Hazel turned the car in smoothly, slowly. She pulled into a parking spot in front of the office.
Rose stared at the front office, where a college student was filling in. “I can’t believe she did it,” she said. “I can’t believe she’s not in there. She’s always in there.”
“Things change, hon,” Angie said. “It’s only for a few months. She’s coming home.”
Rose turned around again. Her blue eyes, those sweet, coy, flirtatious baby blues she’d first seen over the Patty Melt counter when they were both teenagers, when things like eye color and hair curls and beauty obscured everything. For nineteen years now, she’d seen those eyes flare in anger, crinkle shut with laughter, well up in fear and sorrow like they were now.
“What if she doesn’t?”
They were, Angie thought, like the blue of a winter sky at dusk. Someday, she would see them close forever. Like she’d seen her father’s. Or Rose would see Angie’s that way. But not yet. Not just yet.
“I love you, Rosie. Did you know that?”
Rose nodded and wiped her eyes. “I love you back.”
Hazel sighed. “Oh my god. Get a room, you two.”
“We are,” Angie said. She climbed out of the car and headed toward Room 7. She unlocked the door and looked in at the decorations, at the banner, the plane tickets and hotel reservations she’d spread out on the beds. She turned around, and she met Rose Prentiss’s eyes again. They both grinned. Their room. That crazy, sexy girl. Somehow they’d made it. Past the looks, past the sex, past the immaturity and denial and secret shame. They’d made it this far.
Hazel let out a whoop. “Disneyland! Are you kidding? Cool! Oh, wow.” She threw her arms around Angie, and Angie remembered that day in the mud, her father lifting her, pulling her to safety. How much he could carry. Love, that glassy orb of a word, took shape over Hazel’s shoulder, and Angie coughed.
“You don’t turn sixteen every day,” Angie said. She held up the car keys. “I think it’s time the Impala had a young driver again.”
Hazel screamed. She hugged Angie and hugged Rose and hopped around the room and out into the parking lot.
Rose sat on the corner of the bed. She looked at Angie now with solemn eyes.
“I’ve been feeling stuck. Wanting to get away.”
Angie nodded. “I know.”
“How? I didn’t even know. Not really.”
“Rose. Come on. I know you.”
Rose threw out her arms. “I want to go places. I want more. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you or our life.”
“I know,” Angie said. She sat on the bed next to her. “I used to want that too. Then we got busy, with Hazel, the shop, the motel, family. All of it. Somehow it got lost.”
“Yeah,” Rose said. “Lost.”
So much lost. Angie thought of heart-shaped rocks, of bones beneath the earth. But so much found, too.
“Run away with me,” Angie said. She pulled out the tickets she’d been hiding under her shirt and inside her waistband. “Paris in December. You and me. Your mom will keep an eye on Hazel. We’ll meet up with Stevie.” She flapped the tickets against her palm.
Rose stared at Angie, at the tickets. She took the tickets and held them in her lap. “Oh, you’re too much, Angela Juarez. Too damn much.”
Hazel yelled from the parking lot, “You guys, come on! Let’s go for a ride in my new car!”
“Roller-skating on the moon,” Rose said. She stared out the open door.
“What?” Angie pulled at one of her curls.
She smiled. “Nothing. Something Stevie used to say.” She laid her head on Angie’s shoulder. “But I know what she means now.”
*
Down the hill in Phoenix, Stevie Prentiss sat buckled in her window seat on the plane. She patted her money belt inside her new jeans, where she had carefully placed several hundred-dollar bills. She had her hotel reservation and a new cell phone with overseas access. She had her neck pillow and eye mask and a coupon for one free drink. One suitcase was in the bin over her head, another was in the belly below, a puffy red coat nesting in the bottom-most layer. The rest, she’d buy when she got there. Paris. She reached up and adjusted the air vent, smelling the jet fuel as men with orange jackets and sticks bustled under the wing.
She turned to the woman sitting in the aisle seat. “I’ve never been on a plane before,” she said.
The woman smiled and nodded. “Oh, sugar, no need to be nervous. People fly every day.”
“I’m not nervous,” Stevie said. She hardly knew what she was feeling. Antsy. Elated. She fiddled with the knob on the tray table. She touched her cheek.
Back home in Sycamore, they were saying good-bye to the girl tonight, paying their respects to the mother. Stevie had already said her good-byes. She’d sat on the bed facing the mural on her wall, and she told the girl, one last time: It was an accident. They didn’t know. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. She told her, I’m taking your coat to Paris. I’m going to wear it as I walk along the Seine. She addressed the woman in the mural, the woman she now understood to be the mother: the mother standing on the canyon rim, looking into the distance, waiting for her girl to come home. To her, Stevie had said, I’m sorry I didn’t follow her. I’m sorry I didn’t call for help. I’m sorry you had to wait so long.
The plane pulled away from the terminal and bumped along the concrete to the runway.
She closed her eyes as the plane accelerated, the force pushing her into the seat. She opened them the exact moment the wheels lifted and the plane left the earth.
She looked out the square little window and watched the houses and cars and trees and swimming pools and jagged mountains grow smaller, shimmering in the heat and dust of the desert. The plane climbed and bounced on air pockets, and her stomach dropped. She peered out and saw a cloud above them, and soon they were inside it, a gray mist that obscured her view.
She had never seen anything like it. Never. And she’d been looking her whole life. She laughed.
The woman on the aisle leaned over. She pointed out the window. “It’s real pretty, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Stevie said.
She pressed her fingers on the glass, and the colors stayed still. She could see clearly all the shining world below.
*
Saturdays, Esther closed the bakery at three for the rest of the weekend, and usually she beat it out of there, knowing she’d have to be back before dawn on Monday. Today, she lingered, thinking she’d make a fresh loaf of banana bread to bring to the service at Iris’s this evening. She’d already overloaded Iris’s kitchen and dining room with platters of pastries and carafes of coffee and tea, and Hugh had made pinwheels and lasagna bites. No one would be going hungry, and she needed to remember to bring plastic to-go containers. But banana bread was Maud’s favorite, and tonight—well, she might need banana bread. By god, Esther could make banana bread.