“What happened to the other cars? Babs, what happened?”
Barbra hadn’t taken her eyes off of Charles, but he didn’t seem to react to Grace’s question. Well, there was no reason she should be spared the truth. It could hardly have escaped her notice that she’d been pulled out of school, and soon they’d be bunking down in dingy motel rooms across America. She turned to face Grace.
“They were all repossessed last week. Your father didn’t want to ask Andrew to drive back home, so his was repossessed at school.”
“Daddy?”
Charles shrank into his collar. He really wasn’t going to reply. Nothing. In all the years of their marriage, in all the years since they’d met, really, Barbra’s admiration of Charles had never wavered. She respected the fact that he wasn’t an academic, someone with extant family money and a nearsighted squint; that he’d wrested a cosmetics empire out of the wilds of this foreign land. There had been a time, in the sex-soaked half decade that began their relationship, when the sight of him snapping a shirt straight before putting it on had been enough to send a weakening shot between her legs. But now, in the silence that sank into the pinpoints of the perforated leather upholstery, Barbra looked at Charles and felt curiously maternal. She had never even held a newborn before, but it must feel something like this, this urge to soften the world around him while simultaneously finding herself bewildered by the creature to whom she had once been so intimately connected.
Touching his arm, she pointed at a rapidly approaching In-N-Out sign, and said, low, “We should eat before we get there—we can’t ask her daughter to feed us all.” Charles turned towards her, grateful, and flicked on the right turn signal.
“Eh?” Ama called out. “Ni yao jia you ah?”
“Wo men qu chi In-N-Out, hao ma?” replied Charles.
“Bu bu bu, wo nu er yi jing zai zuo wan fan le.”
Oh, dinner at Ama’s daughter’s house. Barbra couldn’t bear the thought. A casserole. A can of soup hastily heated in a dinged pot. An iceberg salad. Or, even worse, something that had been labored over and was still nearly inedible.
Chicken à la king. Beef stroganoff.
Any one of those horrid American cookbook concoctions that Ama’s daughter probably tried to solder together out of supermarket ingredients in her desert shack.
But Charles, dutiful to his Ama if nothing else, kept the car on the highway and didn’t even glance at the cluster of fast food joints as they zoomed past.
“Do we have to stay there?” asked Grace. “Like, for the night?”
Charles peered at her over his shoulder, trying to gauge his daughter’s tone. “Maybe we stay. Rest and leave early in the morning. Ama invited us, so it not so polite to refuse.”
Oh dear. Barbra hadn’t even considered that possibility. Scratchy Kmart sheets and thin bars of soap. It would be a preview of every motel they were due to check into on this journey, probably with a desperately chugging swamp cooler dampening the hard carpet and sun-faded patches on the vulgar sofas. Back to a life she thought she’d left behind.
Grace said nothing, but Barbra could hear the girl shift in the backseat, and a moment later, she felt a pair of teenage knees jam themselves into her spine. May Lee’s daughter. That’s how Barbra thought of her sometimes. The last productive thing May Lee ever did. Saina felt like Charles’s daughter, and Andrew was a sort of free agent, sunny even in the aftermath of his mother’s death and strangely impervious to parenting. Grace was the one she had known from infancy and probably the one who came closest to her practical outlook on the world, but a polite distance always remained between the two of them.
Even in close proximity like this, there was a barrier. Barbra felt her seat jostle and sat up slightly, turning her attention to the dusty world outside the car. She had never really seen the point of the desert. It was a useless landscape, more a failure of evolution than a valid ecosystem. Scorpions and cacti, leftovers from Mother Nature’s rebellious phase; shouldn’t She have gotten past all that by now?
十四
Twentynine Palms, CA
328 Miles