I was about to drag my suitcase downstairs, but I stopped and looked down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. I hadn’t been in it since the morning of the funeral, when I’d stood in the doorway so my mother could see if the black dress I’d chosen was appropriate.
I walked down the hall, passing Charlie’s bedroom, which was adjacent to mine. The door to Charlie’s room had been closed ever since my mother slammed it behind her after she had literally yanked him out of it one month earlier. I opened the door to the master bedroom and stood on the threshold. Though tidier than it once had been, this room was at least still recognizable, with its neatly made king-size bed and stacks of books on each nightstand. I noticed that the books on my father’s side, thick historical biographies alternating with thin paperback mysteries, were beginning to gather dust. I looked away quickly, reminding myself to breathe. It felt like I was underwater and running out of oxygen, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay there much longer. The door to my father’s closet was ajar, and I could see inside it the tie rack Charlie had made for him in fifth-grade woodshop with his ties still hanging on it, all preknotted to save him time in the morning.
Trying to quash the panicky feeling that was beginning to rise, I turned away from my father’s side of the room and crossed to my mother’s dresser. On an impulse, I pulled open her top drawer—socks and stockings—and reached into the very back, on the left side. The drawer was emptier than usual, but even so, it took me a second to find it. But when my fingers closed around something smooth and plastic, I knew that Charlie had been telling the truth. I pulled it out and saw that it was an ancient pantyhose egg, with L’EGGS printed on the side in gold script that was flaking off. I cracked the egg open and saw, as promised, that the egg was stuffed with cash.
Charlie had told me that he’d found it sometime last year—I hadn’t wanted to ask how or why. But there was a piece of me that registered how desperate he must have been to have found the money my mother kept hidden in her sock drawer. That was about the time I started noticing just how far gone he actually was. Charlie had told me that he only dipped into it in case of emergencies and was always careful to put the money back, since he was sure Mom would notice. It always had six hundred dollars in it, mostly hundreds and fifties. Maybe Charlie had been too out of it by the end to care, or maybe he hadn’t had time to replenish it before he found himself on a plane to North Carolina, but there was only four hundred dollars in it now.
I heard the front door slam downstairs and realized that Roger was probably wondering why it was taking me so long to get my suitcase. Not stopping to think about what I was doing, I pocketed the cash, snapped the egg shut, and put it back in its place. A piece of me was running through justifications—you couldn’t trust these house hunters and shady Realtors, really I was just helping my mother out—but I knew none of them were the real reason I’d taken the money. So then why had I?
I pushed the thought away and hurried out of the room, closing the door behind me and dragging my suitcase down the stairs. When I reached the kitchen, I saw Roger standing in front of the fridge, staring at it. He looked at me as I thumped my suitcase onto the landing.
“All set?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said, then immediately wondered why I’d just started talking like a cowboy. I pulled the suitcase toward the door and glanced back at Roger in the kitchen. He was back to looking at the refrigerator, which gave me a moment to study him undetected. He was tall, and the kitchen, which had been so quiet and still lately, seemed filled up with his presence. My mother had told me that he was nineteen and that he’d just finished his freshman year. But there was something about him that made him seem older than that—or at least made me feel young. Maybe it was the hand shaking.
“These are incredible,” Roger said, pointing at the refrigerator.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, crossing into the kitchen, knowing he was talking about the magnets. The fridge was covered with them, many more than were needed to hold up Classic Thai takeout menus and grocery lists. They were all from different places—cities, states, countries. My parents had started collecting them on their honeymoon, and they’d kept it up until a few months ago, when my mother spoke at a conference in Montana and came back with a magnet that was just a square of bright blue with BIG SKY COUNTRY printed on it.
“My parents—” I heard my voice catch a little on the word. Words I’d always taken for granted had turned into landmines, traps for me to stumble over and fall into. I saw that Roger had averted his eyes to the fridge, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything. “They, um,” I continued after a moment, “collected them. From all the places they’d been.”
“Wow,” he said, stepping back and taking in the whole fridge, as though it was a piece of art. “Well, it’s impressive. I’ve never been anywhere.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Really,” he said, eyes still on the fridge. “Only California and Colorado. Pretty lame, huh?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve barely been out of California.” This was incredibly embarrassing, something I had told nobody except Julia. I’d been out of the country once—we’d all spent a very damp summer in the Cotswolds, in England, while my mother did research for a book. But California was the only state I’d ever been in. Whenever I had complained about this, my mother had told me that once we’d seen all there was to see in California, we could move on to the other states.
“You too?” Roger smiled at me, and as though it was an automatic reaction, I looked down at my feet. “Well, that makes me feel a little better. The way I justify it is that California’s a pretty big state, right? It’d be worse if I’d never been out of New Jersey or something.”
“I thought,” I started, then regretted saying anything. It wasn’t like I really wanted to know the answer, so why had I started to ask the question? But I couldn’t just leave that out there, so I cleared my throat and continued. “I mean, I thought my mother said your father lived in Philadelphia. And that’s why you’re, um, doing this.”
“He does,” said Roger. “I’ve just never been out there before. He comes out here a couple times a year, for business.”
“Oh,” I said. I glanced up at him and saw that he was still looking at the fridge. As I watched, his face changed, and I knew he’d seen the program, the one held up by the ITHACA IS GORGES! magnet in the lower left corner. The program I tried to avoid looking at—without success—every time I opened the fridge, but hadn’t actually done anything about, like removing it or anything.
It was printed on beige card stock and had a picture of my father on the front, one that someone had taken of him teaching. It was in black and white, but I could tell that he was wearing the tie I’d gotten him last Father’s Day, the one with tiny hound dogs on it. He had chalk dust on his hands and was looking to the left of the camera, laughing. Underneath the picture was printed BENJAMIN CURRY: A LIFE WELL-LIVED.
Roger looked over at me, and I knew that he was about to say a variation on the same sentence I’d been hearing for the past three months. How sorry he was. What a tragedy it was. How he didn’t know what to say. And I just didn’t want to hear it. None of the words helped at all, and it’s not like he could have possibly understood.
“We should get going,” I said before he could say anything. I grabbed my suitcase by the top handle, but before I could lift it, Roger was standing next to me, hoisting it with ease.
“I got it,” he said, carrying it out the front door. “Meet you at the car.” The door slammed, and I looked around the kitchen, wondering what else I could do to delay the moment when it would just be the two of us, trapped in a car for four days. I picked up the plate from where I’d left it to dry in the empty dishwasher, put it in the cupboard, and closed the door. I was about to leave when I saw the travel book sitting on the counter.
I could have just left it there. But I didn’t. I picked it up and, on impulse, pulled the program out from behind the
Ithaca magnet and stuck it in the scrapbook section. Then I turned out the kitchen lights, walked out the front door, and locked it behind me.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot, if you ain’t got the do-re-mi.
—Woody Guthrie
I got into the passenger seat and slammed the door. Roger was already sitting in the driver’s seat, moving slowly up and down, then back and forth, as he played with the seat adjustment. He must have found the setting he liked, because he stopped moving and turned to me. “Ready?” he asked, drumming his hands on the wheel and smiling at me.
“Here,” I said, taking my mother’s itinerary out of my bag and thrusting it at him. It had the list of towns she’d chosen for us to stop in, MapQuest directions, and a list of hotel reservations—for two rooms in each place—along with the estimated driving time and mileage for each leg of the journey. And if she had tried really hard, she wouldn’t have been able to pick less interesting places to break up the trip: Gallup, New Mexico. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Terre Haute, Indiana. Akron, Ohio. “That’s what my mother mapped out,” I said, as I pulled on my seat belt and snapped it in, taking a deep breath and then letting it out. I could feel my heart hammering in my chest, and we weren’t even moving yet, which didn’t seem to me to be a good sign.
“Do you have GPS?” he asked, flipping through the pages. I saw his expression grow less cheerful as he did so, and I figured that he must have reached the part about Tulsa.
“No,” I said. We’d had it in the other car, but we no longer had the other car, and I didn’t really want to go into why. “But I’m a pretty good navigator,” I said, reaching around to the backseat and grabbing the road atlas. “And I think she printed out the directions for each location.”
“She did,” Roger said, still frowning down at the papers. “Do you know why she planned the trip this way?”
I shook my head. “I think she did it by mileage.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked through the pages again, at the maps and lists of hotel reservations, and seemed a little disappointed. “Well, that makes sense.”
“You know that I don’t …,” I started. I wanted to find out what he knew without actually telling him anything. I cleared my throat and started again. “You know I’m not driving, right?”
“That’s what my mother told me,” said Roger, putting the stack of paper on the console between us. “Do you not have your license?”
I look at him, shocked. I studied his expression for a moment, trying to figure out if he was asking this question genuinely. He seemed to be. I felt my heart start to beat a little faster, but with relief this time. He didn’t know. He hadn’t heard the details. He had no idea what I’d done. It felt freeing, like I could breathe just a little bit easier. “No,” I said slowly. “I have my license. I’m just not … driving right now.” Which was a terrible explanation, but it was all I could come up with on the spot.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “I love driving.”
I had once too. It had once been my favorite thing to do. Driving was when I organized my thoughts and listened to music, my therapy on wheels. It seemed wrong that in addition to all the things that had been taken from me, that had to go as well. I gave a shrug that I hoped seemed nonchalant. “I guess it’s just not my thing.”
“Well, okay,” Roger said, handing me the stack of papers. I flipped through to the first set of directions, which would take us to Gallup in approximately nine hours. “Ready?” he asked again, seeming much less enthusiastic now.
I nodded. “Let’s go.” I handed Roger the keys, and he started the car. I closed my eyes for a moment as the car moved forward, trying to tell myself that I was fine, that everything would be okay. I opened them in time to see the garage door closing, as Roger signaled to pull around the cul-de-sac. I took a last look at the house, realizing that the next time I saw it—if I ever saw it again—it wouldn’t be mine anymore. WELCOME HOME, the sign exclaimed, and it was the last thing I saw before the house disappeared from view.
I turned to face forward, reminding myself to keep breathing and taking in the neighborhood flashing past my window. I glanced over at Roger, feeling that the reality of this situation hadn’t hit me until now. I was going to be stuck sitting very close to a guy I didn’t know, constantly, for the next four days. A really cute guy I didn’t know. I looked out the window as Roger made his way toward downtown Raven Rock. It was the all-day-every-day aspect of this that was troubling me. I knew I could seem like I was actually doing okay, so long as you didn’t talk to me for too long. I wasn’t an actress for nothing. But I knew that if anyone looked too closely, they would see that I was so far from being okay that it was laughable. And I was just worried that so much time together would give Roger the opportunity to see that.
As we headed to the main street downtown, and Roger sped up to match the traffic, I found I couldn’t help wincing and pressing my foot down, hard, on the phantom brake every time it seemed like he got too close to the car in front of us. And the cars in the other lane and across the intersection were just flying by. Why did everyone have to go so fast?
The car behind us honked, loud, and I felt myself jump a little. I saw Roger glance over at me as he put his turn signal on to make the right onto Campus Drive. “You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said quickly, staring at the small green arrow blinking on and off, fighting down rising panic as I realized how he intended to get us to the freeway. “But you know, it’s faster if you take Alvarez.”
“Really?” he asked. “But we can just cut over to—”
“No,” I said, more loudly than I’d meant to. “If you just go straight here, you can get to the 2 that way. It’s faster.”
The light changed, and Roger paused for a moment before turning his signal off and going straight. “Sure,” he said.
I stared out the window, taking deep breaths and trying to calm myself down, trying not to think about how close I’d just come to seeing the intersection at University. I had no idea if the ribbons and signs were still there, or if they’d disappeared into recycling bins and birds’ nests. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get away from it as fast as possible.
As we got closer to the freeway, it struck me—probably a little late—that this would be one of the last times I would see my town. Raven Rock wasn’t going to be my home anymore. And I’d never even really taken the time to think about it. It was just the place I’d always lived, kind of boring, kind of confining. But mine, with all my history, good and bad, wrapped up in it. I saw landmarks from my life passing the window at faster speeds than I was comfortable with. The Fosters Freeze where Charlie and I used to walk to get shakes, and the Jamba Juice where he deeply humiliated me when we were twelve. He told me that if you yelled out “JAMBA!” at full volume, all the employees would yell back “JUICE!” He lied.
I turned in my seat to try to see as much as I still could, but then Roger was turning onto the freeway’s on-ramp, and thankfully not saying anything about the fact that we’d taken the scenic route to get there. I looked in my side mirror to see Raven Rock getting farther away, turning into just another dot on a map, just another anonymous town to be driven past. And as I watched, it disappeared from view until all I could see behind me were the other cars on the freeway.
We drove for about twenty minutes in silence. Once we were out of Raven Rock and off the surface streets, being in a car was bothering me less. On the freeway, where there were no stoplights or people who ran them, I could feel myself relax a little bit.
And Roger seemed to be a good driver, much more comfortable in my mother’s car than I had expected him to be. I kept sneaking glances across the car at him. I had never realized just how small the front seats of cars were. We seemed to be in closer proximity to each other than I had anticipated. Every time he moved, it caught my attention, and I was sitting at the very edge of my seat, pressed practically into t
he door, so that we wouldn’t bump elbows on the console or anything. Roger just seemed to take up a lot of space, driving with the seat pushed far back, his long jeans-clad legs looking like they were almost fully extended. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the glass of the window. This hadn’t been my style—when I’d been driving I’d been a strictly ten-and-two girl. But he was in control of the car, not driving too fast, but fast enough to keep up in the carpool lane. Traffic was moving, thankfully, since on the other side of the freeway it was bumper-to-bumper—for no apparent reason, at noon on a Thursday.
“Hey,” Roger said, breaking the silence in the car. He tapped the glass on the driver’s side. I looked and saw a familiar yellow arrow and red sign across the freeway. “What do you think?” he asked. “You hungry?”
“I’m going to miss this,” Roger said, reaching into the white paper bag sitting between us and pulling out a french fry. “I love fast food in all its forms, but nothing really compares to In-N-Out.”
I took a careful bite of my burger and nodded in agreement. We were in the back of the Liberty, what Charlie and I had always called the way-back, the open space designed for storing things. The door was raised, and we were sitting with our legs dangling over the edge. The sun was getting strong, and the glare made it harder to look
directly at Roger. But my sunglasses had shattered three months ago, and I’d gotten used to squinting. The cars on the freeway rushed past to the right of the car, and to the left of us an In-N-Out employee seemed to be breaking up with her boyfriend—loudly—over the phone.