“ ’Cause that’s not how it works.”
“Right,” he says. He turns the radio up. We both like country music. We also like rap. No one knows where I am. When I’m with him, I don’t return my friends’ text messages or answer my mother’s phone calls. I fall down a rabbit hole.
It’s not a bad drive down 49. There are plenty of places to stop, which I appreciate, and lots of antique malls made out of connecting storage units. My mother used to make me go to them with her back when I was too young to refuse, but I don’t remember her ever buying anything. I wonder what she was looking for. There’s a catfish house shaped like an igloo and another one in a massive barn, only about five miles apart. I like the men on the side of the highway selling fruits and vegetables, nice-looking men in overalls, real country people. We live in Mississippi and almost everyone we know is from Mississippi but we don’t know any real country people.
“I have to pee,” I say, “just stop wherever, whenever it’s convenient.” He tells me I pee too much, and it’s true, I do pee a lot. I close my eyes and think about the woman, Susan Lacey. I imagine her in a shapeless housedress and heavy shoes with rubber soles like a nurse, spooning fro-yo from a gallon container. And then I imagine a younger Susan Lacey, her hair long and dark, eyes full of life. She’s on the street, carrying a recyclable bag full of organic fruits and vegetables, flowers sticking out of the top of it. The picture will capture her mid-stride, head turning to look for cars as she crosses the street. It’s a picture I’ve seen so many times on the crime shows I watch, the photograph snapping the color out of everything.
“Can I smoke?” I ask.
“I don’t care.”
“No, the joint.”
“Let’s wait till after,” he says.
I say okay but after feels like forever. I wish I’d grabbed a book from my apartment—all I have is the Cosmo with the address and number on it and I’ve already read it from cover to cover. I reread an interview with Cameron Diaz. Cosmo asks her what the secret is to being an effective flirt—“Is it ‘flipping your goddamn hair,’ like Lucy Liu advised you to do in Angels?” And Cameron Diaz says, “Yes, flip the goddamn hair [laughs]. I think the secret is trying to be charming. I always try to make a man laugh, and usually, it’s by making fun of myself.” I wonder if her answer would be different in 2013, if she would say something so embarrassing and unfeminist-like. I try to focus on the trees, the way the light filters through them, but there’s Susan Lacey again—she is definitely the younger, dark-haired one. Perhaps she’s even beautiful, but it isn’t going to save her.
Less than three hours later, we’re here. He pulls into a gas station and I slip my card into the slot before he can ask and go inside, buy a 16-ounce beer and a king-size Twix.
He’s still pumping when I come back out, talking on his burner. I get in the truck and take off my flip-flops—my toenails bright red, so pretty.
He hands me a receipt, which I let fall to the floor without looking at it. I type the address into my phone, direct him through the city. For some reason the sound isn’t working and I can’t get it to work even though the media volume is turned all the way up.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend that lives here?” he asks. He knows I have an ex-boyfriend who lives here. He lives in a high-rise apartment and drives a black Mercedes with a personalized license plate that means supreme ruler in some Asian language. He is a horrible person who made me go to church with him on Sundays, a Californian, a former marine, a drunk. I have no idea where I find these people.
“No,” I say.
He looks at me.
“That was like three years ago.”
“When’s the last time you talked to him?”
“Not since we broke up,” I say. “Richard.”
“Dick,” he says, “that’s right, good old Dick.”
“Let’s talk about your ex-girlfriends. Were they all ugly? Make a left at the next light.”
“I don’t date ugly chicks.”
“You know I’ve met a lot of the girls you dated?”
He sighs because I’m right—they were all weirdly tall or hook-nosed; one of them had so many tattoos she looked deranged. “How much further?” he asks.
“Farther.”
“Okay,” he says, “Jesus Christ. How much farther?”
“Three miles. If he has her address, why’s he need a picture? Why doesn’t he just send somebody there to kill her?”
“We’re going to her job,” he says, and then, “Hey, babe? Could you just stop talking for just a minute?”
We pull into the parking lot of an Office Depot. “Is this it?” he asks.
“This is the address you wrote down.”
Office Depots depress me and I refuse to get out. I open my bag and hand him the camera, turn it on and off. “This button here,” I say. “I hope she’s in there and we can get this over with. I want to go swimming, and maybe gamble. I love to gamble.” I’ve decided I’ll definitely rent a room at a casino, a nice one, and order room service and drink overpriced drinks at the hotel bar and fuck him in a huge bed with too many pillows.
I watch his back as he walks into the store: stocky and bald-headed, tattoos covering his thick arms. He’s not attractive in the conventional way but he makes beautiful babies. I’ll never have a baby with him but I like the idea of it, having a small version of him that I could control, who would listen to me and obey me and tell me every thought that popped into his head. The doors slide open and he’s gone, disappeared into the sadness of Office Depot forever. The turn of events deflates me.
Ten minutes later, he gets back in the truck.
“So?”
“No Suzie.”
“What took you so long?”
“I bought some envelopes,” he says, and tosses the bag to the floor. He hands me the camera and I immediately check to see if he took any pictures; he didn’t. I turn it off. “What now?”
“I don’t know. Let me think for a minute.”
“Drive us to a nice hotel and I’ll rent a room and we can pretend we’re on a stakeout. Set up a command center.”
“This isn’t a game,” he says, pulling out of the lot. “It’s not a fucking game.”