I was about to tell her about Drake—about rescuing the cat and returning him safe—but when I opened my mouth something else came out. “I was having a little adventure, Mom.” I watched her brown eyes squint at me. “And this is part of it, actually, but it’s the boring part between the exciting bits, where the girl does the same predictable dialogue with her mother.”
I got down on my haunches and roughed up Abe’s neck. I heard my mom go inside—a single flap of the tarp—and guilt swooped over me and away, like one of those birds of prey blacking the sun for an instant. Then I was just angry at the dogs, which felt better. I could see that their legs were covered in thistles and burrs. Their coats had dried in front with spikes of mud. “You’re getting wild,” I told them. Which was true I felt.
I waited until I was done drying the dishes that night before I told my mother I was going with the family across the lake to Duluth for the weekend. “Tell your dad,” she said to that, giving me a look I couldn’t read. So I went out to the shed after the dishes were put away and sat with my dad for an hour listening to a ball game on the radio. Twins versus Royals. As we sat together on overturned buckets, my father drank three Buds, methodically, measuring each sip, making them last to the final inning. Then he crushed the cans into disks, one after the other, as the announcers described the weather in Kansas City, the heat wave that was followed by a thunderstorm, which had knocked out so much power they’d almost canceled the game. Almost, but not quite.
I told my dad about going to Duluth just as he was standing up.
He nodded, turned off the radio, and then pulled one more dripping can of beer from the cold lake water inside the cooler. As if reconsidering his prospects for the evening, as if changing his mind about something. “That front’ll be coming east by tomorrow night.”
“I know.”
“I thought we might get some walleye up in Goose Neck tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“The out-of-towners will be taking over soon.”
“I know.”
“Superior sure is pretty in a storm, though. Have you seen that?”
Never.
They picked me up at ten the next morning. I’d thought a long time about what to bring the night before, had laid out my second pair of jeans and rooted through my mom’s thrift-store bag for something besides an old T-shirt to sleep in. I found a baby-blue slip my mom had collected for scraps, and though it was musty and wrinkled and too big in the chest, I thought it might pass for pajamas. I’d also packed my toothbrush and comb, and right before bed—pumping well water in the dark—I tried shaving with my dad’s razor. The hair on my legs was fine and long, and the first stripe that was gone felt magical beneath my fingertips, a track of shorn skin like silk ribbon from ankle to thigh. I’d finished most of the first leg before I realized there was blood from a cut I hadn’t seen or felt in the dark. I could tell it was blood from the greasy way it slid between my fingertips, and how it smelled. I was too disheartened to do the second leg. Instead, shivering, I washed my hair with the last of the shampoo and a little bit of lemon dish soap. I rinsed caked mud from the soles of my tennis shoes and set them near the outhouse to dry. Peed in that plywood hole, closed the door on the flies. I squeezed out the wet rope of hair that hung on my chest.
When I slipped into the backseat of the blue Honda the next morning, Paul was asleep in his car seat. As Leo did a threepoint turn, Patra twisted around and whispered from the front, “Good morning!” She handed me a bran muffin, still warm, crumbling as I peeled open its waxed paper cup. “Mmm. You smell good,” she added.
My mouth was already full of muffin. The moist crumbs filled up every bit of space between my teeth and tongue, every empty place available.
Patra grinned. “Good, eat up. Leo never likes to stop. He’ll drive straight through anything. Tornadoes, floods. Breakfast and lunch.”
“I stop! When we get there. Just say where ‘there’ is, in advance, and I’ll stop.”
“Then ‘there’ is lunch. ‘There’ is sometime before two o’clock.”
“That’s when there is, then. It’s agreed.”