A small crowd is gathering, craning their necks to get a better look at Ted, and I’d really rather they didn’t. I’m torn between going up to join Stan and staying here with Callie, trying to shield her from view with my body, against I’m not sure what. People are starting to talk about manners and bad parenting and then about what the hell is going on with all these kids who don’t know how to talk.
Um, what? “All these kids”? What are they talking about? Who do they mean? I want to ask what they mean, if they’ve seen any others, but then there’s a hand on my shoulder and I think better of leaving Callie to go get involved with a bunch of people who don’t seem like they’d take too kindly to a girl like her. I look up, and there’s Betty, our waitress, our angel.
“How’re you kids doing?” Betty asks. “Can I get you all the check?”
“Yes, please,” I say, then turn to Stan and wave. He’s no longer the center of the argument, thank God, so I tell him to get the hell over here, please, in gestures. He catches my meaning and drags Ted back to the table.
Betty brings the check, which has a smiley face at the bottom, and I notice she left off all our drinks. Stan and I pay, and I leave her a huge cash tip, and then we’re off, leaving the angry diners to fume and scratch their heads.
ELEVEN
WE’RE BACK ON the road, still headed north. It’s my turn to drive for the next four hours, which Stan and I have decided is the longest either of us seems to be able to manage before the road and its accompanying signs and markers all start blending together.
I keep my eyes straight ahead on the road, and at the sides of my vision I watch the trees chase the retaining walls and the retaining walls chase the trees into some sort of small space in the distance where the highway will stop, where everything we know will just disappear. I see Callie in the rearview watching me, and I start to smile, but my face is too tired, and anyway she doesn’t smile back. I must be wearing my anxiety on my face, because all of a sudden Stan pipes up and tells me he thinks that I should rest and he should maybe drive for a bit. I make a lame attempt at reminding him that my shift isn’t quite up yet, but he insists, and I can’t find the energy to pretend I have any real powers of concentration left.
So now I’m in the passenger seat watching it all with full vi sion, as one sign for the interstate swallows another until, poof, we’re in Maine. I think of this poem I once read, about how one train can hide another, and this feels a lot like that. One thing is right in front of you, and directly behind it is another thing, and then they’re gone, but then there’s something else, let’s call them clouds. So there are clouds, and they’re in the sky, and then the clouds in the sky swallow up the sky, and then everything’s just sky, and the power lines keep running along around the sky’s knees, and cell phone towers keep trying to punch their way up into space. All of which is to say, it’s a good thing that Stan took the initiative to take over the wheel.