“So are you in a hurry?” I persisted, gambling, wanting to prove to myself whether she was evading the question or just being ladyishly coy.
“No, I’ve just had enough of this cruddy desert and I want to be out of it as soon as I can.”
“I suppose that’s the difference.”
“Difference?”
“Between you and me.” I sprawled out in the two seats I had to myself. “The sooner you get where you’re going, the sooner we’ll have to part ways. So I’m in no hurry at all.”
I glanced at the rearview. Her eyes weren’t on me, they were on the road. She was through giving out information. Though if that counted as giving it out, then having a rotten tooth pulled was an act of charity.
I looked at the steering wheel. Her hands. She had her right on the wheel. Her left was out of sight.
“Are you married?” I asked her.
Lia looked back at me. “Mommy, he wants to know if you’re single.”
I chuckled. “That’s not what I asked.”
“He wants to know if you’re illegitimate,” Lucy said to Lia.
I decided I’d had enough of playing peekaboo with the rearview mirror. I leaned forward, setting my elbows on the seatbacks between mother and daughter. From here, I could see the side of Lucy’s face. She was laughing quietly.
“I’m sorry, I went and pried again.” I picked a bit of lint from the seat my arms were resting on. “I guess I find you too interesting not to want to know more about you.”
“Then I guess I’m flattered. There’s not many men your age who are interested in older women.”
“Come on, we could’ve gone to high school together,” I said, though if it were a bet, I’d put money on a five year difference.
“To answer your question, I’m a widow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’s sorry, Lia. To think, after all this time, people are still sorry for us.”
She said it in an easy voice, but the words were bitter enough for me to be taken aback. I knew when a person was really lighthearted and when they were putting up a poker face.
“Forget I brought it up.”
I laid back in my seat, not volunteering anymore conversation. I felt Lucy’s eyes on me from time to time, but it never struck me as an invitation for us to try mindreading again.
My thoughts now were of being small and easygoing. I didn’t want to step on any raw nerves and suddenly Lucy seemed to have a lot more of those than I’d figured. Like reading on a map that you’d walked into a minefield after you’d gotten as close to the exit as you were far away from the entrance.
The desert was stubborn. It didn’t change, no matter how much more of it we forced it to give up. All of it was flat and brown; even the mountains didn’t seem to soar so much as detach from the horizon. Strings of rocks didn’t impress me. I imagined they were real rocks, huge boulders and statues and buildings that were drifting down into the ground. Too interesting to survive in a landscape where everything was pummeled all the time with sun and wind and time.
“I’m getting thirsty,” Lia said, her voice edging towards a moan.
“Don’t think about it,” Lucy suggested. “I don’t know when the next rest stop is.”
“It’s not exactly Route 66, now is it?” I put in.
“That’s how we want it,” Lia said.
“Lia,” Lucy said warningly.
“What? I just mean that we have him all to ourselves.” She looked at me over the back of her seat. “You’ve very good company, Mr. Vasey.”
“You’re easy to be companionable with,” I retorted.
Lia settled back into her seat with an air of satisfaction, but Lucy was still giving her the eye.
“What?” she squeaked. “I’m not being a blabbermouth.”
“No, you’re not,” Lucy said, with so much concrete in her tone that it sounded like an incontrovertible prediction.
I dropped it. They had something to hide and I had no way of knowing what they’d do if I closed in on it. And I liked this talk of having me all to themselves a lot more than I liked the thought of satisfying my curiosity.
More fool me. If I’d pressed a little harder, maybe I would’ve found out the truth before all the killing started.
Time did what it did, however slowly. The unchanging scenery, the unending road, they made it seem like the hourglass was going at a drip, like a leaky faucet at night. Like no matter how fast we drove, there was no ending that day, no getting where we were headed. But no clouds in the sky meant nothing for the sun to hang onto. It ran into the horizon and the horizon ate up its light, right in front of us, a show we couldn’t watch and couldn’t look away from.
“That billboard says there’s a motel in ten miles,” Lia reported, young enough to manage some cheer despite how ragged she’d been run.
“Good, we can get some gas. And stop for the night.”
“And eat!” Lia insisted. “I’m starving!”
“Really? I thought we picked up a good two hundred pounds of meat back at the diner.”
Lia glanced involuntarily into the backseat, colored, and said “Mom!” in a reedy voice.
When the view of the open highway finally changed, we saw there was a motel, and a restaurant, and a gas station, all melted together like this heat would do to everything.
Lucy took her foot off the gas for the first time in hours and turned us into the parking lot behind the motel.
“Let’s eat!” Lia cried.
“You’re not worried someone else will take the last vacancy?” I teased her.
“If needs must, we can always sleep in the car,” Lucy said. “We do have a great big heater to keep us warm.”
We went into the restaurant, me feeling warm enough to keep them comfortable even if we landed in Siberia. The place could’ve been stamped out on an assembly line, right behind the one where I’d met the ladies. If an old man had come out of the kitchen, I would’ve screamed.
But the cashier was too young to be working here instead of too old and there was a waitress slumped down in a booth, looking at her phone instead of making anything cleaner than it already was.
She got up when the bell over the door announced us and smiled sheepishly. “You’ll be wanting water.” It was not a question.
“I’ll have a beer,” Lucy said. Her eyes flickered to me and I guess she saw my envy. “And one for him.”
We squeezed into the booth. The waitress dealt us laminated menus like cards from a deck.
She was back a minute later to find what we wanted. The girls both wanted cheeseburgers with fries. All this time and I hadn’t come up with anything better. I asked for the same. Lucy asked for a baked potato as well; Lia a salad and a milkshake. I asked for a water.
“That’s all you want?” Lucy asked me after the waitress had left. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“It’s not like I worked up much of an appetite.”
“Maybe we want you to be ready,” Lia said. “In case we have something heavy to lift.”
“Like all the suitcases you have in the trunk?”
A muscle twitched in Lucy’s cheek. “I think Mr. Vasey is just saving his money.”
“That’s silly. Mommy, aren’t we going to pick up the bill?”
“Certainly. We owe him for the cokes.”
“Cokes aren’t a meal,” I reminded them.
“Then you’ll just have to work really hard when we need you to,” Lucy said, with her usual cheekiness. I still didn’t know if it was meant to go over Lia’s head or if it was a shared joke.
“Thank you,” I said to them both.
“He’s grateful again,” Lia chimed, looking surreptitiously at her mother.
“Oh, I’m always grateful,” I assured them.
“Even at night?” Lucy laid her hand flat on the table. My hands were on the table too and with both of us like that, our fingers were close enough to touch. “No need to thank me. I know how hard it is—looking for work.”
“I’m not looking too hard,” I admitted. “Just trying to keep moving. See how far I have to go before my luck changes.”
“And if it were to change anywhere in particular…?” she asked leadingly.
“Los Angeles, I suppose. It seems to be the place to be in California. So if I’m going to see any of the state, it might as well be that.”
Lia fairly gasped. “That’s where we’re going! Before we leave the country—”
I didn’t have to look at Lucy to know she was smoldering. “Vacation?”
“A cruise,” Lucy said primly.
“Maybe you could let me borrow your car while you’re at sea.”
“Maybe we could sneak you onboard in a suitcase,” Lia suggested.