by Emily Adrian
“I love Ohio,” I say, buckling my seatbelt.
“You hate Ohio,” Carrie reminds me.
“That too.”
As kids, she and I were constantly doing things together that we could have accomplished alone. Our homework, our chores. It was typical for one of us to read magazines in a waiting room while the other had a cavity filled. As we’re driving home, I try to thank Carrie for taking me shopping, and my voice catches.
“Are you crying?” Carrie asks.
“No.”
Jack is already passed out in his car seat. If I bring the whole thing into the house, maybe I can park him next to the bed and take a nap.
“Sheesh,” Carrie says, accelerating through a yellow light. “Hormonal, much?”
* * *
It’s the gold standard of naps. We sleep through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. When Jack does finally wake up, it’s with a few mild squawks. I pat the mattress blindly before remembering he’s still in his car seat on the floor. Normally we sleep together, our breathing synced. My lips against his forehead or his mouth on my breast. The risk of the blankets smothering him has never seemed as real to me as the risk of letting too much space get between us.
He kicks his legs as I lift him from his car seat.
“Are you so, so happy?” I ask him. “Should we go to Walmart every day from now on? Is it the most stimulating place in the world?”
He smiles at me for the first time. It’s sloppy and asymmetrical, but I know my child’s grin when I see it. I spend the next ten minutes squealing at him, trying to capture his smile with my phone. Though his mouth widens frequently, his joy eludes the camera, and I end up with fifty photos of my baby looking stunned, perplexed, or gassy.
We exit the bedroom and try to find Carrie, but the house feels empty. The groceries have been put away, the lights turned off. I knock on Nina’s closed door.
“Yeah?” she says.
I let myself into the room. Nina is flat on her bed, holding her phone inches from her face. “Any idea where your mom went?”
“Picnic.”
“Carrie went on a picnic?” Jack reacts to my raised voice, looking up at me like I’m about to reveal the punch line to a ghost story.
“Such a hypocrite, right?”
I blink. It takes me a second to remember Nina’s fight with her mother. And while it does seem unreasonable that Carrie would hold Nina hostage at home while picnicking elsewhere, I accept that the nuances of the conflict are lost on me.
“With whom?”
Nina lets her phone fall to the mattress. “With Tyler.”
I hear the name Tyler less and less since I left the Midwest, but it always makes me think of the first boy I ever kissed, during our eighth-grade graduation dance. The song was “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias. I spent its four minutes and eleven seconds concerned that pit stains were seeping through my dress, the ensuing summer listening to the same song on a Discman and hoping to catch Tyler performing ollies in the school parking lot.
I kissed him three times total. Tyler Cox of Deerling, Ohio.
“Wait,” I say to Nina, my heart suddenly pounding. “Tyler Cox?”
She smirks. Tyler’s own coping method—on the advice of his older brother, Damien—had been to own the surname, to replace the x with a c-k-s, no matter how many detentions the trick earned him. “Yes.”
My jaw falls open. “Christ. No wonder she didn’t tell me.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“Well, I kissed him first, for starters.”
Nina rolls her eyes. “Aren’t you basically married?”
“Um, yeah?”
“So, maybe it’s time to let go of the past.”
“Nina, if I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t be here.”
She looks pained, like I’ve said something about my own bodily fluids or mental health.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I ask, energized. Carrie going out with a fully grown Tyler Cox is a lot of things—ridiculous, primarily—but it’s also, I suspect, a personal attack. “We could drive to Cleveland if you want. See a movie.”
Propped up on her elbows, Nina frowns. “Won’t he cry?”
In my agitation over Carrie and Tyler, I have forgotten about my infant son. With one hand cupped beneath his butt, I jiggle him up and down, as if to prove to Nina that I am a fully engaged parent. Nina, who, I’m sure, wants nothing more than for her own mother to disengage.
“Maybe not a movie,” I admit. “And maybe not Cleveland.”
In silence, she waits for me to revise my offer.
“Want to go to the drive-in?” I ask.
The fridge is brimming with fresh produce, the freezer with pizzas and pot pies. We have no reason to spend even a minimal amount of money on fast food, but after a second of deliberation, Nina swings her legs over the bed, pats her braids, and says, “Let’s go.”
Again she rides shotgun, and again I don’t have the nerve to ask if she’s allowed. She rides with the soles of her sneakers pressed against the glove compartment—something Carrie used to do too. Nina is alarmed to discover my car has no Bluetooth, no auxiliary input. Even the CD player is broken. Gabe and I bought ourselves a pre-owned 2005 Subaru so we’d have a cheap way to drive to Ohio and back a few times a year. In the weeks before Jack was born, we used it for trips to Ikea and to get to my final prenatal appointments. I had developed a fear of going into labor on the subway. I was worried about getting stuck underground and delivering on the sticky floor of the M train.
If I had understood how much time would pass between the first contraction and Jack’s first breath, I could have commuted in peace.
“What do you guys do?” Nina asks. “Sing to yourself?”
“Sometimes. Or we listen to the radio.”
She looks at me like I’ve suggested churning our own butter.
“Don’t knock it till you try it,” I say.
With an uncertain hand, she scans the stations. “Christian, Christian, country, Christian,” she summarizes.
It’s a side effect of growing up in rural Ohio, the ability to recognize a Christian rock song in three seconds flat. The production is canned, the vocals generic. The first discernible word is always grace.
“The options are better in New York,” I tell her.
Solemnly, we listen to a song about a girl with a body like a backhoe.
“Is that even a good thing?” I ask, after a couple of verses. “Isn’t a backhoe sort of . . . ungainly?”
“A body like a back road,” Nina clarifies. “Not a backhoe.”
When the chorus returns we both dissolve, and we’re still laughing as we pull into a spot outside the Deerling Drive-in. fire dogs, coneys, and more! Almost instantly, a waitress a few years older than Nina mimes for me to roll down my window. She rotates her fist in the air, and I wonder if she knows the origin of that gesture, if she’s ever been in a car without power windows.
“Hey, Neen,” the girl says, leaning into the Subaru.
Nina shuts off the radio. “Hey.”
“This your mom?” The girl’s dyed black hair has been chopped into jagged layers. The shortest pieces graze her chin; the longest touch her shoulder blades.
“No,” Nina answers quickly, without explaining who I am. “Could I get two coneys with extra onions? And a root beer?”
The girl scribbles Nina’s order onto a sticky note. “And yourself?”
“I’ll have the same, but with an average number of onions, please,” I say.
“Coolness,” she says and skips back toward the kitchen. Nothing about the Deerling Drive-in has changed in the last decade. Not even the prices. I remember my dad complaining that two bucks per hot dog was about a buck too much.
“That’s Maxine’s sister,” Nina says. “Trinity.”
I remain silent.
“I know,” Nina says. “They sound like strippers.”
“Why does Maxine’s sister work at the drive-in? Aren’t they rich?”
“The parents, not the kids.”
My laughter is condescending. “That’s not how that works.”
Nina shrugs. “They get, like, no allowance. Neither of them ever has cash.”
In the back, Jack is growing restless. I can hear him raking his tiny fingernails along the water-resistant interior of his car seat. I’m trying to become Nina’s friend, her confidante, and I’m failing.
Trinity reappears and affixes an aluminum tray to the lowered window. Atop the tray she unfurls a red rubber mat and arranges our coneys in their paper boats, our root beers in their glass steins. She uses several packets of soda crackers to anchor a stack of napkins. The crackers are in case we feel our chili-cheese-onion hot dogs lack texture.
“Anything else?” Trinity chirps.
“This should do us.” I hand her five folded singles. The tip amounts to half our bill. She accepts the money with wide eyes and skips toward another car. Is skipping written into this kid’s job description?
“There,” I say to Nina, “now Trinity has some extra pocket money.”
Nina reaches over me for her food. “You’re a little bit of an asshole.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “I know.”
What I want is for Nina to tell me her secrets, so that I can swiftly deliver them to Carrie. Because the central conflict between Carrie and her daughter seems to be a lack of information. As a mother, you go from tracking your kid’s every bowel movement and checking her temperature at the first sign of discomfort to never knowing whom she’s texting or in what dubious activities some other child’s parents have allowed her to participate. Carrie doesn’t want to make Nina miserable, she simply wants a full report on everything that’s ever happened to her.
Moms: the original stalkers.
Jack is starting to fuss. There’s something so painful about the moments before he cries, when my thoughts become skittish and hard to corral. With the time we have left—somewhere between twenty seconds and three minutes—I blurt out, “Hey, what were you and Maxine going to do today?”
Nina side-eyes me and says, “Nothing illegal.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
She wipes coney sauce from her upper lip. “We didn’t have specific plans.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Nina shrugs, as if my personal beliefs are none of her business. I am deeply familiar with the particular rise and fall of her shoulders, her impenetrable aloofness. It must be genetic.
Jack’s whimpers escalate just as Trinity returns to collect our trash. “Aw,” she says, noticing the baby for the first time. “Little cutie-pie. How old?”
“Almost three months,” I say.
She tilts her head, clicks her tongue. “Beautiful.”
As it turns out, I have missed girls like Trinity. In New York, even women my own age are often too self-conscious to comment on a baby. To heighten the pitch of their voices, drop to their knees and appeal to the toddlers, the puppies, the prideless among us.
Until I had Jack, I never told a stranger her screaming baby was beautiful.
I regret that.
* * *
Nina and I are driving home—I keep apologizing for Jack’s interminable crying; she keeps saying, “It’s just sad he’s sad, is all”—and we’re about to turn onto Center Street, when we are blocked by a police car, its lights silently flashing. My throat constricts until I remember I am not seventeen, not stoned, not breaking any laws. That I know of.
Also, I realize, the cop isn’t patrolling. He’s escorting a funeral procession.
First come the 4-H girls. I’d recognize them anywhere, with their long, crimped ponytails, their slumped shoulders in pink flannel. Six equestriennes lead the procession, each clutching a flag in her right hand. Two are American flags, two are Ohio state official, and two celebrate the football team of the local college I was once slated to attend, where Carrie’s dad still teaches. The girls are somber and sweaty as their steeds stomp through the intersection. Next come the pickup trucks, new paint jobs shimmering in the sun. Most are driven by teenagers. All these lockjawed boys wear their sleeves pushed past their elbows and steer with one hand at twelve o’clock. Some have penned elegies onto their windshields: Rest in Peace, Jared.
One last ride for JJ.
I sigh dramatically, and I half expect Nina to reiterate her assessment from earlier: I’m an asshole. Yes, but it’s a slow parade, and my baby’s crying, and death is common out here. A Deerling High School graduation ceremony isn’t over until the principal has paid homage to whichever kid wrapped his car around a tree in the week before finals.
The casket rides in the flatbed of an old Chevy. The casket is draped with a Confederate flag.
My skin crawls, but it’s a familiar sensation. The scene in the street doesn’t shock me as much as it should or as much as I wish it did. Maybe I am still seventeen. Maybe Nina is Carrie, the baby a fantasy. Maybe I never left this town.
There’s a version of Deerling that exists only in my head and only at a distance of several hundred miles. It’s the Deerling I invented whenever I was trapped in a Manhattan office building, 3:00 p.m., so far from the ground that I couldn’t hear the rain hitting the pavement. What I wanted was to touch the velvety cheek of a horse or to climb behind the wheel of a car older than myself. What I wanted was my mother, but what I thought I wanted was to go home. Being here now is like getting back together with a boyfriend whose flaws time temporarily erased. You meet on the sidewalk. He is handsome and smells great, but in the restaurant he condescends to the waitress and returns his food to the kitchen twice. Oh, you think, it’s you.
When Carrie and I were kids, the high school’s mascot was a rebel soldier. Every fall, at least one teacher took it upon herself to sheepishly explain that Deerling High was the offshoot of a larger school that had split in half. We were the south campus, therefore we had southern pride—despite residing in the northeastern quadrant of a union state and despite learning, in a cursory way, that slavery had been a mistake. By the midnineties, the school handbook officially banned “the wearing of any imagery known to ignite racial violence,” but as of 2003, proud alumni still showed up to football games with the Confederate flag pinned to the backs of their motorcycle jackets.
Behind the unconventional hearse are two grown men straddling twin white stallions, each holding up one end of a banner.
The banner says, make america great again.
Stunned laughter climbs my throat. I turn to Nina, but she is leaning forward in the passenger seat, frantically snapping pictures of the procession through my dirt-streaked windshield.
“These aren’t turning out. Can we open the sunroof?” Her finger has already found the switch. She unbuckles her seatbelt, preparing to stand. I throw out an arm to stop her.
“You can’t, Nina. These people. They should be arrested.”
“I won’t let them see me. I’ll be sneaky.”
“But what if they do see you?”
“They’re supposed to be mourning?”
“Clearly they’re multitasking.”
Nina shrugs and rises again. She’s not going to listen to me. I exude none of Carrie’s maternal authority; I am the hapless babysitter, easily convinced bedtime is two hours later than noted in the instructions stuck to the fridge.
I grab Nina’s phone and push her back into her seat. Getting a good angle—capturing not only a flash of red but the full Southern Cross smoothed flat across the casket—almost requires climbing onto the roof of the car. By holding Nina’s phone above my head and snapping blindly, I try to squeeze more context into the frame: the teenager behind the wheel, the patient horses, the sig
n above the Chinese restaurant on Center Street advertising both Peking duck and air conditioning in neon script. Nina is smacking my leg to convey urgency. Jack is screaming like a horror movie heroine midshower. One of the riders notices me protruding gopherish from my vehicle. His upper lip curls into a sneer.
Resisting the urge to stick out my tongue, I duck before he can shout or arrange his fingers into an objection.
A second cop car brings up the rear, and traffic is free to resume.
“Drive,” Nina says.
I keep my foot on the brake. “What was that?”
“That was Jared Jenkins’s funeral.”
“Who’s Jared Jenkins?”
“High schooler. Got into a wreck on 71 last weekend. No seatbelt. His brother’s in my geometry class.”
Finally, and for no discernible reason, Jack falls silent. “Why do you need pictures?”
A car behind us honks. I make a left onto Center Street.
“Because fuck white supremacy?” Nina is already flipping through the album, favoriting the few images that unambiguously feature both the casket and the banner. These she sends to Maxine.
“Obviously, but—”
“But what?”
I don’t finish the thought, and I avoid Nina’s gaze for the last few minutes of the drive. At her age, I never did anything in the spirit of “fuck white supremacy.” Boys like the boy Jared Jenkins must have been—I’m remembering particular buzz cuts, particular belt buckles—were plentiful but seemed irrelevant. Always, I was more concerned with my future escape than with the present reality of Carrie sitting among those people in class.
Of course, I believed we would escape together.
In the driveway, I kill the engine. “You’re sure it’s legal? Taking pictures of a stranger’s casket?”
Nina looks me in the eye, surprised and slightly chastened. Carrie may be the boss, but I’m starting to understand how calculating, how ambitious Nina can be. She knew the precise hour at which Jared’s funeral procession would snake its way through downtown Deerling. It’s why she wanted out of the house on this most crucial of Saturdays. It’s why she agreed to eat chili-soaked hot dogs with me.