“Thank you for the apology,” Genevieve said flatly.
The man nodded and still wouldn’t look at them. He turned sideways to face the shore.
“I come out here most every morning in the summer and fall,” he said. “You see folks like you, visitors, you know, floating on the water. Me, I come out because it’s the only time a man my size feels light, you know? Buoyant. That’s the word I mean.”
He cleared his throat and licked some of the salt from his lips.
“You ladies have a safe trip, wherever you’re headin’.” He walked away without looking at them, and when he’d moved off a good distance, he slid into the water again, his face turned up to the sky and his eyes closed.
Genevieve touched Claire’s shoulder and said, “Let’s go.”
*
They had driven into Wyoming by noon, stopping for coffee and blueberry muffins in one of the small towns. Claire had knotted their wet clothes to a rope she’d strung behind the cab of the truck, and so far none had flown away. Mostly, they hadn’t talked, but as they entered the tunnels outside Green River, Claire yanked off her sunglasses.
“Wow. Can’t see a damn thing,” she said.
Out of the hot sun, the tunnel cooled the inside of the cab and filled it with exhaust fumes, and they both rolled up their windows. When they emerged, Genevieve was squinting in the bright light.
“Nice while it lasted,” Claire said, and cracked the window again. The bluffs and rocks along the highway were dramatic, but bled of color in the middle of the day.
“Getting closer to getting there, aren’t we?” said Genevieve.
“Still a long way yet.”
“Nebraska will seem closer. Flat. More like home for you.”
“I guess that’s true. It was my home for a while.”
“It’s funny. You leave on a trip like this only with your destination in mind, and only thinking about getting there, and what it will be like, and then along the way you start enjoying the road, and you wish you had another day or two of solitude with nothing to do but drive.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Claire said. She had made it through the morning mostly without thinking of her mother and father.
“You think I’m being impulsive?” Genevieve asked. “Moving to Chicago like this with a guy I haven’t seen in a year?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like you’re trailing a moving truck behind you. It’d be pretty easy to change your mind.”
“He’s lonely,” she said. “All those people in Chicago to remind him.”
“Seems like all those people would make it a little less lonely.”
Genevieve looked at her and smiled.
“Maybe,” she said. “But not when he stops to watch couples walking along the lakeshore holding hands.” She still hadn’t rolled her window all the way back down, and she leaned her head against the glass pane. “I wonder,” she said. “The guy back at the campsite. He was kind of lonely, too.”
“I don’t know about that, Genevieve.”
“No, seriously. I have some sympathy for him now. Going down to the lake every morning. Floating on the water like that. Wanting to feel buoyant, like he said. I think he meant boy-ant. B-o-y. Like he felt when he was a boy.”
“That doesn’t make him lonely.”
“No, I know. I bet if two women pulled into his little campground tonight, and slept in the bed of their truck, he’d walk over and then do the same thing. Maybe loneliness becomes something else once night falls. Or after you’ve been lonely for a long time.”
“I don’t know, Genevieve. He seemed a little creepy.”
“Maybe he was a little desperate,” she said.
“You can be both.”
“I’m not trying to excuse him. I’m trying to explain him. Loneliness can be a pathology.”
“All right, Professor.” Claire realized Genevieve had two ways of speaking—one when she talked about herself, and another when she talked about others. But Genevieve smiled at this, took her head from the glass pane, and rolled down the window. She sat up straight.
“But it wasn’t that kind of loneliness for your father, I don’t think.”
“Genevieve, we don’t need to—”
“It’s a long drive,” she interrupted.
Claire tightened her hands on the steering wheel. They were passing a small lake where a deer was wading among the reeds in the water, and Claire glanced over as it lifted its head.
“Okay. All right.”
“Do you think it’s different, falling in love when you’re older?”
“It was different when I fell in love with Jack.”
“I don’t mean that. You’re still young. Your dad’s over sixty. He falls in love with a woman he meets in the supermarket.”