“I see. He must be pretty sick.”
“I think he is. But to answer your question, I haven’t spoken to him in around fifteen years.”
The woman nodded and looked out the windshield. She pulled a strand of hair that was blowing around her face back behind her ear, and then suddenly pointed at a telephone pole. “Look, a hawk! It’s perched right on top there.” It lifted into the sky just as they passed.
“That’s a long time,” the woman continued. “My own father died a few years back. A stroke. He was still pretty young. I didn’t have to drive across the country to see him, but I still didn’t make it in time. I mean, he was still alive when I got there. But I don’t think he recognized me. He only had one eye. I mean, after the stroke, he had one that still worked. It just sort of kept moving back and forth across my face, searching for something. I was holding his hand when he died. I’d never seen a person die before.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire said. It struck her that she had never seen someone die, either, and that of the people she had known, except for a boy from high school she’d heard was killed in a car crash, she had come closer to dying than anyone.
“It’s something you’re not ready for. I mean, it happens in its own time, out of your control. All the things I remembered about him. They didn’t crowd in till afterward. I wanted to say, ‘No, wait, Dad! I’m not ready.’ But I don’t imagine he was ready, either. It was just his body. His body didn’t leave him any choice.”
“How old was he?”
“Sixty-seven. He and my mom had me when he was older. The last of three kids. Two brothers and me.”
“Do you miss him?” Claire was surprised at her own directness, but the woman seemed so unselfconscious.
Genevieve shifted her eyes to Claire’s face. Claire felt the awkwardness of being looked at while she had to keep her own eyes on the road. Finally, Genevieve said, “Not much more now that he’s dead than I did when he was alive. My mother was the one who raised me. Raised us. My father worked hard as a salesman. It’s not that he was mean or stern. He was just away. The strange thing is—”
She stopped and looked out the window at the road.
“So we’re on Interstate 80, right?”
“Yeah. I’m hoping to make Salt Lake City by tonight.”
“That’s a long haul, but I bet we can get there. Like I said, I’ll be happy to drive.”
Already the woman was saying we. They were headed around a bend with a high, bald hill and a few clumps of bushes toward the top.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Claire said. “So you were saying?”
“So I mean, we’re going to take this trip together. All these hours here in this little truck. Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa. The landscape is pretty sometimes, but it’s mostly bleak. And there will be long stretches of miles and miles that neither of us will remember. But some things will happen along the way, and we’ll talk sometimes like we’re talking now. And then you’ll drop me off in Chicago, and we will probably never see each other again. But when you look back, you’ll remember those things that happened and these conversations separated by all the quiet highway hours.”