“That’s what I call the lady in my dashboard. Maria.”
“Oh,” Thomas said. “Why Maria?”
“I don’t know. She just strikes me as a Maria. Maybe she should be Gretchen or Heidi or something that sounds kind of German, but I like Maria.”
He was studying the screen as I drove down the road and pulled onto the highway. He never took his eyes off the digital map. “We’re just passing Miller’s Lane,” he said.
“You could look out the window and know that,” I said. “Let me ask you something.”
“About what?”
“About when you found Dad. You okay talking about that?”
“This red line,” he said, pointing. “Is that the route the car wants us to take?”
“That’s right. You mind my asking something about when you found Dad?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Either before or after you pushed the tractor off him, did you touch any of the controls on it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like turn off the key, or lift up the blades?”
“No. I don’t even know how to drive it. Dad never let me use it. This computer is wrong.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the navigational screen the whole time we’d been talking.
“So you didn’t touch anything,” I said. “On the tractor.”
“That’s right.”
“What about when the ambulance came, or the police. Did any of the paramedics touch it?”
“They only cared about Dad. And I never saw the police do anything with it, but I wasn’t always there. Maybe later they came.”
“But it hasn’t been moved all week,” I said. “It’s been sitting down by the creek this whole time.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Thomas asked.
“About what?”
“This thing is wrong.” He was still staring at the screen.
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“The route. It’s no good.”
“In three hundred yards, make a right turn.”
“Maria’s wrong,” Thomas said.
“She is?”
“She’s telling you the wrong way to go. There’s a faster way to go.”
“She does that sometimes. She tends to stick to the main roads. And some of the really new roads, she doesn’t even know they’re there. Don’t worry about it. Think of Maria as an adviser. You can choose to take her advice, or not.”
“Well, she shouldn’t be giving advice if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He started fiddling with the buttons. “How do you tell her she’s making a mistake?”
“I don’t know that—”
“In one hundred yards, make a right turn.”
“No!” Thomas shouted at the screen. “If we go the way she’s suggesting, she’ll take us down Saratoga Street. I don’t want to go down Saratoga Street.”
“What difference does it make?”
“I don’t want to go that way!” He was starting to sound frantic.
“Just tell me which way you want me to go,” I said. “We can tell Maria to take a hike.”
Thomas said he wanted to go downtown by way of Main, not Saratoga. I said okay, since it was about the same distance. I ignored Maria when, as we passed Saratoga, she implored me to turn around. When I kept driving in the same direction, she recalculated the route, but she kept wanting to send us back, eventually, to Saratoga Street.
“Shut up,” Thomas told her.
Maria said, “In three hundred yards, make a left turn.”
“I don’t believe this,” Thomas said. He was becoming increasingly agitated. “Make her stop. Make her stop talking.” He slapped his hand on top of the dashboard, the way my father used to deal with the TV years ago when the horizontal went wonky.
“Just cancel the route,” I said. “That button there.”
Thomas, who’d been so good at entering the data, became flustered when it came to undoing what he’d done.
“Make a right turn.”
“No! We’re not doing it!” Thomas yelled at the dash.
I reached over, fiddled with the settings, and shut her down.
“It’s over,” I said. “I turned her off.”
Thomas sat back in the leather seat and took a few deep breaths. Finally, he looked at me and said, “You should get rid of this car.”
EIGHT
ONCE there was no more fun to be had with the car’s GPS, Thomas became sullen and asked me to turn around and go home. But I stuck to my guns and said he had an appointment, and we had to keep it.
He sulked.
I took a seat in the waiting room while Thomas went in for his session with Dr. Grigorin. There was one other patient waiting to see her. A very thin woman, late twenties, with long, scraggly blond hair that she kept twisting around her index finger. She was studying a spot on the wall with great interest, like there was a spider there that only she could see.
I glanced at my watch, figured I had a bit of time, and stepped out into the hall. I took out my cell phone, looked up a number online, and tapped to connect.
“Promise Falls Standard,” a woman’s recorded voice said. “If you know the extension, enter it now. To use the company directory, press 2.”
I struggled through the process until an actual phone rang.