I looked at him.
“Sheesh, I know I’m never gonna win Citizen of the Month, but would you give me some credit? It’s late and we need a place to stay.”
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
“So have you.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. But I don’t see how you can be on your own and not do it.”
“You’re right,” I sighed. “But it wasn’t like this before. I was invited.”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“It’s true.” I picked at my fingernail. “I’ll tell you about it some other time.”
“We’ve got time now.”
“Is this … how you live?”
“Not every night. But yeah, sometimes.”
He wasn’t looking at me, but I felt like he was looking me over. “Well, I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I need this day to be over already.”
I sat on the edge of the waterbed, took out my journal, and added Andy’s name to my list. Lee appeared in the doorway, and when he made a running leap onto the mattress it rolled and sloshed beneath him. “A waterbed!” He turned onto his back, folded his arms behind his head, and smiled at me. “Now all we need is a mirror on the ceiling.”
I felt the warmth creeping into my cheeks, because if we had been different people—normal people—what he’d just said would have meant something. I lay down on the bed beside him, not too close but not at the very edge either. Being that near to him made me feel good. We were safe with each other, safe from each other. My ribs ached, but that sort of pain was easy to live with.
I must have been staring at him because he inched toward the far side of the bed and said, “What?”
I yawned. “I’m wondering if I made you up.”
He didn’t answer, just rolled over onto his back to stare at the ceiling, and the waterbed rippled beneath us. I closed my eyes and pretended we were drifting at sea. A ship rocking gently as a cradle on still water. The far-off horizon, blue on blue. A mermaid on a rock, running a comb made of shell through her silvery hair.
A little while later I opened my eyes. “Do you remember your first time?”
“Yeah. You?”
“I was too little. I think I can remember it sometimes, but I don’t think it’s real.”
“Why, did somebody tell you about it? Your mom?”
I nodded. “When I got older I asked why she never went anyplace like the other mothers. She said she couldn’t ever leave me with anybody—not after what happened.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Mine was the babysitter too.”
* * *
Lee wasn’t beside me when I woke up. I found him on the sofa in the den, snoring softly with his mouth wide open, and felt a pang of what felt suspiciously like disappointment.
I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, but all I found was beer and ketchup. I took the box of Ellio’s out of the freezer, turned on the toaster oven, and laid four squares of pizza on the rack.
A moment later someone pounded on the door. I dropped to a crouch on the grimy linoleum, my heart in my throat. This was it.
“Barry!” a woman shouted. “Where’s the check, Barry? Do you even care if your daughter has enough to eat?”
I sighed. No reckoning for us today—nor for Barry, come to think of it. Maybe Lee had done him a favor. I could see her, whoever she was, squinting through the ruffled red curtain across the front window. She couldn’t see Lee on the sofa, or at least she couldn’t tell he wasn’t Barry. I caught a glimpse of disheveled dark hair and darting eyes.
“I know you’re home, you asshole!”
Lee opened his eyes, looked at me, dropped quietly off the sofa onto the carpet, and came over to join me.
The screen door hinges screeched in protest as she pounded on the front door. “Open up, you useless piece of shit!” She jiggled the knob, and I was really glad I’d locked it the night before.
“Look.” He pulled back the curtain on the side window and pointed to the Subaru hatchback in the driveway. “She’s got her kid in the car. Jesus.”
I thought back over the rest of the house. There were no toys, no board books, no tiny T-shirts or Velcro shoes. His child had never stayed there.
“What should we do?” I whispered. There was another door at the back of the kitchen, but a chain-link fence ran around the backyard and I knew we couldn’t get away without her seeing us.
“You stupid, lazy-ass son of a bitch!” She kicked the door and gave the screen door one last slam. “You’re not gonna get away with it this time, Barry. I’m coming back with the cops!”
We heard her get into her car and drive off. Then we gathered our things and went outside. “Shit,” Lee said. She’d slashed one of the front tires.
“What are we going to do?”
He hopped up onto the truck bed, bent over, and picked up a spare tire. “Had it together enough to have a spare. Which is kind of surprising, knowing Barry as we do.” Lee smirked to himself. “Good thing she was too pissed off to notice it was back here. Gimme a hand?”
He passed me the tire and opened the cargo box to look for the tools he’d need. He found the jack and lug wrench and hopped down off the flatbed.
“What if she comes back while you’re working on it?”
He laid the tools on the asphalt and pried off the hubcap. “Around here it takes at least twenty minutes to get anyplace. I can change this in seven minutes flat.”
“Can you really?”
I watched his jaw clench as he pumped up the jack. “Go ahead and time me.”
“I believe you,” I said. I didn’t time him, but seven minutes seemed about right. He worked quickly, with confidence in every movement. I wondered if his dad was a mechanic.
“We’ll have to get a new tire, but I think we should drive a ways first. Can’t have anybody recognizing this truck.”
He left the slashed tire in the driveway. We got inside and Lee turned the key in the ignition. “I need to go home,” he said.
“Where’s home?”
“A place called Tingley, in Virginia. Just over the Kentucky border. Where did you say you were headed?”
“Minnesota.”
“You in a hurry?”
I shrugged. I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping my hope under wraps.
“I really do need to get back, even if just for a few hours,” he went on. “Then I can take you where you need to go. It’s a lot of driving, but I’m up for it if you are.”
I thrilled to the ends of my fingertips. I couldn’t help it. “You mean … you want me to come with you? Back to Virginia?”
“Unless you got something better to do,” he said dryly.
I wiped away my smile with the back of my hand.
“I’m not saying we’re friends or anything. I just think it’s good to have someone to look out for you.”
“Isn’t that what a friend is?”
“Wouldn’t know,” he said. “Never had one.”
“Sure you have.”
“Why? How many friends have you had?”
I looked out the window. “I make friends,” I said. “I just can’t keep them.”
I felt him flick me a look. That’s what I thought.
“Shoot,” I said. “I left the pizza in the toaster oven.”
* * *
For several miles we drove in silence. A flock of birds came whirling up out of a meadow ringed in fir trees. Lee glanced over. “You said the last time you’d stayed in somebody’s house you were invited.”
“You want to hear the whole story?”
“We got plenty of time.” When he yawned, a long, extravagant yawn, it made him look for a second like he was six years old. “But you should start at the beginning. If you start telling me a bunch of stories all out of order I’m gonna get confused.” He shot me a sideways glance. “Where you from?”
“I was born in Wisconsin, but we moved all over.”
“Oh,” he said
. “I get it.”
“I went to Pennsylvania after my mom left. I figured she’d gone to her parents’ house.” I paused. “I never met my grandparents. But they sent her birthday and Christmas cards, and one time I saved the envelope.”
“Was she there?”
I nodded.
“Did you talk to her?”
“No.”
He gave me a sympathetic look. “Prob’ly best.”
* * *
We stopped for breakfast at a diner along the highway and ordered eggs, bacon, and home fries from a waitress with a smoker’s rasp who kept calling us both “hon.” She was probably half as old as she looked. Lee ordered a coffee so I did too, even though I’d never really liked the taste when Mama let me try it.
Once the waitress had brought our mugs I began to tell him about Mrs. Harmon, how I’d met her at the supermarket and helped her with her groceries and how she’d fed me and promised to teach me how to knit. The coffee tasted bitter even with one of those tiny white cups of half and half, so I dumped in a second and gave it a stir. I told him about going for a nap, getting up again and finding her, you know, and then getting up again and seeing Sully bent over her. I was very careful with the words I used. I never forgot we were in public. Lee didn’t comment, but I could tell he was listening to me—really listening. No matter what he called himself, I knew he was my friend.
Our breakfast came. “Never expected to meet somebody like me,” Lee said as he munched on a slice of bacon. “Can you imagine how surprised I was when I walked out into the parking lot and saw you in that guy’s car?”
I dropped my eyes and wrung my paper napkin. “Please don’t remind me.”
“You never did it in a car before?” He reached for another slice. “Don’t be embarrassed. After a minute nobody can see what you’re doing with all the windows fogged up. I just happened to catch you at the start.”
I felt myself getting hot in the cheeks again. We’d only met yesterday and I knew hardly anything about him, but we understood each other as we talked around the bad thing we both did. Somebody eavesdropping from the next booth over would have thought I was the kind of girl to do things with boys in the backseat of a car, and for a second I wished I was that kind of girl. Better a slut than a monster.
I cleared my throat. “You’ve really never met anybody else who…?”
“Nope,” he said. “You’re the first.”
“You would be too, except for Sully.”
“What was he like, anyway? Did you get along?”
“Yup, pretty well.” I mopped up an egg yolk with a slice of toast. “He’s all right. Weird, but all right.”
“Guess it’s easy to get weird when you’re traveling on your own. What sort of eater is he?”
“That’s just it,” I said slowly. “He isn’t like us. He says he can smell it on somebody, when they’re about to die, and then he … you know.”
Lee raised an eyebrow. “And you believe him?”
“He didn’t give me any reason not to.” I frowned. “That’s how it happened with Mrs. Harmon. That morning he saw us on the bus, and he just knew.”
He sipped pensively at his coffee. “There are all kinds, I guess. It’s funny how I never thought to wonder about any of it before.” Lee set down his mug and ran a finger along his plate to catch a few stray bits of bacon. “How come you and he parted ways?”
“He said I could go along with him, but I wanted to find my dad first.”
“Your dad’s the reason you’re going to Minnesota?”
I nodded.
“You think your father was one of us, and that’s why he had to leave you?”
I nodded again, but when he put it that way I felt a little foolish, like it was much too tidy an explanation.
“How do you know he’s in Minnesota?”
“I don’t. I just know it’s where he’s from.”
“Might take you a while to find him, then. If you find him.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t find my dad. I couldn’t afford to think like that, so I thought of how he would play Beatles records for me on weekend mornings as he cooked us a breakfast like the one I’d just had, only better. Absently, under my breath, I hummed the chorus of “Eleanor Rigby.” The waitress came by, and Lee smiled up at her as she refilled his coffee. She walked away and he took a swig, his eyes on the Formica.
“So why are you going home?” I asked. “Just visiting your family?”
“Sort of. I’ve promised to give my sister some driving lessons before she takes her test.”
“Do you get home often?”
“Not often, no.”
“How long have you been on your own?”
“Left when I was seventeen.”
“How old are you now?”
“Nineteen.” He paused and looked me over like he was seeing me for the first time. “What are you—fifteen? Sixteen?”
“Sixteen,” I replied stiffly. Looking younger couldn’t be a good thing when you were out on your own. “What’s your sister’s name?”
“Kayla. She’s a good girl.” I could almost see him weighing the facts in his head and separating them into piles—what to tell me, what not to. “We got different fathers,” he said finally. “My mom, well … she’s like that.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Why d’you think?”
I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “I can’t see how you were a danger to them.”
“Doesn’t matter. I know what I am.” He downed his coffee, raised his eyebrows, and tilted his head toward the door.
We paid our bill and climbed back into the truck. Lee switched on the radio and fiddled with the dial until he found a song he could drive to. “You like Shania Twain?”
“Sure.” It was a bright sunny morning now. We passed field after field of freshly turned soil, the air filled with the peaceful drone of a tractor. The world felt new again. I thought of Barry Cook’s baby daughter and hoped her mother wasn’t always that angry. I hoped she’d find another man, a nice man, somebody who didn’t drink too much and curse at strangers in the candy aisle.
We were into Illinois when Lee decided it was safe to stop for a new tire. We parked at a service station, and he went inside.
I kicked at an empty pack of Marlboros and looked around the inside of the truck. Disgusting, of course. Not only had Barry Cook been King of the Fast-Food Drive-In, he apparently couldn’t tell the difference between his truck and a garbage can. Every time he finished a meal he tossed the take-out bag on the passenger’s-side floor. The only nasty thing I couldn’t blame on Barry Cook was the white and blue Walmart bag stuffed under the driver’s seat.
It looked like we’d be spending the better part of our days in here, so I figured I might as well tidy it up. I scrounged up a plastic bag and started collecting the cigarette packs, McDonald’s burger wrappers, and empty soda cups. I’d gathered three bulging bags’ worth by the time I got out of the truck to toss them in the Dumpster along with the remnants of Andy’s clothes.
Lee came out and suggested we go for some necessaries while we were waiting on the mechanic. From a hardware store across the road he bought a ten-gallon water canister, and the owner let him fill it at a pump out back. There was also a Dumpster brimming with wood scraps, and while the canister was filling up, Lee peered inside and fished out a big piece of plywood.
“What’s that for?”
“Truck bed.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll see.”
When the mechanic was finished, Lee took out Barry’s wallet to pay the bill and we went back out to the truck.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you change the license plates?”
“Got them changed, for an additional fee.” He laughed a little. “Otherwise we can’t keep driving it.”
I raised an eyebrow. Lee looked at me and laughed again. “And just who crowned you queen of all that’s good and proper?”
* * *
By nightfall we were two hours into Kentucky. “How do you feel about sleeping out of doors? There’s a state park entrance not too far from here. It’s safe. I’ve slept there before.”
“What do you do when it’s cold out?”
He smiled. “Head south.”
We took the turnoff for the state park, but I didn’t see any signs for campsites. Lee pulled into a small lay-by in front of a signboard of the local flora and fauna, with blue arrows along the various walking routes you could take to appreciate them. “Do you have a tent?” I asked.
“Don’t need one. We can sleep in the back.”
When he’d said truck bed I hadn’t realized he meant it literally. “What if somebody finds us?”
“They won’t. We’ll be gone first thing in the morning.”
“Why plywood though?”
“Even in the summer the metal can get pretty cold at night. No sense buying a piece of foam—it’ll fall to pieces in no time and it’s not that much more comfortable anyway.”
“You think of everything,” I said, and he shrugged.
“Once you find yourself out and alone without the things you need, you get practical pretty fast.” I watched him draw all sorts of useful things out of his rucksack: a sleeping bag and a spare blanket, a flashlight, a tin pot, a fistful of Bic lighters (“Mementos,” he said with that twist in his lip), and a tiny propane camp stove. “How’s bean soup sound for dinner?”
“Perfect,” I said. Like magic, two tin cups, two spoons, and a packet of soup mix appeared out of the rucksack, which was still quite full. Lee laid everything out on an old picnic table scarred with the initials of people who were, most likely, no longer in love. The forest was alive with the hum of the cicadas. In the gathering darkness my new friend cooked our meal while I grabbed his flashlight so I could write in my journal.
“Lee?”
“Yeah?”
“What were you doing in Iowa?”
“Do you always ask this many questions?”
“Pretty much.” I paused. “If you ever feel like ditching me, will you please just say so?”
Lee cocked his head. “What kind of a question is that?”
I told him about Samantha, hoping he’d say he’d never feel like ditching me. He only said, “I don’t like people who go back on their word,” but that seemed as good as a promise.
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