by Zoe Chant
“How about that one?” Rigo asked, then added hastily, “Of course we can choose whatever you like.”
Godiva’s mouth was already watering. “May as well get authentic Southwestern while we’re actually in the southwest.”
She stepped out of the car into the stunning heat. It felt good for a few seconds, after the steady air conditioning in the car, but she was ready for air conditioning again as they walked into a diner whose décor hadn’t changed much since the forties. But the place was clean, with nearly every booth and table filled, and the smells were enticing.
Over fresh-picked squash calabacitas and blue-corn cheese enchiladas drenched in chile sauce, he kept up the conversation about his favorite mysteries. No personal questions.
The talk ran out as the plates emptied. Godiva had already calculated her share, and plunked down enough to cover her food and her half of the tip.
Rigo looked up at her, with a half-smile. “I think I’m able to cover my part of the tip.”
“Then add it,” Godiva answered. “I always tip well—I was a waitress. I know how hard they work. I figure my overage covers some cheap-ass who doesn’t bother, or who leaves a gigantic mess and fifty cents.”
Rigo’s brows rose. “I never thought of that.” And he matched the amount she’d laid down. No argument, no mansplaining.
It made her feel good . . . until she climbed into the car, noted the darkness, and wondered if he was about to suggest they get a motel now. That meant a long evening stretching ahead. Would he expect her company or would they sit alone in rooms side by side as the hours ticked by before falling asleep?
He started up the car, then said, “How about this? The tank is full, and so are we. I figure we’re good for another hundred miles or so. If you want to get in some of the scenic route, we can take the 93 to Kingman, then follow the 40, and maybe even some of Route 66 east to the Grand Canyon.”
“Kingman Arizona,” Godiva said reminiscently. “I remember that city. When I was there, it was like the town that time forgot.”
“I was told it’s the thunderstorm capital of the United States, though when I blew through on my drive west, the sky was clear as a bell. Wouldn’t mind stopping there again, if you’d maybe like to cruise the rim of the Grand Canyon tomorrow?”
“I’ve never seen it,” she said. “I was on the Greyhound, stopping along this part of the world in the middle of the night. If they took the scenic route, I never saw any of it.”
“Grand Canyon it is.”
Chapter 10
RIGO
Rigo fought his damndest against letting the mate bond connect to her thoughts. It was a little like holding yourself at attention without ever relaxing into an ‘at ease’ but he was afraid that Godiva might sense him there, and get spooked.
She was still skittish, he could feel that much despite his best efforts. His basilisk waited silently, constantly on the alert inside him. Yes, he knew that the basilisk and he were one and the same. It’s just that he’d fought against it for so long as he was growing up that he knew he was never going to lose that sense that he and his animal were two separate beings.
Anyway, the basilisk, separate or part of him, was no help now. Finding a way back to Godiva’s trust was a 100% human project. It wasn’t going to happen with claws that could tear metal, a beak that could snap a pine in two, or eyes that burned anything living to ash.
So far, the day had gone better than he’d let himself hope. She was still wary, but he’d expected that. Now, as his flying goddess hood ornament—which looked to him like a shifter—sliced through the crystal clear night, flashes of headlights lancing past in the other direction, the quiet slowly became a silence.
He glanced over from time to time. At first Godiva sat upright, her slight form erect. In the dimness of the car the years softened her contours, though her white hair gleamed softly. When he first met her, she was eighteen going on ageless. It was he who’d been completely clueless. The drink and the basilisk had kept him from coming within speaking range of a woman, but then one day on the Texas border, there she was, with that same profile as she hitched herself up on the makeshift corral fence to watch the horses.
In this light, she was again ageless, sublimely, wonderfully herself:
But when he glanced again, it was to see her head nod, then jerk upright. Once, then twice. Then she glanced his way.
He said, “Go ahead and snooze if you like. Kingman isn’t that far now.”
She sat up straight again, saying, “And snore like a hog in a bog? Or even better, drool all over your fine leather seats? I wouldn’t blame you if you booted me right out of the car.”
“I can promise you there will be no booting,” he said, trying not to laugh. “If you want, I can try to find a rap station to play. Alejo saw to it this car has a first class sound system. Some rap, heavy on the bass, should keep us alert.”
“It’s okay,” she said, her dark eyes gleaming briefly in the light of a car passing on the other side. “Though I like a lot of rap. It makes me think of those old Viking bards and poets, who used to be able to turn out rhymes by the hour. Rappers do the same.”
“Where did you learn about Viking bards?”
“While I was living in the Bay Area I used to take all kinds of classes,” she said. “One class was on early epics. Wow, those old eddas and epics were bloody-minded.”
He waited for her to say why she’d been taking those classes, but she stopped there. As usual.
If she needed to steer clear of the personal, then that’s what they’d do.
He admitted that the best musical ballads he’d ever heard were all in Spanish, and yep, most of those were either revenge tragedies, or romantic tragedies, but for great melodies strummed by a bunch of guitars, they couldn’t be beat.
They talked about those until they saw Kingman’s lights appear between dark mountain slopes.
He chose the first likely-looking motel. When he pulled their cases out of the trunk, he saw she had her purse at her side and her wallet in hand, and she didn’t relax until they got inside and he asked the bored night clerk for two rooms.
Outside the rooms, which were next to each other, he wished her a good night and let himself into his. The motel room was like motel rooms everywhere, smelling of various cleaning solvents. He opened the windows wide to the soft summer air, took a shower to get rid of the dust of the drive, and climbed between cool sheets. His phone blinked, and he found the expected text from Alejo: How’s it going?
We reached Kingman. Tomorrow Route 66 and Grand Canyon. It wasn’t really an answer, but Rigo figured, either say everything, or just wait.
He dropped the phone onto the nightstand and lay there alone in the bed, as he had for uncounted years. He wondered if she was doing the same—no, he wouldn’t go there, even in mind. He hadn’t earned back the right.
He closed his mind to the homing instinct, punched the pillow, turned over, and was soon asleep.
Morning brought heat pouring in through the windows, driven by the sun. For a few seconds he forgot where he was, then he remembered Godiva in the next room. He got up and hustled through the shower, his intent to have everything ready to go as soon as she appeared. Make it as easy as possible for her, in hopes she wouldn’t have second thoughts and feel abandoned in the middle of nowhere.
He’d abandoned her once. He wasn’t going to do it again if he could possibly avoid it.
He shoved into some fresh clothes, and ventured out. Then hesitated. Should he knock on her door, or not?
A hot breeze sent a tumbleweed skittering across the rutted gravel parking lot. The motel was a one-story adobe building with tile roofs and a diner at the far end, and jutting mountains beyond. As he lifted his eyes to their hazy purple shape, the sunlight abruptly dimmed. In the distance, thunder muttered, a low sound like a cosmic bowling ball rumbling across the heavens.
Fat drops of rain spattered on the ground, and one hit his face.
He d
ecided the easiest course was to scope out the diner. If it looked terrible, he’d do some exploration on Yelp for suggestions. He crossed the parking lot in a few strides, entered the diner, and met the smells of ground coffee and fresh bread.
He picked up a menu and was halfway through scanning it when he felt a presence at his side.
Here she was, a straight-backed little figure dominated by those expressive black eyes, now framed by white hair. She wore a loose floaty thing in that shade of green-blue he’d sometimes heard call teal, over loose black linen pants and sandals, with her painted toes peeking out. The color matched her top. A shiver ran through him, he wanted so badly to take her into his arms, warm and soft and vital.
But he reached for a polite smile. “Sleep well?”
“Like I was bonked over the head and dropped like a rock,” she said. “Now I’m starved.”
“I was just checking out the menu. They don’t offer much, but from what I see, everything is fresh, and smells good.”
“Lead me to it,” she said.
They were the only ones in the small diner. Godiva ordered an omelet, coffee, and fresh fruit slices, then leaned her elbows on the table and peered across the table at Rigo.
“Okay,” she said, taking him once again by surprise. “Fair’s fair. You haven’t asked me a damned thing, outside of have I read Raymond Chandler. Go ahead. Shoot.”
“I figured you’d talk when you were ready,” he said, easing his way along this new path.
She shrugged. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
He didn’t speak right away, but took the time to set his coffee cup down if the fate of the world required precision, as his mind raced.
Godiva merely waited.
He looked up, his head a little tilted, then said, “All the way across the US I kept reordering the questions I wanted to ask once I found you. Outside of the first question, they kept changing—because I didn’t know what the answer to Number One would be. Though I imagined hundreds of possible answers. Just, not the one you gave me.”
“Which is? Though I think I probably know.”
“What we’re on the way to find out, why you never wrote back to Alejo.”
“But I did write,” she stated.
“I said it wrong. Why your letters, and his, crossed. No, they didn’t cross, because that would mean they landed.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding seriously, but with no return of her initial anger. “No, I get what you mean. What did you think?”
That could be a leading question, but he shook that thought away. She had never been the kind to insinuate something. She’d always come right out with it.
So he said, “I completely understood not wanting to communicate with me ever again. But I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t answer Alejo’s letters.”
“Totally fair,” she said.
He paused as the food was set down before them. When they were alone again, he continued. “I know it’s ridiculous to talk about the mother-son bond as if it’s the same for everyone. I knew that growing up.”
Here, her eyes flicked between his. “You never told me anything about your childhood, other than admitting we’d had the same kind of dad.”
“For my mother, the world revolved around my older brother. She never saw that he was a bully and a thug. Like my father. He signed up as soon as World War I started, thinking the war was one giant carnie shooting gallery. When a bomb took him out in France, the life went out of her. I did my damndest to please her, but she wasted away. By then Dad was in jail. I left home the day after her funeral.”
He sighed. “But everything Alejo told me about the two of you during his childhood convinced me that you two were tight. That you cared deeply. Well, the fact that you kept moving when he got bullied, or when someone slandered or threatened the two of you—the care you took in renting that post office box in the first place—convinced me that you were pacing a hole in the street wanting to hear from him.”
“I was,” she whispered. “I was. I went out every single night to search, until I got the first post card. And then when they stopped, I waited a year, saving every penny. And when no more came, I headed west toward the last place he’d been, San Francisco.”
“So . . . what happened when you got out west?” he asked. “Not about the letters. You told me you never got any. How about we set aside the questions about why until we reach the Midwest. But . . . your life?”
She sat back. “Where to start?”
“Well, how about this: can you drive? Do you want to drive? I can do all the driving if necessary, but I remember your enthusiasm about luxury cars in the old days.”
“I can drive. I learned on a stick,” she said. “Well, everybody did, back then. But I, ah, don’t actually have a driver’s license.”
He’d been about to get up from his chair, and paused, surprised. “You don’t?”
She sidled him a guilty look that was so adorable it took everything he had not to grab her up and hug her right there. Instead, as she moved toward the door, he opened it like a gentleman.
They walked out, wind whipping fretfully at them as thunder growled toward the north, though to the south—the direction they were driving in—the sky was completely clear.
She said, “I never had a birth certificate, and after I left Hidalgo, I didn’t keep the same name longer than two or three years at a time, for various reasons.”
She flickered a troubled glance his way, and he knew instinctively that at least one reason had been a fear that he would swoop in and take away their son. After all, when had she been able to trust the men in her life?
But all he said was, “Alejo’s told me about some of the troubles you had.”
“The single mother stigma was so heavy in the fifties, especially if you were poor, and not white. Not that that is news. But I caught a real break when a good-hearted woman hired me as a governess for her four-year-old. She was Spanish—from Madrid—her English minimal, and her husband was away all the time, traveling for his company. I figured out fast what she really needed was company in that huge house. She insisted that our kids play together, learning Spanish and English equally. She’s the one who taught me to drive. But then her husband got transferred to Europe, she up and moved, and I was out looking for work again. New names, new places.”
She paused at the door of her room, the wind teasing the fine strands of her white hair that had escaped her braid. “When I got out west, I had no money for a car. I hitchhiked a lot, if I was with others, and when alone, got used to public transportation.”
Godiva keyed the door open, and there was her suitcase, packed and waiting. She pulled it out as she said, “By the time a friend gave me an old clunker that her boyfriend had given her, well, for a while there I just drove without a license. That old rattletrap had certainly never been registered. For a long time that wasn’t that much of an issue in California, until things got computerized.”
She followed him to his room as he collected his gear. She was still talking. “The last time I drove a long distance was when I took the coast route, looking for a new home. My first thought was to head for Mexico, but I stopped overnight in Playa del Encanto, and somehow I never left.”
“So you’re not street-legal?” he asked over his shoulder as he stowed their stuff in the trunk—he noticed this time she let him heft hers in.
He smothered a laugh. Somehow the idea of her living by her own rules was just so . . . Godiva. Funny, how fast he’d gotten used to her name, even after years of thinking of her as something else. Maybe it was because Shirley had always seemed a borrowed name, or a label, but Godiva was somehow so very her.
“I’ll have you know I am now a perfectly legal, tax-paying citizen of our republic,” she stated in mock pomposity. “Though I did live off the grid until the books started selling, and I got an agent. Sterling woman, and as savvy as they come. She talked me through the vast wasteland of red tape before I could get legal. I pay my taxes, or th
e accountant she turned me onto does. But I never got around to memorizing that booklet of traffic laws and rules, and then age crept up on me and I was convinced that anyone applying for their first license over the age of eighty would get thrown out on her ear. So I decided I’d better not drive except for a few blocks here and back, to keep my hand in. But if you want me to take my share—drive the boring parts, so you can nap—I can do that.”
“A generous offer, but I actually find it relaxing to go on long drives. That Los Angeles traffic, not so much. New York is even worse.”
“Oh, you should try San Francisco,” she said.
“I did. Swore I’d never return, at least to those streets. All of them seemed to be one way, always the opposite way I wanted to go. And the hills!”
They laughed as he pulled onto the highway. A brief spatter of hail tinkled over the car, a spectacular rainbow stretching off toward the mountains. “It looks like the Grand Canyon area is still clear,” he said, and when she assented, he said, “I take it you went back to school?”
“Sort of,” she said. “Since I had no legitimate ID, I couldn’t go to a regular school, but in those days, there was plenty of alternative education everywhere you turned. You pretty much got what you paid for. There was a lot of hippie claptrap and woo as well as people who genuinely loved to teach. You just had to pick and choose.”
“Is that where you started writing?”
“Not right away,” she said. “I always liked telling myself stories in my head. Pretending I wasn’t a throwaway kid slubbing away in a greasy spoon, I was a runaway heiress hiding—I was a spy against a gangster ring—I was anything but what I was. Usually I fantasized about whatever I saw in the latest show at the Odeon.”
“I remember the Odeon. That was our only escape from the Texas heat.” He stopped, wincing. Would the reminder of their time together cause her to clam up?