“You left the bride? At her shower?” Aida said. The maple syrup tasted funny, like kerosene. She scraped it off her pancakes.
“I’m terrible,” he said. “I know. But I just couldn’t stay.”
Aida understood this. That’s why she was running away. She couldn’t stay in that house, in that town, for even one more minute.
“Beth,” he said. “She’ll do fine. She’s real pretty and nice. Studying to be a nurse.” He shook his head again. “She’ll be fine.” He motioned the waitress for more chocolate milk, holding up two fingers like a peace sign. “We dated in high school, and then I got unlucky in the lottery. Number three, if you can believe it, and got sent to Vietnam instead of Carnegie Mellon, where I was supposed to go. And you know, when you think you might die, you do crazy things. Like say if you manage to live and come back, you’ll marry somebody. Then you come back and you’ve changed a lot and the girl doesn’t even seem like someone you know. She’s talking about getting shoes dyed lavender to match bridesmaids’ dresses and seating arrangements and whiskey-sour fountains and all you can think about is the way you were walking along this gorgeous mountain pass and the South China Sea is glittering in the sunlight and all of a fucking sudden you’re getting shot at and people are dying all around you and you don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing halfway across the world anyway.”
The waitress banged down two glasses of chocolate milk.
“You’re saving democracy,” she said to him, air whistling through the gaps where teeth were supposed to be. “That’s what you’re doing over there.”
“Right,” he mumbled.
Aida stared at him, hard.
“What?” he said.
“Do you play the guitar?” she asked him. But she didn’t really want to hear the answer, so she got up, banging her knee on the booth, and walked back to the bus.
DURING THE STOP, passengers got off and other passengers got on and everything rearranged itself. Aida grabbed an open window seat. She had not had a window seat in three days, and wasn’t part of running away seeing things? Wasn’t the bus pass called the “See the USA” pass? Here was Ohio, Aida thought happily. I am watching Ohio go by. The vet took the seat next to her.
“This is lucky,” he says as he stretches his legs. “Isn’t it?”
The bus pulls away and Aida stares with determination out the window.
“Ohio,” the vet says. “I think it produced more presidents than any other state.”
Aida finds this hard to believe. “What about Massachusetts?” she says, watching the rolling hills. “What about Virginia?”
“Can you name the presidents for those states? Let’s try, okay?”
She looks at his open, hopeful face. Does he really expect her to play car games with him the entire way to San Francisco? She remembers how on that car trip with Aunt Francie, she had to play Travel Bingo, keeping her eye out for cows and stop signs and other ridiculous things. The Bingo cards had little red see-through shades that you pulled down when you found an item. But reading the cards and scanning the back roads for mailboxes and silos had only made Aida more queasy.
“I hate games,” Aida tells him.
“This isn’t a game,” he says. “It’s more of a challenge.”
Aida sighs. “Look,” she says, “you need to know that I’m against the war. I hate Richard Nixon, and I’ve been very active in the antiwar movement.” She thinks of that black armband, how much she loved tying it on every morning.
“I’m glad to know that,” he tells her. “I’m also against the war. You have no idea.”
Aida tries to figure out the ethics of falling in love with a vet. It seems wrong, even if he is also against the war.
“I’m Bill,” he says. “Bill Henderson.”
Aida blurts her own name before remembering that she was going to change it to something like Heather or Juliet. Aida is old-fashioned and ugly. She adds, “Aida with an A,” to make it special somehow.
Bill nods at her. “Like the opera,” he says. “I-ee-da.”
He has given her a gift and he doesn’t even know it. I-ee-da, she thinks. An opera. She would have to look that up in the library when she got to San Francisco.
“Well,” she says finally. “There’s Jefferson and Monroe and Washington. They’re all from Virginia.”
She can feel his knee against hers. He has rolled up the sleeves on his shirt, and she can see the light blond hair on his arms, the beginning of a five o’clock shadow on his fine angled cheeks.
“The two Adamses,” he says, “John and John Quincy. They’re Massachusetts. And Kennedy, of course.”
Ohio rolls by, but Aida isn’t watching.