Chapter TWENTY-THREE
April studied the road map while her grandfather was in the restroom. They had started early and already driven five hours. Her grandfather had slept most of the time. But at exactly noon, he’d opened his eyes and announced, “I need to piss and eat.”
She was tired, but pinpointing their location on the map revived her. They were just about at the Wyoming border, finally free of Nebraska, just two states away from California. She couldn’t believe how much time it was taking. During her long hours behind the wheel, April considered creating another list: STS—States That Suck. The people were friendly, though. The waitresses didn’t seem as hurried or as angry and frumpy as they were back home. She wondered if people got friendlier the farther west you went. That would make San Francisco the friendliest place on earth.
She also liked the thought, if not the actual experience, of having traveled through several different states. Now, if Heather said something about, say, Iowa, April would be able to say, Oh, yeah? Have you ever actually been there? No? Well, I have. And let me tell you . . . Over some backstage phone call after his desperate and heartsick confession that he loved her and missed her, she would say to Keith Spinelli, Listen—I’ve got to do the next set. You want to be with me? Do what I did. Break free.
But as April studied the map, she started getting nervous. She was proud of the increasingly adult role she played in checking into roadside motels and using her grandfather’s credit card to pay for gas and meals. She had no problem driving on the highway now and along the wide roads off the interstate. But what would happen when they reached San Francisco? It was a big city with hills and those strange cable car thingys in the middle of the road.
Whenever she asked her grandfather what they’d do when they got to San Francisco—where they’d stay, how she’d meet someone to introduce her to a band—he told her not to worry. He knew cities. I didn’t get to be an old man by being a rube, he’d say.
Whatever that meant. She often got the feeling there was something he wasn’t telling her. A hidden agenda, her mother would say. Always a hidden agenda with him.
“You by yourself?”
The man addressing her, a fat guy wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and butt-crack jeans, stared at her from the counter stool.
“No,” April said. She returned to her map.
“Who you with?” the man asked.
Great, another pervert. She used her finger to follow I-80 from Green River to San Francisco.
“Miss?”
April couldn’t ignore him any longer. “I’m with my grandfather,” she said, not trying to disguise the contempt in her voice.
The man nodded amiably. “That him out there?” he asked, pointing to the window behind her. April turned and saw her grandfather walking toward the divided highway.
She bolted out of the diner. The parking lot was unpaved, and the wind kicked up a fine white dust in her face. She had to stop and rub her eyes. Her grandfather was getting closer to the highway. A semi roared past just as she grabbed him by the arm. He looked down at her. His eyes were unfocused. He was working his mouth slowly, as if trying to form words.
“I thought . . . I was trying,” he began. Then his eyes sharpened suddenly. “Where in the holy hell have you been?” he demanded.
“I was waiting in the diner. We were going to have lunch. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember. You’re always asking me if I remember. I remember everything—don’t you worry.”
“But where were you going, Grandpa?”
“Never mind. I’m here, aren’t I?”
April looked at her grandfather. “That makes, like, no sense,” she said.
“Maybe not to you. I can’t account for your piss-poor education.”
April tried to guide him back to the diner, but he shrugged her off whenever she took his elbow. When they got into the restaurant, the waitress and fat-assed cowboy gawked at them. April stared back defiantly until they went about their business. Her grandfather announced he wasn’t hungry.
“But it’s lunchtime, Grandpa. You said you were. Besides, I’m hungry.”
“I thought you were in a big hurry to get to Seattle,” he said.
“San Francisco.”
“Whatever, like you’re always saying. So what are we doing here? Let’s go.”
Her grandfather walked out of the diner. April paid for his untouched coffee and for her Coke. The waitress shoved a huge oatmeal raisin cookie at her. April almost cried.
“Tell me a story about Grandma Clare,” she said a few minutes later, back on the highway, trying to get her grandfather focused. He was sharpest when he was telling his stories.
“I already told you my stories.”
“Not about Grandma Clare,” April said. “What did you like most about her?”
Bill squinted at her. “What kind of question is that? I liked everything about her.”
“Well, then, what didn’t you like about her?”
Bill looked at her again. “Now, that’s a much better question,” he said. He looked out the window. “But I’m not gonna answer it.”
But he did—practically nonstop through Wyoming. None of the stories were bad, though, despite his promise. This was the thing she noticed about her grandma Clare. If all you had to go on were the stories that her grandfather and her mother told her, then Grandma Clare was right up there with the Blessed Virgin Mary, maybe higher. This seemed to April to be one of the good things about dying: A sort of amnesia sets in. People forget your faults, or at least they stop talking about them—unless you’re a school shooter or a pedophile or a Hitler of some sort. Would her mother remember her grandfather this way? Would she stop calling him old man and Billy Boy and suddenly start talking about “my father” or “my dad” or even “Daddy”? April thought of her own father. Would her mother stop saying nasty things about him if he died? And what would she say about him? “Yeah, he walked out on us, but he was actually a really good guy. A really great dad. Really.”
She shook her head, trying to ward off the bad karma that thinking about death—especially the death of people you know—is sure to bring on. Good topic for a song, though. She played with some lines while her grandfather talked.
Did you die to escape your lies?
Now that you’re dead, it’s an empty bed.
When you could breathe, you cheated with ease.
But now that you’re gone, it’s your touch that I . . . long?
She’d have to work on it later. Her grandfather was now distracting her, he was talking so much. He talked longer than April had ever heard him go on before. She started to get the feeling that she didn’t even need to be there. But she knew it was good that she was, because if they weren’t there together, driving to a place neither of them had been, he’d be telling the same stories, but he’d be telling them back in Ohio, sitting in his ratty brown chair in his dumpy little house, smoking his smelly pipe and picking at the gross gray hair in his ears, talking and laughing at the peeling wallpaper.
She felt her throat tighten and her eyes well. What was with the crying, April wondered as she gripped the steering wheel. They were getting close to San Francisco; she should be ecstatic. Why did a free cookie, or the thought of her grandfather alone, have such an effect on her? Sad stuff, she supposed, but enough to get all teary? She got emotional about being emotional. Ridiculous. She concentrated on her grandfather’s stories.
“Graduation was her goal,” her grandfather said.
April realized she’d lost the thread of whatever story her grandfather was telling her. “Grandma went back to school?”
“No . . . no . . . She wanted to see Nick, your uncle Nick, graduate from high school,” he said. “She knew she’d never see Marcy graduate, but she tried to hold on for Nick.”
Then, all of a sudden, he grew quiet. Another black-hole moment, and she tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound stupid, a question to ask that wouldn’t sound nosy. She saw a roadside memorial: a small white cross, a splash of color at its base.
“The doctors?” her grandfather said, as if answering someone else’s questions. “They said she might hold on for quite a while, or there could be a sudden turn and she’d go quickly. They need a fancy degree to tell me that? And then she didn’t even make it to Mike’s graduation. She gave up.”
April’s head snapped up.
“What do you mean, she gave up?”
“It was too much for her. The cancer.”
“Yeah, but you say it like—I don’t know—like you blame her. She had cancer, Grandpa.”
“I know what she had, believe you me.” He said this quietly. He apparently wasn’t in the mood to argue. “And I didn’t mean anything by it. She was in incredible pain. Incredible.” He paused. “Let’s change the subject.”
But for about thirty miles, there was no change of subject. In fact, there was no discussion at all.
Then he spoke up again as if he’d been talking all along. “Reminds me of the time Nick ran that touchdown,” he said.
April tried not to get freaked out. “I thought it was a baseball game,” she said. “You told me he hit a double in a baseball game.”
Her grandfather frowned. “Am I repeating myself?” he asked.
“Only every story,” April said, laughing.
Her grandfather laughed, too. A good sign.
“Whatever it was,” he said, “I was relieved, I can tell you that.”
“Relieved? Why?”
“I was worried Nick was a little . . .” He stopped. “What am I doing? Never mind.”
“A little what?” April asked, trying to think of the word he had apparently forgotten.
After another pause, her grandfather said, “Well, in the marines we used to say that some guys spent a little too much time polishing their buttons.”
April inhaled loudly. “Grandpa! You thought Uncle Nick was gay?”
“No!” her grandfather said quickly. “I mean, you never know for sure, right? Until they start going out with girls. Or they hit a home run or something.”
“Grandpa, that is so Neanderthal! There are lots of sports people—”
“I know, I know, don’t get all—whaddya call it—PC on me, okay? Remember, I’m talking about thirty years ago. Things were different back then. And it doesn’t matter anyway. He married a beautiful girl. Poor thing.”
Poor thing.
Those two words always seemed to come up whenever Aunt Marilyn’s name was mentioned. April hadn’t seen her all that often even though—unlike her other aunt in Chicago—she and Uncle Nick lived fairly close by. About the only times were on holidays, when they’d stop in on their way to one of Marilyn’s relatives, but even on those short visits her aunt was always eager to find out what April was reading, what music she was listening to, and—here Aunt Marilyn would look around her and lean closer, secret-sharing style—did she have a crush on anyone? For her part, April liked her aunt but was always slightly intimidated by her. Aunt Marilyn was so tall, always so nicely dressed, with thick black hair swept up and back into elegant, complicated, fascinating styles. It wasn’t that she was stuck-up or anything—it wasn’t beyond her to get down on the floor with April, even in a nice holiday dress, to sit Indian-style during their “girl talk”—but April was afraid that any move she might make would somehow throw dirt or otherwise do damage to the perfection that was Aunt Marilyn.
But now that April thought about it, Aunt Marilyn seemed more eager during those visits to spend time with her than she did with her mom and dad. Which reminded April of a time Uncle Nick, who had been in the living room with her parents, came into the den to get Aunt Marilyn, who’d come in to listen to a CD with her. Uncle Nick, usually so serious, smiled at her aunt so broadly that, for a moment, April thought he was drunk. And she thought then—as she did now—that she had never seen her father look at her mother that way.
Uncle Nick, she thought. Poor thing.
The noise of the wind whistling through the slightly cracked driver’s-side window was the only sound for miles. Her grandfather got talkative again just as April started watching the road signs for a motel. These stories were familiar to her: Korea, the family vacations, some of the characters he had met during his days in sales. And then, when April found a motel with the “Vacancy” portion of the “No Vacancy” sign lit, her grandfather talked again about how he had remained loyal to Clare (he had stopped calling Clare “your grandmother” somewhere in Illinois) while all his buddies were “sowing their oats.”
April didn’t want to hear it. There was something about it that bothered her.
“Am I supposed to admire you for that?” she finally asked.
Her grandfather stopped. “Admire me for what?”
“For not screwing other women when you promised Grandma you wouldn’t.”
Her grandfather glanced over. “You’ve got quite a mouth on you, don’t you?”
“Well, that’s what we’re talking about, aren’t we?” April didn’t know why she was getting so angry. But she wanted to scream. She came close. “Being unfaithful. Screwing around. F*cking other women. Like my father did?”
“Enough!” her grandfather shouted. “I don’t like that kind of language,” he said.
“You use it all the time,” April said.
“I mean from you,” he said. “You’re too . . . too . . . what word am I looking for?”
“Young? Well, that’s wrong, Grandpa. I’m not too young. You wouldn’t believe what some of my friends do with their boyfriends. I’m not too young. I just don’t do it yet. But when I meet someone who isn’t a complete moron and loser, I’m gonna find out what all the fuss is about. Believe me!”
“Good!” her grandfather shouted.
“You want me to do it? Fine. Believe me, I will.”
“No. I mean, ‘good’ is the word I was looking for,” her grandfather shouted. Then he quieted. “You’re too good for that,” he said.
April pulled over, threw the car in park, and hugged the steering wheel, crying.
“I’m not too good,” she cried. “In fact, I’m not good at all.”
She could sense her grandfather’s uneasiness in the silence around her, but then he reached over and started to rub her back.
“Not so, Marcy,” he said. “Not so.”