way he said this made me go still. Did he know what had happened? I’d thought he didn’t, but maybe that was just what I’d wanted to think. And maybe he hadn’t just been perceptive when Drew had been driving too fast for me. Maybe he’d known why it bothered me, and had known this whole time. “I don’t want to drive,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, but hearing it quaver a little despite my best effort.
“Do you want to talk about why?” he asked. He glanced at me.
I stared at his profile, feeling my heart hammering. The car didn’t feel so safe anymore. “Do you know what happened?” I asked, hearing that my voice was already sounding strangled.
Roger shook his head. “No,” he said. “I just think that maybe you should talk about it.”
My heart was pounding in my chest. “Well, I don’t want to,” I said as firmly as I could.
“I just …” He looked at me, and I saw that his glasses had gotten smudged again somehow. I could practically see a whole fingerprint on the right lens. I chose to focus on this, and not the way he was looking at me. Like he was disappointed in what he was seeing. “You can talk to me, you know.”
“I know that,” I said carefully. “Haven’t I been talking to you?” I asked, deciding to deliberately misunderstand what he was saying. “Have we not been talking?”
He sighed and looked out at the road, and I knew he hadn’t bought it. Of course I knew what he meant. But it was one thing to tell Walcott, since I knew I wasn’t going to see him again. Opening up to Roger would be a wholly different thing. I’d have to sit with him in the car afterward, for miles and miles and hours and hours. And what if it was too much for him?
“I just …,” I said. I took a breath, so I wouldn’t break down before I even started. “It’s just hard for me. To talk about this. I mean.” Or to complete full sentences, apparently. Amy! wouldn’t have had this problem. Amy! would have had no issue with sharing her feelings and the things that scared her most with the person who was offering to hear them. But then again, Amy! probably had no issues. I really, really hated Amy!.
“I know it is,” Roger said quietly. The mix ended, and he didn’t start it up again. The iPod’s tiny screen glowed for a moment, then faded, and the only sound in the car was the rhythmic thwapping of the wipers across the windshield, which remained clear for only a second before the rain engulfed it again.
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk,” I said without thinking about it, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized that they were true. I did want to talk. I’d wanted to talk for months. And here was someone who was offering to listen. So why did this seem so impossible? Like I was being asked to speak Portuguese, or something equally difficult? “I just …” I didn’t even seem to possess the words to finish that sentence. I hugged my knees into
my chest and looked out the window.
“All right,” Roger said after a moment. “I’ll start, okay? Twenty Questions.”
“Oh,” I said, a little surprised that we were switching topics so quickly. Because to be honest, I’d almost felt ready to talk to him. “Okay. Is it a person?”
“No,” Roger said, smiling. “I mean, I’ll ask you questions. And that way it might be easier for you to talk. Maybe?”
I was both relieved and anxious that we were staying on me, that I would have to talk. “Twenty seems like a lot,” I said. “How about five?”
“Five Questions? Doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it.”
“And I get to ask you, too,” I added on impulse. “It’s only fair that way.”
Roger drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Ready?” I nodded. Mostly, I wanted to just get this over with. “Why don’t you want to drive?” he asked.
I swallowed and concentrated on the wipers going back and forth. And even though Roger could see me and I him, I was suddenly glad for the darkness in the car. It made it easier to pretend that he couldn’t see that I was trying hard not to cry, that my chin had apparently taken on a life of its own, and I no longer had any control over it. “There was an accident,” I said finally, forcing the words out.
“A car accident?”
“Yes,” I said. I was working very, very hard to keep control of myself, but I was on the verge of bursting into tears, and there was nowhere to go if that happened. No bathroom stall to hide in, nowhere to run.
“When was this?” Roger was asking me these questions gently, and quietly, but he might as well have been shouting them at me, that was how it felt to hear them, knowing I would have to answer.
“Three months ago,” I said, and felt my voice crack a little on the last word. “March eighth.”
“That’s all?” Roger asked, sounding surprised, and sad.
“Yes,” I said. I took a deep breath and tried to take a lighter tone. “That counts as one of your questions, you know.” From the way my voice was shaking, and the way it sounded thick to me, I had a feeling that my lighter tone had not been successful.