They were too afraid to put anything on a credit card—who was to say her father couldn’t use it to track them down—so they just kept spending the cash, but slowly enough that they could pretend it would last forever. In the cities they passed through from time to time, Michael looked up old friends. Gina sat beside him on their couches, smiled when she was introduced, and tried to keep up with the conversation, which was mostly about people she had never met. She drank cocktails when they were offered and tried to be friendly, but she always felt like she made Michael’s friends uncomfortable. Even when they smiled at her, she sensed there was something they weren’t saying, something on the tip of everyone’s tongue, whispered conversations behind closed doors at night. More than once she saw them pull Michael aside, into a hallway or empty room, to talk to him. But those conversations always ended with Michael’s laughter as he came back to sit beside her on the couch, where she’d been making painful small talk. The two of them would sleep in the friends’ spare rooms or on the sofa, enjoying the hot water and free food and a bed that bounced underneath them. “I don’t know how they all got so old,” Michael would say, tracing a finger along her spine as she sank into drowsiness. “Must be something about the mortgages.” After a few days, he and Gina would say their farewells and move on again, back out on their own, leaving the doubts and hushed voices behind for the old friends to worry about.
They spent the winter traveling the South, as far west as Texas and then slowly back toward Florida.
“Let’s head straight up to North Carolina,” Michael said one night as they lay together, waiting to fall asleep.
“But I want to see Miami.”
“No, you don’t. It’s just a big overpriced beach full of tourists.”
“So what? I like the beach.”
“Fine,” he said, and turned his back to her, so that she wondered how he could breathe with his face pressed so close against the wall of the truck bed.
They crossed into Florida the next morning, and were still hours away from Miami when Michael turned sharply onto an exit, crossing three lanes to slide onto the ramp at the last second.
“Are we getting lunch?” Gina asked.
“There’s something I want to see.”
“What?” she said, but he didn’t answer, and it was easier to doze with her head against the window than to ask him questions. He never answered questions if he didn’t feel like it anyway, and she had become used to his moods.
In the late afternoon they passed through a city and Michael began driving slowly, making turns that took them onto smaller and smaller streets, and eventually onto a dirt road that snaked along for miles.
“Are we near Disney World?” she said.
“Disney World is three hours away. And I’m trying to concentrate.”
At last they came to a bend in the road that looked no different from the last dozen curves, and Michael pulled the car onto the berm, just to the edge of the turn, and put it in park, then sat looking out the window, saying nothing. To their left was a house painted bright yellow like a new pencil, with a neatly trimmed lawn bordered by azalea bushes and a red-and-white swing set next to the driveway. An old couple were reclining on lawn chairs next to the swings, the man with a newspaper folded over his face.
“What are we looking at? Are we going to kill these people and steal their car or something?” Gina asked.
“Have you ever been serious for one fucking moment in your life?” Michael said. He leaned forward to see better through the windshield glare.
Gina scowled and turned to look out her window. On her side there was nothing but a dense tangle of plants at the roadside.
“Damn it,” said Michael.
Gina looked back at the house. A young woman with a child balanced on her hip had come out to join the older couple. Michael pressed his forehead against the steering wheel.
“Who is that?” Gina said.
“My ex.”
“Ex-wife?”
“Girlfriend. And my son.”
“Huh.”
“My life didn’t start in your father’s mine, you know.”
“I’m not stupid,” Gina said, but she felt nauseated. The woman had set the little boy down and he was walking across the lawn, grabbing onto pieces of furniture. “Can we go?”
“We will. Soon. I just want to say hello. I want to see him.”
“I’m not going in there.”
“Good,” he said. “Don’t. Just wait in the truck, I won’t be long.”
Gina twisted the edge of her dress around her finger, tight enough to cut off the circulation. “Don’t pick him up,” she said. “If you pick that little boy up you’ll never come back.”
Michael narrowed his eyes at her, a cutting look she knew well by now. “Please, be as crazy as possible. Because it’s not like this is already hard.”
He drove a few miles from the house, taking so many turns and shortcuts that, for a while, she thought he was just driving in circles. Eventually, he parked the car in a gravel lot behind a grocery store.
“Here,” Michael said, handing her the cash from his wallet. “Get something to eat while you’re waiting. Sorry there’s nothing better around.”
“I’m giving you three hours, and if you’re not back, it’s over,” Gina said. “I mean it. Don’t say you love me, either.”
“It won’t even be three hours.” He grabbed his jacket and got out of the truck.
“I’m going to stay right here and watch for you,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her, walking quickly to the road and starting back the way they had come, sticking his thumb out for a ride whenever a car passed. She watched him until he was out of sight.
* * *
—
She waited there for two days. She ate tuna sandwiches from the grocery store, drank plastic jugs of iced tea, and moved the truck around the parking lot, following the shade of the building as it slowly sailed across the gravel with the passing hours. When she couldn’t bear the heat, she’d walk up and down the aisles of the grocery store, pretending to look at canned fruit and boxes of cereal until her blood cooled. As evening settled, she sat with her forehead against the steering wheel and was just starting to doze when someone said, “Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes. An old man was standing beside the window, looking at her with eyes like puddles of mud.
“Are you all right?” he asked again.
“Fine.”
“I seen you out here earlier.”
“Who are you?” she said.
“My name’s Paul.”
“I mean, is this your store?”
“No.”
“Then go away.”
When she woke up again it was dark, the night full of small noises and the quick sting of mosquitoes, but it was still too hot to roll the windows up. Gina got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the parking lot, looked down to the bend in the road where Michael had disappeared, tried to visualize the yellow house where they had seen the family and the little boy. She imagined Michael sitting there, drinking a beer in the living room, making small talk. She closed her eyes and willed him to stand up, to put the beer down and walk out the door and back up the road to the grocery store and beg her forgiveness. A car came around the bend then, the headlights making her squint, but it roared right past her, spitting gravel at her bare legs. She went back to the truck and climbed inside.
The next day her head ached whenever she moved, and it was hard to even find the energy to get up and go into the store. The thought of drinking more iced tea made her want to gag, but she bought a bag of ice and sat in a patch of grass at the edge of the parking lot, rubbing the cubes across her wrists and legs as the day wore away. At some point, she fell asleep and when she woke up again, it was the middle of the night and the old man was cro
uching a few feet away from her.
“What are you doing out here?” he said.
“I made him,” she said. “He’s mine. He has to come back.”
“Honey, you’re not even making sense. You’re tired out. Why don’t you come home with me? Whoever you’re looking for, you can find him tomorrow.”
“He’s not, though, is he?” she asked. “Coming back.”
Paul helped her to her feet and led her back through the parking lot, empty except for the pickup and another car with the engine running. He walked to the car and leaned in the driver’s-side window, said a few words to the man inside, and stood back to let him drive away. Then he came back to Gina and opened the door to the truck, but she made no move to get in.
“I have a granddaughter your age in Boston,” he said. “I wouldn’t hurt you for anything. There’s a couch in my attic room. You can sleep there tonight, lock the door if you want. In the morning, we can see about getting you home.”
“I’m not going home,” Gina said.
Paul’s house was dark when they arrived. He went around turning on lights, then brought Gina a towel and a washcloth and showed her the bathroom. She didn’t bother with a shower, but as tired as she was, she cranked up the air conditioning and lay awake for a long time in the dry cool of the attic, staring up at the peak of the roof and feeling the seams of the couch against her back, trying to think of everything Michael had ever said to her about Florida and love and how beautiful she was.
* * *
—
She woke early the next morning, showered, went into the kitchen and started going through the cupboards. With the radio on low, she began to make pancakes. Paul wandered in soon after, trying to smooth his hair into place with his fingers.
“Smells good,” he said.
She nodded, fixed two plates and sat down at the table. Paul ate quickly, swallowing without chewing, like a dog. Gina twirled her fork and leaned back in her chair to look out the window. They didn’t speak, until Paul finished his last mouthful and said, “Got some relatives I can take you to?”
Gina thought of June and Laura with their husbands and babies and their boring lives. Of her daddy bubbling with anger, sitting in his bright white office while the miners shuffled through to collect their paychecks. He must know by now that the money was gone, and where to. He might forgive her, but, then again, he might not.
“Not really,” she said.
She scratched her fingernail against a spot of crusted food on the tabletop, looked around at the house. The windows were fogged with dust, the kitchen linoleum sticky and curled at the edges. She could smell banana peels in the garbage can under the sink.
“You want a housekeeper?” she said.
Paul set his fork down and sighed. “If I could afford a housekeeper, I’d have one already.”
“You need that attic room for anything?” she asked. “You can afford me.”
* * *
—
Every morning she served him breakfast, and while he ate she made up plates for his lunch and dinner and put them in the refrigerator, tinfoil pressed down tightly around the edges. Once a week, she went to the grocery store, vacuumed, wiped down the furniture and the windows, and did two loads of wash.
It didn’t take long for the attic to wear out its appeal, but she wasn’t ready to move on. She took to exploring, learning the layout of the city, walking the sidewalks just to lose herself in a crowd. After a few weeks, she got a job with a catering company and spent her evenings wearing a tuxedo shirt and snug black pants, cruising bar mitzvahs and fundraiser dinners with a silver tray balanced lightly between her hands. On the weekends she and a few of the girls from work would gather at someone’s apartment and drink until the early hours, or one of the boys would get up the guts to ask her out, and when she got home in the morning there was no one to answer to, only Paul. He might shake his head as she dragged herself around the kitchen with a blinding hangover, but he never asked questions.
She took her earnings, rolled them up tight in a pillowcase, and hid them in the dark recesses of the couch cushions. Some nights she counted the money, smoothing each bill across her knee as she went, a tiny black-and-white TV playing old westerns in the background to keep her company.
* * *
—
One day at breakfast Paul said, “So who was he, anyway?”
“Who?”
“Guy you were waiting on when I met you.”
“No one,” she said. “Anyway, he ran off with some slut who probably doesn’t even appreciate him.”
Paul took another bite of his toast. “You ever meet this slut?”
“No. What difference does that make?”
“Just sounds like an ugly name to call someone who wanted the same thing you did.”
“Well, I wanted it more,” Gina said.
“Did you? Well, it’s a hard time getting anything in this life without taking it from someone else.”
Gina didn’t answer, and Paul went to the counter, poured a second cup of coffee, and set it down in front of her. She blew across the top of it to watch the steam billow off, even though she didn’t like coffee.
“When I was your age the only thing I really wanted was a motorcycle,” he said. “Never got one. I had a pretty little girlfriend who thought I was Heaven and Earth all wrapped up in Christmas paper, but if someone had offered to let me trade her for a motorcycle, I’d of done it.”
Gina laughed. “That’s fucked up, Paul.”
“Yeah, well. Last I heard, she was living in Naples with her sons and her grandkids, and all I got is a daughter who won’t talk to me and a crazy teenage runaway who sulks around the attic all day. And still no motorcycle. So I guess the joke’s on me.”
* * *
—
She stayed through the summer, months that were hot and steaming and full of the threat of hurricanes, through the fall and the winter, and it felt like time never passed. To her, winter was cold that froze your spit on the pavement, drifts of snow that covered the windows and made the world silent. Here, there was just a slight coolness and some occasional rain. The only thing that told time was the money accumulating like dead leaves, two pillowcases full now, hidden in an old bookshelf behind some coffee cans full of screws. She didn’t earn much, but she hardly spent anything. She ate the leftovers from work, prime rib and Coronation Chicken, finger sandwiches for breakfast and slabs of chocolate cake if she had a craving. Sometimes she thought about Michael, wondered if he was even in Florida anymore or if he had gotten himself a new truck and a new girl or just started hitching. She didn’t even know the name of the town where he had left her at the grocery store. She knew if she asked Paul he would tell her, and she could drive out there, find her way back to the yellow house, see for herself. She could go crying back to her father, too, say she’d been tricked and taken advantage of, and maybe he’d find Michael for her. But she also knew that the part of her that didn’t want to ask for those things was the better part, and so she cleaned the bathroom with bleach water and mowed the lawn and pulled comforters out of boxes to pad the couch and waited without knowing what for.
* * *
—
In May, the weddings started, two or three every weekend. Gina served hors d’oeuvres in ballrooms filled with bunting and candles, extravagant displays of flowers, small pink boxes of candied almonds. She liked the fuss of it all, the ceremony and music and grandparents slow-dancing on parquet floors. She could get overtime when she wanted it, and she always wanted it. One Saturday, Joel, her manager, called to see if she would come down to the Sea Crest to fill in for a girl who was sick.
“What time?” she said.
“Six. But maybe you have a date.”
“Not tonight.”
“Maybe you should.”
She ignored
him. Joel was twice her age and said things like this all the time; she expected it as much as he expected her continued rejection.
The room at the Sea Crest was festooned with ugly violet crepe, and the tables were packed close together. As she waited for the guests to arrive, Gina placed napkins beside plates, set out flatware and glasses and silver pitchers of ice water. Joel handed her a basket of favors, chocolate kisses wrapped in tulle with a paper tag attached. Cheap, she thought, and set four tables full of them before she saw Michael’s name on the tag, paired with one she didn’t recognize, his bride’s.
Gina turned the tag over and stared at the blank back of it. Flipping it again, she traced her finger over the names, the date. Eleven months since she had come to Florida, and all that time he had been there. Had maybe been at the movies with this woman a few streets away from where Gina was buying shoes, had been happily playing house without ever knowing where Gina had gone or what had happened to her. The thought turned her stomach like a swallow of spoiled milk. She tore the tag free of the chocolates and put it in her pocket, and wove her way through the ballroom to the head table. A chair with a brown plastic booster seat sat beside the bride’s chair. Gina filled the water glasses.
Back in the kitchen, she said to Joel, “It’s a big wedding, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “About average, really.”
“Do you think they love each other?”
“Jesus, are we here to philosophize or are we here to serve shrimp? If we could make money catering divorces the way we do catering weddings, we’d be all over it.”
“I’ll bet,” she said.
* * *
—
All the Names They Used for God Page 15