The Last Grand Adventure

by Rebecca Behrens

  Pidge shook her head. “No, we’ll have enough. And to answer your question: We’re on our way to Kansas. Atchison.”

  “Kansas. Following the yellow brick road?” Margo asked, sticking the key in the ignition and starting the engine.

  “It’s where I grew up. I thought it would be good for my granddaughter to lay eyes on the place. Stand on the banks of the Missouri with me. It’s beautiful this time of year.”

  Margo nodded, and it spurred Pidge to keep talking. I wondered how many times Margo had picked up travelers wandering from the Lamy station—or travelers anywhere she and the Rolling Stone went—and got them to spill their stories with an understanding bob or two of her chin.

  “We are also planning to meet someone there. My sister.” Pidge weighed each word like the man at the deli counter weighed the sandwich meat, to get the perfect amount and not an ounce more or less on the butcher paper. “We’ve been estranged for a long time. Thirty years this summer. She . . .” Pidge paused for a moment. “My sister wrote me a letter, and it’s brought us back together.” I ached for Pidge to tell more, the whole story. That it was Meelie we were going to find and everything that meant. Margo seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t think we were crazy to go on this adventure but that we were pretty cool. But I knew the details about Amelia were Pidge’s to tell, and she closed her mouth tight after that sentence, like she was afraid of any more of the truth spilling out.

  “Thirty years.” Margo let out a sigh. “That’s heavy. But now this trip you two are on makes all the sense in the world.”

  TEN

  Santa Fe

  It wasn’t much longer before the road stopped being so solitary. We coasted down the hills into Santa Fe. I pulled out my camera and a few times called from the backseat for Margo to stop the Rolling Stone, so I could take more pictures.

  “Do you know what time your bus rolls out?” Margo asked.

  “Late,” Pidge replied. “We’re in no rush.”

  “Then you should do some sightseeing before you go. I could take you around, so you don’t have to lug those suitcases. There’s a market in the plaza on Saturdays, and it’s outta sight.”

  “We’d really appreciate that,” I blurted, before Pidge could answer. I didn’t want her to turn Margo down, which she might do out of a sense of us being an inconvenience. I liked Margo—and I also wanted to check out the town. What if I never got back to Santa Fe? Like Margo had said, you had to experience things while you had the chance. My mother would agree. Meelie, too, probably.

  The buildings in Santa Fe were like nothing I’d seen before—rounded adobe in white, tan, and desert red. They reminded me of something in between a sandcastle and the Mission-style houses you see in California. Some had blue-painted porches or planters of vibrant flowers. Margo had said that a lot of artists lived here, and I understood why. Santa Fe felt like a painting come to life. Pidge’s manufactured community was called Sun City, but it felt kind of empty and cold. This was a real city of sunshine, vibrant and warm.

  I hadn’t been to that many real places. Sure, I knew my neighborhood in Burbank, and other places around Los Angeles, but I had seen little of the world yet aside from the pictures tacked on my bedroom wall. It seemed wrong that I’d walked through New Orleans Square in Disneyland but had never seen New Orleans; that before this trip, my only point of reference for the desert and the Wild West had been Frontierland. By the end of this trip, I’d have made it all the way to the middle of the country. I felt a burst of pride. I had Earhart eyes and now I was using them to see.

  We drove to the downtown plaza, where an open-air market was still going on, despite it being near sundown. Farmers, artists, and vendors were selling their food and wares, and flute music drifted through the air. Margo stopped the Rolling Stone and we got out to stretch our legs. We’d parked next to a stand selling food, and before I even knew what I smelled, my mouth watered and my stomach begged with a growl. I walked closer to see what was tantalizing me. Some kind of puffy bread, served piping hot on plates. Pidge sidled up to me and took a deep breath. “Are you as hungry as I am?”

  “Yes!” I practically shouted.

  “What is this?” Pidge asked the woman dishing it up.

  “Frybread. Dough we fry in oil—a Navajo recipe.”

  “It smells delicious. Could we have two pieces?”

  The woman nodded and pushed two paper plates toward us. The oil from the bread had pooled in the center of the plate, smears dotting the rest. Pidge handed the woman some money with a shaky hand. I picked up her plate as well as mine.

  We found a spot under a tree and sat down to eat and watch the crowd go by. There were Navajo craftspeople, artist types, farmers, hippies, and men in Western wear. After a few minutes, Margo joined us. “Cool, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, too busy inhaling my frybread to answer, but I agreed that the plaza was bright and beautiful. I wiped some of the oil off my fingers and pulled out my camera again, taking more pictures than I should have—I was nearing the end of the roll and we hadn’t bought more film yet—but I couldn’t help it. I shot the mountains beyond the city, the beautiful old Spanish churches, and the booths of food and art and jewelry in the plaza. I loved the colorful strings of chiles hanging like Christmas lights. I wanted to take a picture of the frybread to remember how wonderful it tasted, but a picture of half-eaten food seemed like a waste of film. I wished I had a way of capturing the smells—how my nose tickled from the frying food and the spices for sale—but since I didn’t, I just took deep, long inhalations with my eyes closed.

  We shuffled around the market stalls, after Pidge finally finished taking bites that were much daintier than mine. I didn’t know quite what to make of Pidge’s waxing and waning properness. She had a somewhat formal way of speaking, she kept her hair neat, and she always ate like someone important was watching. But she also only wore pants, wasn’t averse to tramping through a dusty desert, and had set us off on a freighthopping and hitchhiking adventure. Those weren’t things I usually thought of as “ladylike,” which Julie had called her, unless you took the word to mean something other than mannerly and demure. My grandmother was made of delicate steel. Maybe ladylike, and Pidge, both could be all those things: lovely and tough.

  We wandered the booths and tables spread with a bounty of trinkets and handicrafts. Margo examined some paintings, Pidge admired clay pots, but the jewelry caught my eye. One artist had beautiful pieces of turquoise laid out on a table, carved in almost every shape I could imagine: animals, stars, trees, people. A figure of a person playing a flute-like instrument. The turquoise was set in silver that caught the sunlight, making the table almost glow. I ran my fingertips over a few of the smooth, polished pieces, admiring how cool they felt despite the desert sun. And then I spotted the perfect one: an elephant on a thin silver chain. I held it in the palm of my hand. It reminded me of Pidge’s Ellie. And the bracelet Meelie had worn on her Atlantic flight.

  I squeezed the elephant tighter in my palm. “How much for this one?” I asked the man, snoozing lightly, sitting in a folding chair next to the table. He looked kind of like John Wayne.

  He snorted as he jolted awake. “What? Oh, let me see . . . five dollars.”

  That was much more than I had. Five dollars could get you four movie tickets.

  “Thank you.” I reluctantly placed the bracelet back down, running the tip of my finger along the charm’s edge before turning to walk away. But Pidge came up behind me.

  “Did you find a treasure?”

  I nodded. “I like that bracelet—the elephant. It reminds me”—I swallowed hard—“of Ellie.”

  Pidge’s hand floated down to the edge of the table, either to steady herself or so she could touch the elephant. “Yes. It reminds me of that too.”

  Sunlight glinting drew my eye a few charms away, to a small silver donkey on a leather cord. “Look—there’s a Donk!”

  The vendor perked up, seeing that our interest was serious.
He picked up the donkey bracelet and held it out to me. “What if I gave you both for five?” That was more reasonable—but I also knew that we had bus tickets to buy, not to mention food along the way. And where would we stay when we got to Atchison? Could we sleep in Pidge’s old house? Or would we need a hotel—and what about our trip west, home to California? We had to get back quickly. At some point, Dad and Julie would realize that we weren’t sitting on Pidge’s scratchy couch in Sun City, watching I Dream of Jeannie and eating gumdrops. That would be a big problem.

  “C’mon, it’s a good deal,” he said, his voice gruff like John Wayne’s too. It snapped me back from my stream of worries. I patted my knapsack, thinking about the two dollars I had stashed inside.

  But Pidge had already pulled her billfold out of her pocketbook. She freed four dollars from the sleeve and held them out. “We’ll give you four, and that’s our best and final offer.” She smiled sweetly, so I did the same.

  The seller harrumphed and snatched the elephant bracelet up from the table. I thought he was going to take it away, but then he grabbed the donkey and some tissue paper from a stack and wrapped the bracelets up in it. He shoved the tissue bundles into a small paper bag, which he swapped for the bills that Pidge was still holding out. “You ladies know how to drive a bargain.”

  We had barely thanked him and walked away from his stand before I had the tissue paper torn off and the elephant bracelet looped around my wrist. Pidge struggled to tie the donkey charm around hers. I stopped and took the ends of the leather, winding them into a secure knot. “Happy?” she asked.

  I nodded, suddenly shy. This was the first real present I’d ever gotten from my grandmother—not a generic card and check, but a bracelet, with an elephant like the one she’d so loved. It had real meaning behind it, and a memory—of when we found it, together in Santa Fe, on our wild adventure.

  • • •

  Around the time the sun finished hiding itself behind the mountains, Margo dropped us at the Trailways bus station, on the outskirts of town. She seemed unsure about leaving us there. “The bus really leaves tonight? I don’t want you crashing here.”

  Pidge nodded. “It absolutely does, and we’re fine waiting for it. You’ve been so kind to us, Margo, but you should be on your way.”

  Margo nodded, glancing at the door into the station like she wanted to stroll in there and read the schedule for herself. But she decided to trust Pidge, or at least take her word for it. “I’m so jazzed that what I thought was a mirage on the road turned out to be the two of you.” Pidge held out her hand for Margo to shake, but Margo bypassed it and wrapped Pidge in a bear hug. It was stiff at first, but then Pidge let Margo’s paint-stained arms press her close. “In my wildest dreams, I’ll be half as cool as you when I’m old.” I thought Pidge might be annoyed at being called old, but she smiled.

  Next Margo hugged me, and I breathed in deeply the smell of paint and earth and patchouli. “Thanks, Margo.” I kind of wished she were going to take the next leg with us. “Wait—could I take your picture?”

  “Of course!” Margo leaned against the hood of the Rolling Stone, making a comically dramatic face. I held up my Brownie and waited until she cracked into one of her wide smiles before I took the picture. It might not turn out the best because of the after-dusk light, but at least I knew I’d captured Margo’s vibrance.

  “I was gonna give you that painting—Bea’s Sky. But now I want to keep it for myself, to remember you and this beautiful afternoon. Is that okay?”

  “Sure thing.” I blushed at the thought that Margo wanted to remember me. “Hey, if you do come out to California—maybe you could visit us?”

  “That would be real nice.” Margo gave me another squeeze. “Write down your address and number for me, okay?” On a scrap of canvas, I did.

  She piled our luggage on the curb and got into the wagon, tapping the horn in a friendly toot as she pulled away. Pidge and I stood, watching and waving. It wasn’t until the Rolling Stone turned a corner and Margo was gone that I realized how chilly it had gotten. The sun had gone down, and my dress provided about as much warmth as fad paper clothing. Before we got on the bus, I’d change into jeans—although the thought of putting clean clothes on my dusty, sweaty body was kind of disgusting. I hadn’t taken a bath since the night before we left Pidge’s house. I wondered if I was starting to smell earthy like a desert artist girl too.

  Pidge stared off in the direction Margo had gone. Then she wiped at her eyes and bent down to grab the valise. She slung her pocketbook over her shoulder and reached for her suitcase, grimacing. “Aging isn’t for sissies,” she sniffed, waving away my outstretched helping hand. “Come on, let’s head inside.” So I grabbed the rest of our things and, shivering, headed in from the desert night.

  ELEVEN

  Pay Phone Home

  There was a line at the ticket counter but only a few people sat in the waiting room, quietly reading the newspaper or, in the case of one man, dozing in the avocado-colored plastic seats. I lugged my things over to a section of the waiting room that nobody else was in. It sounds silly, because we only knew her for a couple of hours, but I missed Margo. She’d been like sunshine in human form. I wondered if other people she’d met throughout her travels missed her too—if friends whom she’d made covered the country like dots on a map. That was a truth about her life in the Rolling Stone—Margo gathered no moss, but she still left an imprint on the landscape.

  Pidge glanced at the line. “Why don’t you sit with our things while I go fetch our tickets?” I wanted to go with her to make sure she actually bought them this time, but somebody needed to watch all our stuff, so I sat down. Pidge walked toward the counter. I never took my eyes off her.

  A few minutes later, she triumphantly returned. “We have our tickets to Salina,” she said, making a big show of tucking them into her pocketbook. Which wasn’t necessary, as I’d already watched her hand over the money.

  “How long will it take us to get from there to Atchison?” It was already past dusk on July 22, and we needed to be at Pidge’s old house in the morning on July 24. That gave us fewer than forty-eight hours, and we were still in New Mexico. My geography wasn’t the best, but I knew those states weren’t right next to each other.

  “It’s close,” she said, easing herself into the chair next to mine. “Slightly more than one hundred fifty miles. A three-hour drive, more or less.”

  “Isn’t there a bus we can take directly to Atchison?”

  “That’s where we’re going.”

  I frowned. “I thought you said the bus went to Salina.”

  “Does it?” Pidge rubbed her temples. She looked very tired. “Oh . . . you’re right. It goes to Salina. All the way to Kansas City, in fact, which is closer but we didn’t have quite enough for those tickets. We’ll have to figure it out once we get to Salina. But I’m confident.” She yawned.

  Figure it out once we get to Salina? My heart sank. If we didn’t have enough for a bus ticket to Kansas City, how were we going to have enough money to get us one hundred and fifty miles farther? I felt the coolness of the elephant bracelet pressing on my wrist. Maybe if I hadn’t wanted it so badly, we’d have enough to get all the way to Atchison. I hoped my bracelet would give us good luck, like the elephant one that Meelie wore on her Atlantic flight.

  Pidge must have noticed me toying with it, because she said, “Now, don’t let that spoil your bracelet. I still love mine. Those four dollars wouldn’t have made the difference, anyway. Also, I’ve pinched a few pennies so we can eat once we get there.” Something caught her eye across the waiting room. “Say, why don’t you take a dime and go phone your father? It’s about time we checked in, or he’ll get suspicious.”

  We grabbed all our bags and relocated our camp to the corner where the pay phone was, even though only two people were still waiting with us, and they hardly seemed like the type to steal suitcases from an older woman and her granddaughter. Pidge stood next to me, leaning up aga
inst the wall—in case Dad or Julie wanted to talk to her. As I slid the dime into the coin slot, she whispered, “Remember. We’re in Sun City. Tell him we’ve been playing shuffleboard and that the phone line is still having some trouble.” I nodded, suddenly unsure about making the call. I wasn’t a good liar. I always got nervous and said too much.

  The phone rang a few times before someone picked up. “Hello?” It was Julie. She sounded frazzled, like she was in the middle of making dinner. Which, based on the time, she probably was.

  When my parents had been together, we didn’t make a big thing about dinner, mostly because my father wasn’t home for it many nights and even when he was, my mother’s cooking left a lot to be desired. He and I would try to saw through overcooked steak or neatly spoon gloppy potatoes onto our plates while my mother eyed the dishes like they were traitors in her battle to conquer the kitchen. After my parents divorced, if I was with my dad we would go to a restaurant like Pizza Prince, or maybe the Brown Derby for something special. When I was staying with my mom, she would make something simple like spaghetti and sauce from a can, or something complicated involving lentils and avocado that she read about in a health guide. Then we’d eat with our books at the chipped kitchen table, occasionally piping up with an interesting comment about what we’d just read.

  But after my dad and Julie got married, Julie seemed to think an old-fashioned family dinner was the thing that would hold—or bring—the four of us together. In science class last year, we learned about mixtures. In a solution, one substance dissolves into another, like salt into water. A suspension is a mixture of a solid into a liquid—but you can separate the solid particles out, like sand and water. Then there are the things that simply cannot mix, like oil and water. You can combine them and shake up the container really well, and maybe for a minute or two it looks like they’ve come together nicely. But after a time, they’ll separate back out. Anyway, Julie seemed to think that if we got enough togetherness we all could become a solution—and perhaps my dad, Julie, and Sally would. But I felt like I was always going to separate out, so I didn’t need her to keep trying to combine us.