The Last True Love Story

by Brendan Kiely

  Corrina’s face went still. She glared at me and then shut the door in my face.

  I heard a knife chopping on a wooden block in the kitchen, and so, still clutching the flashlight, I opened the door to the closest bathroom and stood there listening until I heard the voices in the kitchen grow quiet and the bodies climbing the rickety ladder to the loft over the common room. I waited for a while and then stepped back out into the hall to go to Gpa’s (and now my) bedroom, but paused again when I heard a noise in the common room. Then I continued quickly, and pissed off, because I was pretty sure what I heard was the stone-crusher and Greggie breaking the rules.

  CHAPTER 16

  TEST DRIVE

  I woke in the morning as the only person in the room and panicked. I’d set my alarm, but obviously it was too late, and I leapt out into the hall and down to the kitchen without even looking at myself in the mirror.

  Gpa sat at the table in the kitchenette, sipping a cup of coffee. I hoped it was decaffeinated. The stone-crusher was standing by the sink, sipping her own cup of coffee, listening to him tell her a story. She was smiling and looked happy and well rested and so did Gpa. He’d even put his clothes on and shoes, and with the exception of white grizzle on his cheeks and chin, he looked as sharp as I’d seen him in days.

  “My God you can sleep in,” he said when he saw me. It was seven thirty. “Asya tells me she met you two last night.”

  Okay. Weird. My mind was still partly asleep, but I knew enough to deflect. “Where’s Old Humper?”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “Your mind,” Asya said to me.

  “He’s out back,” Gpa said. “Greg’s got him chasing down a Frisbee.” He smiled. “Where’s your friend?”

  “I don’t know. Is she up?”

  “No,” Asya said. She turned back to Gpa. “She sounds like she was a lovely woman, Charlie. You were a lucky man.”

  “I’m still a lucky man,” Gpa said. “I still love her. And every minute I ever had with her was worth it.”

  I heard a door open behind me, then another one, which quickly slammed shut, and then the shower ran. I joined Gpa at the table and poured myself a cup of coffee. Asya cut a thick slice of bread on the wooden block and brought it over to me. “Zucchini,” she said, and she pointed to the butter and jams on the table in front of me.

  When she had positioned herself back by the sink she continued. “I try to tell Greggie this. It is not all wine and roses, yeah? You have to be a person of faith. You have to believe you two are right for each other and you have to believe you will make it work no matter what—you both do. Right? I am a person of that faith. The faith in me and Greggie.”

  “That’s right,” Gpa said.

  I had my own thoughts about Greggie and what he might or might not have faith in, but I kept them to myself. I wondered how long they’d been talking and about what, and I feared it was a bad idea to stay somewhere people got to know us.

  “I wish she could have been here as I’ve been going through this Alzheimer’s, though,” Gpa continued. “She was my rock. She was so strong.”

  “Yes, she was,” Asya agreed.

  “How long have you two been talking?”

  “Since six thirty,” Gpa said. “Asya here is one heck of a hostess. Isn’t this bread delicious?” It was, but I was more worried that Asya had called the police when Gpa wasn’t looking.

  They spoke some more, this time Asya telling Gpa how she and Greggie met, and I kept looking at the hallway, waiting for Corrina to join us. Eventually she darted out of the bathroom, wrapped in a thick towel, and slammed the door to the bedroom behind her. When she joined us in the kitchen, she sat across the table from Gpa.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and stared at me. “Hendrix, you stink like a sack of rancid onions.”

  Nobody said anything else for a moment.

  “Good morning?” I said.

  “Teddy,” Gpa said. “Take that shower.”

  I was worried about what they would all talk about without me there, but I desperately needed a shower, and so I went to take one, but while I was scrubbing down the pits and trying to scrape all the rotten onion smell away, I couldn’t help thinking that it was Monday morning, the day Calypso thought I’d be back with Gpa from the reunion, and only two days before Mom got back from Shanghai. If Calypso called her today, which they might, she’d call me and ask what the hell was going on, and I’d have to tell her what was going on, or lie, but I wasn’t sure I could get away with it. I was so terrible at breaking rules—I didn’t know what I was doing.

  When I finally got back to the kitchen, wearing clean underwear and pink and flushed from the hot water and all that scrubbing with a hard bar of soap, Corrina and Gpa had the bags packed and stored in the car, and Gpa was sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch, waiting with Old Humper.

  Asya was packing food with Corrina. “You’re going to need this,” she said. “Long drive today, if you plan to make it all the way to Oklahoma City.” Corrina finished bagging the sandwiches and gave Asya a hug good-bye.

  “I’ll send you a file as soon as I can get it uploaded to a dropbox,” she said. “Come on, Hendrix,” she added when she turned to me. “We have miles to burn.” She wasn’t smiling at me exactly, but it was something like a smirk, and she breezed past me to the front door.

  Asya took me by the shoulders. This is it, I thought. Here comes the Judas kiss, the moment she tells me she called the cops and they’re down the street waiting for us and why am I such an incredibly awful person who thought he could get away with this crazy plan in the first place.

  But she didn’t. She mussed my now-clean and already perfectly mussed hair. “You are a good boy,” she said. “You take care of your grandfather.” She pulled me into a hug.

  “Yes.”

  Then she released me and I could breathe again. “Now go!” she shouted, and I obeyed.

  Once we were winding down the hill and on our way back out onto the highway, I finally began to breathe a little easier. Monday night: Tulsa. Tuesday night: Indianapolis. And Wednesday we’d have to make it all the way to Ithaca, if we could, before Mom figured out exactly where we were. And maybe, just maybe, I could hang on to the plan.

  We were nearly at the junction to get back onto the 40 when Corrina said, “You know what stinks? I have to drive the whole time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, man. You and your apologies.”

  “What can I do?” I said. “I am sorry I can’t drive. I wish I could!”

  “Hendrix, you have been beaten down by the rules so much you don’t know when to think for yourself. That’s sad, man. Sad.”

  “All right, pull over,” Gpa said from the backseat. Corrina glanced at him and continued toward the highway. “Pull over,” Gpa said again. She looked at me this time, and I nodded. She pulled over into the breakdown lane a couple hundred yards from the on-ramp to the interstate.

  “Now get out,” he said.

  The car was still running, and Corrina put it in park. “Uh, Charlie, look. I hope you’re not mad at me. I’m just trying to tell Hendrix here that he doesn’t have to always be so afraid of things and follow all the rules.”

  “To hell with the damn rules. Get out of the car.”

  “Gpa,” I said. “Don’t get mad at her.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “The two of you are driving me crazy. It’s infuriating to watch! Now,” he said to Corrina. “Get out of the car.”

  She did as he’d told her, and then he pushed the seat forward and began to climb out too. I jumped out of the car and ran around it to make sure he didn’t stumble into the traffic.

  “I’m driving,” he said. “Teddy, get me to Tulsa.”

  This was a terrible idea. “Gpa,” I said.

  “I’m feeling great, Teddy.”

  “I know, but—”

  “I drove this car more than your mother did when she first got it.”

  “
Okay, but—”

  “I’ve been driving my whole damn life, Teddy. It’s second nature. And highway driving is the easiest.”

  A truck rushed by in the lane closest to us and the wind it threw against us blew Gpa’s cap across the roof of the car. It wasn’t close enough that it could have hit us, but close enough for me to imagine that it could have. I watched it veer off to the right and join the traffic on the 40. Corrina ran around to the other side of the car to get the cap, before it caught the wind and flew off into the sweep of pine trees curling up over the hills on the far side of the highway.

  “Gpa,” I said. “I know you can drive. But I can’t let you.”

  “Teddy.”

  I took him by the arm, leaned closer, and whispered in his ear. “Please let me do this. I need your help.” I held on to his arm as I stood back. “Okay,” I said across the roof to Corrina. “Teach me how to drive.”

  As soon as I said it, Gpa began to climb into the backseat again. “Thank God,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Corrina asked. “You?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Hendrix,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

  Corrina drove the Blue Bomber to a huge, nearly empty parking lot in front of a Best Buy and a Home Depot, pulled into a space far away from the few cars that were parked near the stores, and turned the car off. We switched seats, and when I was in the driver’s seat, Gpa leaned forward and patted my shoulder. “Nothing to it,” he said.

  “Okay,” Corrina said. “Lesson one. Gas and brake.”

  She coached me, and Gpa did too, and after a few minutes of herky-jerky, slamming us into our seat belts and then back into our seats, I got the hang of the pedals and learned how to manage a fairly smooth transition, and then I got more comfortable steering and Corrina had me drive over to where cars were coming into the lot and had me merge with them so we could aim toward the store, and take a left, and after about an hour of all this, I began to feel a slight sense of what to do and Corrina urged me out onto the road, cheering, Yeah, Hendrix, yeah, getting me to accelerate until we came to a stop sign, and by some strange twist of cosmic fate the name of the cross street was Test Drive.

  “Take a left on Test Drive,” Corrina said, and laughed.

  I did, pulling out a little too quickly and making the wheels squeal, and maybe a little too close to the oncoming truck that was coming at us along Test Drive, but even though the blood in my veins moved faster than the Blue Bomber, I felt good. The brown hilltops spotted with green seemed to beckon me, and the clouds in the bright blue sky were like cars in traffic above me, moving quickly and smoothly, some rolling past others and all of them heading back behind us.

  We practiced for another hour on the roads around the neighborhood, until we came to a sign for Historic Route 66. It was an empty little two-lane highway running parallel to the 40.

  “This is it, Hendrix,” Corrina said. “Take it! All the way to Tulsa, baby!” She hooked up her phone and scrolled to a song and told me to step on it, and the music came on and she sang along with it, and I felt her voice moving through me, the dip and swing of her notes like the pulse of my blood, the hum of the Blue Bomber coming from the pedal and buzzing up through my leg, the crescendo in my stomach like the drop in my heart when she’d hushed and she’d breathed and she’d leaned toward my lips in the dark.

  She belted out along with the song. I knew enough now to know how much she loved Patti Smith. I even knew the stats, like she did: “Because the Night,” from Easter, 1978.

  “Okay, all right,” Gpa said from the backseat. “Teddy!” he yelled. “Slow down!”

  I hadn’t realized it, but I was pushing eighty and ripping past trees and meadows and the small shacks and the mud-wet gravel roads that curled off Historic Route 66. I eased up on the gas pedal and Corrina laughed and continued to sing along with the song, although she turned it down so we could hear each other without shouting.

  When the song finished, Corrina went back to Gpa’s playlist. “Sly and the Family Stone,” she told him. “1969. ‘Thank You.’ ”

  He nodded.

  “I’m still mad at you,” she said to me, with one corner of her face pulled up in a smirk. “But you are all right, Hendrix. You are all right.”

  She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, quickly and lightly, but between those lips was the entirety of the night before, and I was there again, alive and alert and alone in the tent with Corrina and the rest of the world in a still and quiet darkness beyond us.

  “New York, here we come!” Corrina shouted out the window, her hair trailing in the wind, and when the historic route fed into the highway, I aimed the Blue Bomber east toward Ithaca.

  CHAPTER 17

  A SHORTCUT

  We listened to: “Dancing in the Streets,” “Think,” “Route 66,” “Mustang Sally,” “Hit the Road Jack,” “Ramblin’ Man,” “Going Up the Country,” “Long-Distance Operator.” Then Corrina switched the list and told me it was time to listen only to women who rock: the Ronettes, the Supremes, the Shirelles, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Joan Jett, the Breeders, Heart, the Pretenders, Patti Smith, Bikini Kill, Melissa Etheridge, the Donnas, Flyleaf, Advaeta, Shingai Shoniwa, Cherry Glazerr, ZZ Ward, PHOX, Nadia Washington, Jessica Newry, and swinging all the way back to Dusty Springfield.

  I drove us clear across the shrub-gray emptiness of eastern Arizona, and by the time we were passing what was called the petrified forest, although there was nothing to see except the same flat, endless expanse all around us, my mind kept playing tricks on me, because as I looked into what should have seemed like the infinite stretch of land around the 40, I kept thinking I was driving the Blue Bomber toward a fixed point where the sky and the land became one, as if I was driving dead on into the surface of an enormous canvas and if I got there fast enough I might break right through the threads and discover what I was looking for beyond it.

  It was early afternoon as we approached the New Mexico border and lunar, multistrata buttes and enormous globular stone masses began to rise from the desert—lonely curved bodies stranded in time and empty space. The GPS told me that as we swung through the eastern reaches of Arizona into New Mexico, we were driving through Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni reservation land, and as I looked out at the small, square outlines of buildings almost floating on the crests of the wavelike hills, I thought about how far from other cities and towns these little homes were, how beautiful it must be to look out those windows every morning and see the world awaken over the desert expanse, but also how very distant the rest of the world might seem, and what that distance might mean.

  Corrina’s phone was our stereo always, sitting up on the dashboard in the dock, so it was all too easy to see when her father called, which he did, three times, and every time Corrina clicked his face off the screen, no interruption to the music, as if he couldn’t break through the wall of sound she threw up in front of him. But after she ignored his third call, he sent a text, which, although she reached to flick it off the screen, I still read:

  Don’t make me call the police.

  I was sure Gpa couldn’t read it from the backseat, and I glanced at Corrina, but she looked out the window, away from me, and we didn’t mention it. I watched her shoulders rise and fall as she leaned her head against the glass. I wanted to ask her about it, but I was afraid what Gpa would say if we clued him in, so I remained silent too. We didn’t even talk about it when we stopped for lunch, but all I could think about was her father’s threat, and that the police were already starting to look for us.

  We thought we’d have to eat at KFC, Pizza Hut, or Long John Silver’s, but we found a Route 66 Diner and decided that was the spot for us. Gallup was, at least at one time, called the Indian Capital of the World, but for two kids from West LA, the town seemed desolate and abandoned. In the small café, we saw photos of what must have once been downtown, brick buildings festooned with cartoonish signs, a junior-sized, cowboy version of Times Square, but all that was gone.

>   I wondered about that nickname for the town. I’d read somewhere that there are over five hundred different Native American tribes, each recognized as its own nation within the USA. It didn’t seem right to lump them all together. Who’d come up with the name? It occurred to me that for most of my life, I’d seen images on the sides of mugs, on t-shirts, on school bulletin boards, at rallies, and on football helmets—team names, mascots, not the people themselves. I felt gross. We’d been driving across mostly Navajo reservation land, and I told the guy behind the cash register they should change the sign to GALLUP: A CITY IMPORTANT TO NAVAJO, HOPI, AND ZUNI POPULATIONS. CHECK YOUR GUIDEBOOK FOR MORE FIRST NATIONS CAPITALS.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, glancing at me briefly before giving me my change. “I’ll try to tell somebody about that.”

  “You could,” I added, realizing just how unwelcome my comments were. We got the food to go and ate in, on, and standing near the parked car in the lot.

  After lunch, I offered to drive again, and Corrina didn’t mind, because she was sleepy with a food coma after her triple stack of chocolate-chip pancakes. With her bare feet perched up on the dashboard and the seat tipped back, she fell asleep beside me somewhere outside a place called Continental Divide. She’d dropped a Gpa list back on: Chuck Berry, War, the Band, Aretha Franklin, Fleetwood Mac, Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, Neil Young, Jefferson Airplane, Marvin Gaye, Little Richard. The band America played over the speakers for Gpa at one point, and while he occasionally sang a few lines along with the song, I thought about how we were crossing this continental divide in the simple rise and dip and rush of the road, and how by that night we’d be four states away from one home and halfway across the country to another.

  Eventually Gpa conked out too, and so when, shortly after we’d whipped through Grants, I saw a sign for a detour, I wasn’t sure if it meant a detour was approaching, or if the route was a detour from somewhere else. Our road continued straight ahead, and the GPS told me to continue on the 40, so I did. But as the highway cut and swooped through Laguna Pueblo territory, I saw another few signs telling me to turn off the 40 and onto Route 6. Still the GPS said to go straight, and I did, rushing past the last sign that was posted just after the sign for exit 126 to Los Lunas. After we shot under the overpass, the desert spread out around us, or rather swept in, as only shortly ahead of me, the gray dust of the desert and the gray asphalt of the highway became one. All of it seemed to tip up and into the clouds.