The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (17 page)

east of the mountains

W
e motor east on I-90, through the broad-shouldered green foothills and into the steep-faced swells of Snoqualmie Pass. We travel mostly in silence. Trev takes in the scenery with what appears to be only mild interest, but it's not that he isn't interested. He's just anxious; I can tell by the way he leans forward slightly, his elbows on the armrests, his knotted hands dangling inches above his lap. We've already made bathroom stops in Factoria, Issaquah, and Fall City. Trev would like nothing more than to avoid the indignity of another service station bathroom with no stall and yours truly standing by at a distance of three feet. But he'll have to settle for even less. When nature calls again at the Snoqualmie summit, we've no choice but to pull over at the rest area, where the only facilities are glorified honey buckets. Further complicating matters, the structures are not in compliance. No ramp, no bar, no room to maneuver.
Th
e entire ordeal is awkward in every way.

Emerging with Trev in my arms, and setting him in his chair, I see we're being watched by a teenage girl in fingerless gloves and a tartan skirt, sitting on the curb in the shadow of the van, smoking a cigarette. Trev blushes when he notices her, no doubt embarrassed by his predicament. She wears her hair cropped short and bleached blond, except for her long black bangs. Her nose is pierced. She watches us with the expert dispassion of a teenage misfit, picking absently at the skin of her wrist and spitting on the sidewalk, as Trev pilots his chair onto the ramp, and I begin raising it with an electric whir. Cute kid, when you get beyond the fashion statement. About sixteen or seventeen, I'd guess. If she's not a runaway, she could play one on TV. Somewhere nearby, a car honks, and abruptly the girl tosses her cigarette aside, stands up, and dashes into the tree line separating the autos from the trucks.

“Something we said?” says Trev.

“Or maybe something she ate.”

I joke, but the truth is, I can scarcely lay eyes on a teenage girl without wondering what kind of teenager Piper might've been. I picture her like the smoking girl, except happier and not smoking and not biting her cuticles or running away from anything.

As we roll down the leeward side of the Cascades through the basin and into the high desert, the dense fir and cedar give way to sparse pine woods and channeled scablands riddled with boulders and basalt. Soon Trev is asleep in his wheelchair, still leaning slightly forward, and I'm alone with my thoughts and two hundred miles of desert.

I can't help but think of that family trip in '05 through the Southwest, all the cracker crumbs and hokey fanfare—miracle ponds and painted rocks—all the sticky vinyl seat backs and starchy hotel linens and gas-inducing roadside victuals. Sort of an exhausting nightmare, really, what with Janet seven months pregnant and the hundred- degree heat and the broken air conditioner. I can see Piper, as though in a photograph, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, the bright red halo of a cherry slushy ringing her mouth. I can see her holding hands with a venerable Indian in full-feathered regalia at the Jackrabbit Trading Post. Beaming in pigtails at the Amboy Crater. Wild-eyed at the Rattlesnake Museum. None of the photographic evidence suggests what was nearly lost that afternoon at the ghost town.

Trev awakens about ten miles west of Vantage, where the high desert begins its gradual descent into the gorge. His spirits have improved considerably. His whole comportment is more at ease, and he leans back, his arms stretched out at forty-degree angles (which is as far as they can stretch), looking out the side window at some distant point.

“What'd I miss?” he says.

“Oodles.
Th
ere were some cows about sixty miles back. And something that looked like a tree.”

“Damn.”

“Oh, and a hitchhiker—I think it might've been Moses.”

Trev breaks into a grin—not his signature evil genius grin or the uncomfortable tacked-on grin with which he so often greets adversity great or small but a genuine, lighthearted, devil-may-care grin. And something about it makes me want to cry.

george, washington

T
h
e town of George, Washington (population 528), just east of the gorge, is the first lunch stop on our seven-day itinerary. We are an hour and thirty-seven minutes behind schedule as we pull off on exit 149 in the blistering heat of midafternoon. Had we arrived in 1983, we might have been treated to a slice of the World's Biggest Cherry Pie (subsequently dethroned in Traverse City, Michigan in 1987, and again in Oliver, British Columbia, in 1990). However, those golden days of seventeen-thousand-pound pies have flown. As it stands, visitors are forced to settle for a six-story water tower emblazoned with our founding father's silhouette, which looks more like the silhouette of an infant with Paget's disease and a cauliflower ear.

Th
e chamber of commerce really dropped the ball in George. Talk about missed opportunities! No gift shop. No powdered wigs, no wooden dentures, no coin-fed lie detector, no nothing. Okay, there's a bronzed bust of General Washington outside a filling station on the near edge of town. Otherwise, a tour of George, Washington, might include the sheriff substation, a squat green portable surrounded by scorched lawn and a couple of parched-looking trees. Fire District No. 3, an equally squat gray edifice of the sort of cinder block construction one might expect to see in an outbuilding at Stalag Luft.
Th
e George Community Hall, the very nerve center of public life in George, a blotchy and windowless structure possessing all the architectural allure of a two-car garage. And no tour would be complete without a drive past aluminum-sided city hall, which with a few more windows might make a nice retail outlet for ball bearings. I can only hope that the town of Joe, Montana, has more to offer.

After a brief stopover at the foot of the water tower, during which Trev and I scrutinize President Washington's silhouette in the manner of a Rorschach test, we lunch at a dubious Mexican restaurant on the edge of town, a dicey proposition given the recent state of Trev's digestive tract. But Trev is in high spirits at last and insists on a fiesta.
Th
e place is called La Paloma or La Palamino or Los Pintos, but the pretense ends there.
Th
e interior could just as well be any truck-stop diner from Cle Elum to Bismarck.
Th
ey're playing newfangled country over the sound system—Clint somebody or Toby what's-his-name or maybe that Kenny guy.
Th
e waitress is rail thin in that chronic smoker kind of way. If she had a name tag it might say Lana Sue. She looks about thirty-five long years old.

Trev orders the fish tacos in spite of my nonverbal exhortations—a prominent two-handed yield gesture, accompanied by an emphatic shaking of the head.
Th
e scablands of eastern Washington are not generally noted for their seafood.

Trev winks at me as Lana Sue takes leave. “What can I say? I'm feeling reckless.”

Our food arrives much too quickly. My beef chimichanga is the size of a yule log, slathered in an improbable gray-brown gravylike substance.

“Yikes,” says Trev, inspecting his entrée. “Blue tacos? Uh, how did that happen?”

Maybe it's just the afternoon light filtered through tinted windows, but the fish does seem be a bit on the blue side. “Looks like you got the Smurf tacos,” I say.

Trev smiles warily, picking around the edges of his blue tacos with a fork, wondering perhaps whether he should attempt to pick one up or abort the whole ungodly mess. In the end, he decides to abandon the tacos in favor of his side of beans and rice. Meanwhile, I begin poking my way tentatively around the edges of the yule log, which has begun to sag beneath its own weight and seems to be breathing.
Th
e more I poke at the behemoth, the more it lets off steam and slumps in its gravy wallow, until I've exhausted the thing and it lies breathless, flat on its belly. I keep waiting for it to groan.

“How's the beans?” I inquire.

“Not bad. How's your, uh . . . how's that thing?”

“Dead, I think.”

Near the end of the meal, by which point in time I've devoured roughly 20 percent of my burrito, my cell phone rings.
Th
e caller ID is unknown, though I'm fully expecting a check-in call from Elsa anytime now.

“Okay, Ben.
Th
is is it, do you hear me? I'm dead serious this time.” It's Janet. She's trying to sound tough, but I know she's exhausted; I can hear it in her voice.

“Relax. I'm coming down there to finalize everything,” I assure her. “I swear. Everything's ready to go.”

She knows I'm lying. “Oh, cut the crap, Ben. I'm coming up there the minute I get off of work, and you're going to sign those papers, and this time I'm not going to leave without them.”

“You can't do that.”

“Watch me.”

“It won't do any good—I'm not there.”

“
Th
en where are you?”

“I'm on my way to Utah.”

She's greets this news with a silence so cold and dense it has a vacuum effect.

“For work,” I say.

I can feel her gritting her teeth on the other end of the line. “What kind of stunt is this, Ben?
Exactly
where are you?”

“Look, I swear, this isn't a stunt, I'm not running. I thought we agreed that—”

“Where are you right now?”

“On the road.”

“Tell me where you are.”

“East of the mountains.”

“Okay, Ben, fine.
Th
at was your last chance. I'm officially done.”

“No, wait, listen.”

“I'm done listening.
Th
is time I'm not letting you talk me out of anything.”

“Please, wait. Just—”

But before I can finish, she hangs up on me.

Trev looks uncomfortable as he watches the hope drain from my face; a forkful of beans is poised halfway between his plate and his open mouth. In an attempt at levity, he tacks a frozen half smile on his face.

“You want a Smurf taco?” he says.