If I was going to do this, I’d need the computer. . . .
I glanced at it on the floorboard. J. Norm’s legs sagged over it, his bony knees stretching the brown polyester pants that it seemed like he wore about every other day. His hand jerked toward the computer, the kind of movement your body makes without you telling it to, and I knew he’d fallen asleep again. When I looked at him, he was out cold, his head drooping off to one side. He was probably worn-out after all the excitement. The little patch of hair he usually kept slicked across the top of his head was waving in the window breeze like a tiny flag. His glasses hung loose over his knee, where he might knock them onto the floor and step on them. Pinching them between two fingers, I set them on the console so they wouldn’t get crushed; then I tried to think through my next move.
It wouldn’t be too much longer before we started coming into the outskirts of Houston. I could pull the car over someplace where J. Norm would be safe, leave a little note to tell him I was sorry but I had to do what I had to do, and promise to get the computer back to him as soon as I had the chance. I could contact Deborah, let her know where he was. She might even be on her way to the bed-and-breakfast in Groveland by now. Aunt Char and Sharla had been snooping enough that they’d probably heard us talking about Houston. Once Deborah told them all the dirt on us, they’d probably share everything they knew.
You should leave. You should take off now
, a voice inside me said. It was Epie’s voice. I hadn’t heard from her in a while.
You gotta look out for yourself, Epiphany. You don’t owe nobody nothin’. You don’t owe
him
one thing, that’s for sure. You gotta take care of you.
I didn’t like how the words felt in my head.
Is that really who I am?
I wondered.
Am I Epie? Am I somebody who’d steal stuff from an old man, take off, leave him on the side of the road?
J. Norm wouldn’t be my grandpa after that. He wouldn’t have anything to do with me ever again. Deborah would use it as one more way to prove that J. Norm was out of his mind, that he didn’t have any sense about people. The principal at the school, Deborah, everybody would decide DeRon was right. I was a liar. I was a punk who took advantage of people, who stole things.
Mrs. Lora would turn over in her grave. So would the preacher who put me under the water and turned me into a new person. I wasn’t supposed to be like Mama, like Russ, like DeRon. I was supposed to be a new creation, something better. Mrs. Lora always said I could be anything I wanted to be—that I didn’t have to agree with the things my mama did, that I could pick myself out a whole different kind of life. A Godly life. She said I was smart, and I was good inside. She promised she’d help me all the way.
When something doesn’t feel right, stop and ask yourself, Is this what God created me for?
she said.
Think about what kind of life you want, and then you set your feet on a path toward it. Don’t let anyone or anything take your feet off that path, and . . .
Something caught my eye in the rearview, and I glanced up and saw a police car behind us. “J. Norm.” I grabbed J. Norm’s arm and shook it. “J. Norm, there’s a cop behind us.” I tapped the brakes, and then I remembered that J. Norm had said not to do that. The cop closed in a little. “J. Norm,” I hissed, and shook him until his head rolled off the headrest, and he snorted awake. “There’s a police car behind us for real this time!”
He blinked and looked around, confused.
“There’s a cop, there’s a cop, there’s a
cop
,” I whispered, checking the side mirror, my heart pounding. The cop’s lights went on, and he was coming up behind us fast. A bomb went off in my chest. “What do I do? What do I do?” For a half a sec, I thought about stepping on the gas and outrunning the patrol car, action-movie-style.
J. Norm looked around and found his glasses. “Pull off into that minimart ahead. Be careful to slow down and use your blinker.”
“Pull off? Really?” My voice wasn’t much more than a squeak. My hands sweated on the steering wheel, but I did what J. Norm said. The car rolled to a stop at the edge of the minimart parking lot.
“Take out your driver’s permit,” J. Norm told me. He was fishing through the glove compartment. “You know where your driver’s permit is, right?”
I nodded, because I couldn’t talk; then I grabbed my purse and dug out my permit.
In the mirror, the officer was walking closer, his head tipped to one side like he was looking at the back of our car. Was he checking the license plate number? Had he heard a report about us?
“Be polite. No smart-mouthing.” J. Norm sat stiff in his seat, his back straight as a board, his fingers shaking a little when he dug through the cards and pictures in his wallet and pulled out his license.
“Okay . . . all right.”
Time seemed like it was moving in slow motion as I rolled down the window, and the cop asked for my license, and I handed it over.
J. Norm leaned across the seat and said, “Here’s the proof of insurance. Is there a problem, officer? My granddaughter and I are just on a little trip, practicing her driving. Was she doing something wrong?”
The patrolman wrote stuff from my permit on his great big pad of tickets. “Wait here,” he said, and then he took our stuff and went back to his car. A minute later, he was on his radio.
“Oh, man, J. Norm, he’s calling it in. We’re toast. We’re so busted.” I wanted to cry, and I wanted to make a run for it.
“Be calm.” But J. Norm didn’t sound calm. He sounded like he was just as worried as I was. His voice was thin and watery, fake like the skim milk they started serving in the cafeteria after the state decided schoolkids were too fat. “He’s only checking the insurance and registration. He’s following procedure.”
“What if they’re
looking
for us? What if the police are in on it?”
“I don’t think Deborah would go to those lengths.” But his face said that he did. “Let’s not worry ahead of ourselves. Remember that first moon landing. Confidence is half the battle. You have to believe things will go according to plan, until events prove otherwise.”
“What’s this got to do with rockets?”
“Everything has to do with rockets. Launching a rocket is similar to any endeavor in life. You formulate your best plans prior to, but you must be aware that, at any moment, the unexpected may come along. Events can deviate from plan. If you wait until you can foresee everything, you’ll never launch. The best you can do is to aim high and plan for contingencies.”
I looked in the rearview again, fear balling in my neck. “What’s our contingency plan?”
Pulling his lips between his teeth, so that his mouth was like the smile on a scarecrow, he lifted his shoulders. “I couldn’t come up with one.”
I slapped a hand over my eyes. This cop was gonna haul us in, and then we’d have to face Deborah, Mama, and Russ, and the school. Everything was crashing down around me. “Oh, man.”
You could run. Right now, you could get out of the car and run.
The cop wasn’t even watching us, because he was busy writing. I caught myself looking around. There was a patch of woods out behind the convenience store. I could disappear in there, go through the trees, come out the other side and find the way to a bus station. . . .
My fingers touched the door handle, fiddled with it.
The cop got out of his car and made the decision for me. If I tried to take off now, he’d run me down before I cleared the parking lot. As soon as I knew I was trapped, I was glad, in a way. It went back to something Mrs. Lora had told me:
What you do, you become.
I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would bail on a friend.
I’d just have to stay here and face the music. Me and J. Norm together. We got into this together, after all.
“Sit up straight in your seat. Look confident,” he bossed.
For some reason—nerves, I guess—I laughed. “I’m
not
confident.”
“Consider it an acting challenge.” He straightened in his seat, too, and we waited, stiff as a couple of store mannequins.
The cop stood beside the car, silent as he finished writing stuff on his pad.
J. Norm leaned across the console, and I saw his reflection beside mine in the policeman’s glasses. “Everything okay, Officer?”
“I wasn’t speeding,” I said, and J. Norm pinched me on the arm.
We hung there on a string while the cop took his time finishing up. He had a little smirk down below his bad-boy glasses, like he could smell the fear and was enjoying it. If this guy took us off to jail, there was no telling what he’d do to us. He looked like the type who ended up on the news for slamming some grandma to the concrete and cuffing her after she turned the wrong way out of the church parking lot.
But he hadn’t asked us to get out of the car yet. That was a good sign. . . .
He stopped writing finally, then stared at us over the top of his ticket pad.
Just get it over with, already
, I thought. He kept looking around the inside of the car, like he was trolling for evidence, or trying to figure us out. Even through the sunglasses, I could see what he was thinking:
What’s this little creamy caramel girl doing driving around with some old white guy in a car?
Bet if I was some cute little blond-headed girl with big blue eyes, he wouldn’t be holding us up.
“Where are you two headed, young lady?”
I swallowed hard, choked down the lump in my throat. This guy could tell something was fishy, and he was gonna sniff around till he could figure it out. “We’re on our way to Houston. Did I do something wrong? I wasn’t speeding.”
J. Norm pinched me again.
I made myself give the jerky police officer a great big smile. “My grandpa and me are going to see relatives . . . in Houston.”
The policeman tapped the back of his pencil against the pad, like he was deciding what else to write on the ticket. Could they just add stuff because they felt like it? “Where at in Houston?”
“My grandpa knows.”
“Magnolia Estates,” J. Norm chimed in. How he came up with that name, I had no clue, but he said it like he believed it. “Afraid we’re making a bit of a slow trip of it today, though. At this rate, we’ll miss dinner at my sister’s house. Surprised she hasn’t started calling already to see where we are.”
I sat back and waited to see what else J. Norm would come up with.
“How far to her house?” The cop tapped his pencil some more.
J. Norm pretended to think about it. “Oh . . . twenty miles or so. She’s out past the loop.”
The cop nodded. Finally, he tore off the top sheet of his pad and handed it to me, along with our other stuff. I wanted to give it a big ol’ kiss. Maybe we weren’t about to get dragged out of the car, after all. “Are you aware that your inspection sticker is five months out-of-date?”
“No, sir, I was not.” J. Norm gaped at the windshield, and my mouth hung open for a totally different reason. I wanted to say,
You stopped us and scared me to death for a sticker?
“My wife passed away a few months ago. I haven’t been driving,” J. Norm said.
The cop closed his pad. “I’m going to give you a warning today. Take the car in for an inspection when you arrive at your sister’s.”
I went from hating that cop to feeling like he was my best friend in the world. No ticket. No problem.
“Yes, sir!” J. Norm said, and I half expected him to give the guy an army salute.
“Drive carefully.” The policeman turned away and walked back to his car without another word.
J. Norm sagged, patting his chest, and I caught my breath. The two of us were panting like we’d just finished a marathon.
“Man,” I said.
“I think it’s time for a soda,” J. Norm added. We pulled across the parking lot and went in the convenience store for snacks, taking our time and letting the cop get far, far away. Some guys inside told us about a place down the road where we could get the car inspected, so we went there next. Both of us breathed a sigh of relief when we hit the road with our new sticker on the window. No more cop stops for us.
After a while, I could tell by the billboards that we were getting closer to Houston. Finally we hit a serious traffic jam, and we inched along in a bumper-to-bumper mess for almost an hour, until we gave up and pulled off at a Pizza Hut so we could check e-mail and see if Clara Culp or her daughter, Amy, had answered us.
“I hope she doesn’t think we’re, like, a couple of crazy people,” I told J. Norm, while I was waiting for the computer to crank up and listening to my stomach rumble. The room smelled like pizza, and I was hungry for something besides junk food.
“They posted to the reunion Web site. They must expect to have answers.” He stirred his Coke with a straw, squeezed a lemon into it, then rested his chin on his fist, hunching over the table while I worked on the computer. A couple minutes later, he was staring out the window with his chin in his hand, his eyes a million miles away. It didn’t matter, because I didn’t find anything worth telling him about, anyway. No e-mail, and I found a bunch of addresses and phone numbers for Culp, but none for Clara or Amy. There wasn’t any way to tell which of those addresses might be the right one, so I decided to focus on the city library angle. After doing some digging, I found Amy Culp listed with the staff at a library downtown. There were two problems with that—tomorrow was Sunday, and even if the libraries
were
open on Sunday, just looking at the map of how to get to that place scared me half to death.