“What if they know, Mom. What if they take one look at me and—”
“They won’t. Trust me.” She refastens one of the sparkly barrettes dangling above Mila’s ear. “See, perfect disguise.”
“Mmph.”
“Just like this place,” she continues, talking to reassure them both as they crunch across the parking lot. She pushes the door open into the sports bar with bare brick walls and warm copper fixtures. “It wants you to believe it’s a dive, but it’s only playing.”
“So hipster,” Mila agrees, looking up at the monochrome photographs of biker guys posing with their hogs, facial hair like topiary.
“And nostalgia porn,” Cole grimaces, because the TVs mounted above the bar are blaring vintage Superbowl highlights reels, men in helmets hurling themselves against each other with mesmerizing violence. It’s like watching forces of nature, waves smashing against lighthouses or palm trees lashing in a hurricane. The customers watch with hopeless hunger.
She picks a spot at the bar, down the far side where she can get a full view of the place, near a pillar for cover, and also close to the emergency exit. Just in case. A Coke and another Coke, after she sees the cost of whisky. There was a crumpled hundred-dollar bill in the key bowl back at Eagle Creek and that’s not going to get them far. Down to eighty-six and change now. She’s not sure what the plan is, exactly. Beg, borrow, or steal.
Pick a likely target, boo.
In the booth opposite, there’s a couple with two little girls, eight-ish, in baby doll dresses and Shirley Temple curls, as if they’re fresh off the stage at the local kid beauty pageant. The moms, in lumberjack plaid and big black boots, keep making vague friendly intimations in their direction—a smile, a nod, to acknowledge they’re in the same gang. Last of the reproducers.
“Why are they dressed like that?” Mila is aghast at the little girls.
“Maybe it’s a special occasion.” She shrugs.
“Or they’re also boys in drag,” she whispers.
Cole thinks, says almost to herself, “More like nostalgia-for-a-moment-that-hasn’t-passed-yet. When there aren’t going to be any more kids, you want to hold on to their childhoods for as long as you can. There must be a German word for that. Nostalgenfreude. Kindersucht.”
“Yeah, well, I think they hate it.” Mila does a sideways tilt of her head at the one who keeps tugging at her falling-down knee socks.
“You don’t want to get the look?”
“No way!”
“Noted.” Cole fiddles with the paper from Mila’s straw, carefully tearing it down along the seam to fold out. It keeps her hands busy. Goddamn, she could use a drink.
Sounds like something your father would say. Ghostguy in her head.
Cirrhosis of the liver would be the least of her problems right now. The pair of them probably reek of desperation, seeping through her pores along with actual stink—that muggy human swampland smell of long hours on the road, mixed up with eau de guilt, sour notes of worry. She hasn’t spoken to another adult human since the night before they left Ataraxia; the argument with Billie, shouting, running all the faucets in the bathroom so they wouldn’t be overheard by the home assistants installed in every luxury subterranean apartment, and definitely, definitely eavesdropping on their private conversations.
She sneaks a glance at the TVs, wary of her face appearing below the banner Breaking News or Crime Stop! But American football’s greatest hits continues unabated. She irons the split straw wrapper down with her palm, makes four little tears for the legs. Focus. Choose someone who isn’t going to miss their wallet.
The bartenders and waitstaff are out, not only because she once worked service. They’ll be the most sober and alert people in here. Not the woman drinking a beer alone at the bar, or the two look-alike blonds who could have stepped out of that long-ago cigarette commercial; they’re clearly on a first date, leaning in toward each other across the table. Most promising: the cluster of girls-night-outers (a.k.a. every night out now) at the big table by the window, brash and brassy and three bottles of wine down. Their loud laughter sounds defensive. Or maybe she’s projecting.
She’s never stolen anything in her life. No shoplifting nail polish or earrings from the Johannesburg malls in acts of brazen teen girl rebellion. Not like Billie, who would stuff a pillow under her dress and pretend to be pregnant at sixteen, summoning the disapproving ire of old ladies, and reaping the benefits of others’ best intentions. Do-gooders would buy her packs of nappies and formula from the discount pharmacies, which she’d return twenty minutes later in exchange for cigarettes and Cokes, then turn around and sell them to the other kids at school. Always the entrepreneur, Cole thinks, folding out little legs, twisting a trunk for her straw paper sculpture. She sets it down on the ketchup packet.
“I’m going to pee. Guard my elephant, will you. The backpack, too.”
Mila pokes the sad twisted straw beast dubiously. “Mom, this is an insult to elephants.”
But Cole is watching the middle-aged redhead from the ladies-who-dine table, who is picking her way toward the bathroom with the careful deliberation of the very drunk, her zebra-print purse drooping from her shoulder.
When she gets there, the ladies’ restroom is empty. Above the mirror on the polished concrete, neon lights declare “youth has no age” in cursive, which is so irritating she wants to break the mirror. Also because she has lost an opportunity.
There’ll always be another one, Devon used to say, which is about as helpful right now as the greeting-card message on the wall. That logic might have applied back when she had to pass up the artists’ residency in Prague because Miles was only six months old and still breastfeeding. But cute aphorisms do not cut it when the opportunity in question will determine whether they starve to death in the desert in their car with a redline fuel gauge. They do not fucking cut it at all.
She exits the ladies’ and shoves open the door into the men’s instead. The redhead throws her a baleful glare, all right, no need to make an entrance, and goes back to touching up her lipstick in the mirror, which does not, mercifully, have any messages of Tumblr wisdom above it. Her purse is resting on the edge of the sink, unzipped, revealing its innards, including a matching zebra-print wallet.
“Hey, honey, you got any powder?” she says.
“Oh. Um. Let me see. Maybe I have something.” Cole pats down her pockets as if she has ever been the kind of woman prone to carrying surplus cosmetics.
“Thanks. I’m all sweaty.” Her ankles flex, doing double time in the strappy heels to counteract her sway. “Didn’t even want to come out. But it’s Brianna’s birthday. The big five-oh.” She pauses, holding tight on to the sink, glaring at her reflection, eyes bleary.
“That’s a big one all right.” Cole edges closer to the purse. She has no idea how she’s going to do this.
Can’t be harder than murder.
“We had a suicide pact, you know. If we hit forty, and we were still single. Or we’d get married to each other. See how well that turned out!” She gives a little burp against the back of her fingers, the kind that often presages vomiting. “Hey. Can I ask you something?”
“I don’t have any powder, I’m afraid.”