The realization made him feel weak, and tired.
“For every thing there is a reason, Jay,” Mari reminded him. It was what he needed to hear right then. And it was the last they could speak of secret matters, as Astrid aka K.S. Libby was coming out of the McDonalds with a drink carrier and a brown sack in hand.
Mari gathered the letters and her notes and pushed them back into the box.
“Hey, I got some coffee and hash browns,” Astrid said pleasantly as she climbed in the back, just a kid talking again. “My treat. For the ride.”
She passed out the coffees and food, and closed the door. “All in.”
Jay sipped his coffee, taking just a tiny bit of the steaming liquid, and put it between his legs so he could drive.
Mari reached over and took it carefully into her own hands. Jay looked at her, his cheeks flushing red.
“I’m not getting fresh,” Mari assured him. “You just don’t catch the news, do you?”
“Burn your thingy right off,” Astrid said from the back seat, and giggled with her mouth full of hashbrowns.
“Hot,” Mari told him. “I’ll hold, you drive.”
“Can I handle my hashbrowns, do you think?” he asked Mari, and she pushed the golden brown potato patty into his mouth like a cigar.
Astrid ate up the show from the back seat, and Jay took them back toward the interstate.
Thirty Nine
The End Of One Line
For almost a hundred miles after their potty and food stop at Mickey Dees, Astrid detailed for Mari and Jay the wonders of Buncha Burger, reciting the whole menu as she remembered it from her home town location, down to how many packets of sauce you got with the chicken strips—not that she hardly ever ordered those, being a burger kind of person, if they knew what she meant. For so long did she dwell on the Mega Buncha Meal—which was three all beef patties on four buns, with pickles, onions, mustard, ketchup, and three strips of fried zucchini—that Jay suggested that maybe her calling in life was to open a franchise.
A franchise for very disturbed customers, she added, and they all laughed at a that.
After that Mari had asked if she wanted to go as far as they were, Amarillo, and Astrid said sure, that there was a good a chance as any that there was a Buncha Burger there, to which Mari told her flat out that she had Buncha Burger on the brain. A few more laughs, and then it quieted. Astrid dozed off, and Mari offered to switch, but Jay said he was doing fine, that driving was keeping his mind right, and his thoughts off of his keg, which was throbbing again even after two pills that day. He wasn’t groggy, she thought, but made him promise that if he started feeling that way he would give up the wheel. He agreed, and they drove on.
They drove through the plains and the gently hilled lands of western Kansas, prairie that looked like a golden flag unfurling as the wind danced across it, south on State Route 27, across small streams where the afternoon sun fired sparkles on pure waters. They saw deer vaulting barbed wire fences and prancing for distant trees, and coyotes dash across the roadway ahead, and they passed coyotes who had tried but not made it in time. There were hawks in the sky and wisps of clouds far above, and there were green tractors that seemed to be floating in vast seas of growth. It was good country. Country that looked good, felt good.
“Jay?” Mari said as they neared the border with Oklahoma.
“What?” His eyes were ahead now. Just ahead, not taking in the scenery.
“You look sad. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he told her, maybe lying, maybe not. ‘Not’, he figured, if remembering good things that made one sad really caused no irreparable harm. He thought not. “Just thinking back a long, long time.”
She smiled, and left it at that, and the car was a sweet silent ride until near seven in the evening when they neared Amarillo.
“Astrid, wake up, honey,” Mari said, reaching back to pat their young companion on the leg. “We’re just about there.”
“Interstate Forty is just three miles ahead,” Jay said. They were on the 287, which right there was a combination with the 87, and their time on it was draining away fast. Signs for I 40 and the civic center were passing, as were long streams of cars zipping by what their drivers must have thought was the slowest damn thing ever on the highway.
In the back Astrid stirred, but didn’t come out of sleep, so Mari tapped her again, causing the young girl to swat at the annoying hand. “All right already. I’m awake. I’m awake.”
“Should I just get off by I Forty?” Jay asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, and looked into the back seat to see Astrid finally sitting up, her dark-rimmed eyes drooped halfway shut still. “Morning, honey.”
“Morning?” Astrid asked, then sleep fell away enough that she got the humor. “I feel like I’ve been sleeping all day.”
“Half the day,” Mari informed her, and pointed to the sun setting low out the right side windows. “It’s after seven.”
Astrid held the palm of her thumbless hand to her mouth and breathed against it. Her face soured. “Do you have any gum?”
Mari did, and dredged it from her purse. She passed Astrid the whole pack. “Here. Keep it. I’ve got another in here somewhere.”
The girl peeled the shiny wrappers from two pieces and pushed them into her mouth, chewing down on them hard and fast, wanting results right then, thank you very much, then she took her bag from the pile of clothes and blankets and put it on her lap, shoving the gum inside and making sure she hadn’t left anything on the seat or the floor.
“I’m going to get off up here,” Jay said. Plains Boulevard, it was, and though still a ways from the junction with Interstate Forty, he did a bit of quick mental math with the odometer’s present and previous readings and figured that they were pretty darn close, within a mile maybe. And once off 287, it would be about on the money.
“You can just let me off at a store or a gas station,” Astrid said from the back seat, seeming antsy, Mari thought. But then again, thirteen hours in a small, slow car with two people twice your age might tend to drive a young girl half way insane.
“Sure thing, honey,” Mari said, liking the feel of saying that word again, if only to a sweet girl she had known for a very short time.
Honey. Honey. Honey
. It hurt a bit to say it, but not in a bad way. Never in a bad way. Not then, not now.
Jay took the rumbling car off the highway and turned right toward a brightly lit row of buildings along Plains Boulevard. Their windows were down and the coming night was warm, but not as warm as the days before in Missouri, and Astrid pointed out at a cluster of shops just past a gas station on the left. Jay slid over two lanes and into the turn pocket, pulled a tight one, and stopped in the parking lot right outside a taco stand.
“Are you gonna be—” Jay began to inquire, but she was already out the door and a few feet away, bending to look back at them through Mari’s window.
“Thanks a lot, guys,” Astrid said, smiling tightly and giving them a wave before starting away from them.
Mari looked back to Jay, and he to her, both a little stunned by the abrupt departure. Had they done something? To offend her? Anger her? Even just bore her to some state of revulsion?
“I don’t understand, Jay,” Mari said, and he seemed about to reply when his eyes tracked off Mari and out the window. She looked that way as well.
Astrid was back, crouching there, just outside the window, saying nothing, hardly even looking at them, just an awkward glance here and there. After a moment she brought her bag to her front and reached in. She pulled out the fanny pack in which Jay and Mari had all their money and held it out toward the car.
Mari took it, her face sagging in shock, her gaze hurting.
“I saw you pay for gas the last time we stopped, and I...”
Jay was leaning forward now, and a bit Mari’s way to better see the young girl.
Astrid just stood there for a moment, silent, as Mari put the pack on her lap. She had tossed it behind the seat out of habit, the same way she tossed her purse there, only this drive she had kept her purse up front to give the girl more room. She must have just forgotten about the fanny pack.
But Astrid sure hadn’t.
“I didn’t take anything. You can count it if you want.”
Mari stared at her. Just stared at her.
Astrid stood and turned, walking a few feet before stopping and facing the car again. “You know, my real name is Kay Sara,” she said, for some reason that was only apparent to her. Maybe to answer a question asked hours before. Maybe to give something she didn’t have to, to try and make up for what she’d almost done. “My mother named me after some song some old singer sang. Kay Sara Sara, or something like that. Ever hear of it?”
Jay nodded, but Mari did not move. Did not speak. All she gave the girl back was a look, her blue eyes darkened with heartache.
“I’ve heard it,” Jay said, and to that Kay Sara Libby nodded with her wet eyes shining. She looked off toward the sunset and bobbed nervously on her feet. After a moment he told her, “I hope you find a Buncha Burger.”
The girl nodded crisply, biting her lip, and she looked back to Mari one last time, and then she could stand it no more and turned away and walked off into the night.
Mari watched the girl leave, and leave them for real this time, gone.
“Mari?”
She turned, but looked out the windshield instead of at Jay.
“She brought it back,” Jay told her, seeing what she was feeling. Not knowing it, but knowing that something was there. Something he could not understand because he had not known the joy and the pain of having children, and losing them. “She didn’t take it. She couldn’t.”
“I guess it all can’t be a picture postcard along the way,” Mari said, her gaze fixed forward. “Maybe just the end.”
“Right,” Jay agreed, wondering just what kind of ‘perfect’ they’d settle for after all they’d been through.
Forty
Paging Mr. Grady
They sat in the parking lot and waited for almost an hour, giving it time. This ‘thing’ time. Time to give them whatever there was here after nineteen plus hours and exactly, as it turned out, 846 miles. But nothing came their way.
Jay bought them tacos and drinks at the stand right before them, but the change was as random as the sparkle of the stars just winking on in the darkening heavens above.
They ate in the car, and then decided to wait no more. Nothing was coming. Mari’s gut told her that, while it was the coins that convinced Jay. There was nothing more to do. They decided to check into a motel.
Not far up Plains Boulevard they found a place with a vacancy that Friday night. The
Dillo In Rillo Motor Inn
it was called, its sign a huge gray armadillo whose right eye winked red at the traffic every second or two. Jay parked, and crutched his way into the office, getting a room with two beds on the ground floor. The pool gate was locked at ten, the desk clerk told him, and the TV had HBO and The Nashville Network. No nudie shows, though, and Jay told him that was okay.
Mari closed up the car and gathered their things, and when Jay returned from the office they went to the room together.
It was clean, and quiet, and the air conditioner hummed pleasantly as it fed cool air into the room. Jay showered first, taking care with his cast, and then Mari slipped into the tub, leaving the door open a crack so they could talk as she soaked and Jay stared at the television.
Right around nine thirty she asked a question that Jay at first misunderstood.
“How long has it been for you?” Mari asked from the bathroom. Jay could just see her head, lolled back against the top rim of the tub.
“Eight years,” he said, thinking on it quickly. “I mean, I’ve caught a glimpse of it here and there, but it’s been that long since I really sat down and watched.”
Her head tipped left toward him. “Huh?”
“I haven’t watched a whole show in eight years,” he said again, spelling it out more clearly this time.
“No,” she said, laughing. “
Sex
. How long has it been since you’ve had sex?” She chuckled some more. “Leave it to a man to mix the two up.”
“What makes you ask about that?” he inquired, wondering if she could see the color of his cheeks from in there.
“A man, a woman, a motel room,” she said, as if checking off ingredients. “It’s only natural.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, and tried to concentrate on some dance show on a network called TNN—that Nashville thing, must be—but that got hard because the girls’ skirts kept flying up as their partners twirled them, or as they twirled all alone in long lines.
“So, how long has it been?”
A woman, a man, motel room
, he thought. Maybe that was an equally good reason to
not
get into the subject. Not that he
wanted
her, although she was attractive, and he guessed the converse was also a point to accept, that he also didn’t
not
want her. She was pretty like Carrie had been pretty, only afraid to show it. Glancing at her now, seeing just her head, and the smooth line of her shoulders, and even that one damaged arm as it hung over the tub’s edge, he could tell she was beautiful. Delicate features, like some fine doll, thick hair that shined and shimmered and looked just as good pulled back in that scrunchy thing she sometimes wore as spread free all upon her shoulders. She didn’t have to try to look good, he finally decided it was, because her...allure came from more than what one saw. It came also from what one didn’t see. No unnecessary accouterments, no flashy jewelry, no push up bra. He hadn’t known her when she wasn’t like she was now, but he felt fairly certain that she was not all that different in what she was then. Less damaged, of course, in so many ways, but no less real.
“Jay?” she asked after waiting for a reply long enough.
“What? Sorry.”
She wrung water from the washcloth onto her neck and chest and said, “You don’t have to answer that. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he said, and changed the channel to a local bible thumper show and left it there with the sound turned low. “I just haven’t talked about that in a long,
long
time.”