“My parents—” I heard my voice catch a little on the word. Words I’d always taken for granted had turned into landmines, traps for me to stumble over and fall into. I saw that Roger had averted his eyes to the fridge, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything. “They, um,” I continued after a moment, “collected them. From all the places they’d been.”
“Wow,” he said, stepping back and taking in the whole fridge, as though it was a piece of art. “Well, it’s impressive. I’ve never been anywhere.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Really,” he said, eyes still on the fridge. “Only California and Colorado. Pretty lame, huh?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve barely been out of California.” This was incredibly embarrassing, something I had told nobody except Julia. I’d been out of the country once—we’d all spent a very damp summer in the Cotswolds, in England, while my mother did research for a book. But California was the only state I’d ever been in. Whenever I had complained about this, my mother had told me that once we’d seen all there was to see in California, we could move on to the other states.
“You too?” Roger smiled at me, and as though it was an automatic reaction, I looked down at my feet. “Well, that makes me feel a little better. The way I justify it is that California’s a pretty big state, right? It’d be worse if I’d never been out of New Jersey or something.”
“I thought,” I started, then regretted saying anything. It wasn’t like I really wanted to know the answer, so why had I started to ask the question? But I couldn’t just leave that out there, so I cleared my throat and continued. “I mean, I thought my mother said your father lived in Philadelphia. And that’s why you’re, um, doing this.”
“He does,” said Roger. “I’ve just never been out there before. He comes out here a couple times a year, for business.”
“Oh,” I said. I glanced up at him and saw that he was still looking at the fridge. As I watched, his face changed, and I knew he’d seen the program, the one held up by the ITHACA IS GORGES! magnet in the lower left corner. The program I tried to avoid looking at—without success—every time I opened the fridge, but hadn’t actually done anything about, like removing it or anything.
It was printed on beige card stock and had a picture of my father on the front, one that someone had taken of him teaching. It was in black and white, but I could tell that he was wearing the tie I’d gotten him last Father’s Day, the one with tiny hound dogs on it. He had chalk dust on his hands and was looking to the left of the camera, laughing. Underneath the picture was printed BENJAMIN CURRY: A LIFE WELL-LIVED.
Roger looked over at me, and I knew that he was about to say a variation on the same sentence I’d been hearing for the past three months. How sorry he was. What a tragedy it was. How he didn’t know what to say. And I just didn’t want to hear it. None of the words helped at all, and it’s not like he could have possibly understood.
“We should get going,” I said before he could say anything. I grabbed my suitcase by the top handle, but before I could lift it, Roger was standing next to me, hoisting it with ease.
“I got it,” he said, carrying it out the front door. “Meet you at the car.” The door slammed, and I looked around the kitchen, wondering what else I could do to delay the moment when it would just be the two of us, trapped in a car for four days. I picked up the plate from where I’d left it to dry in the empty dishwasher, put it in the cupboard, and closed the door. I was about to leave when I saw the travel book sitting on the counter.
I could have just left it there. But I didn’t. I picked it up and, on impulse, pulled the program out from behind the Ithaca magnet and stuck it in the scrapbook section. Then I turned out the kitchen lights, walked out the front door, and locked it behind me.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see. But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot, if you ain’t got the do-re-mi.
—Woody Guthrie
I got into the passenger seat and slammed the door. Roger was already sitting in the driver’s seat, moving slowly up and down, then back and forth, as he played with the seat adjustment. He must have found the setting he liked, because he stopped moving and turned to me. “Ready?” he asked, drumming his hands on the wheel and smiling at me.
“Here,” I said, taking my mother’s itinerary out of my bag and thrusting it at him. It had the list of towns she’d chosen for us to stop in, MapQuest directions, and a list of hotel reservations—for two rooms in each place—along with the estimated driving time and mileage for each leg of the journey. And if she had tried really hard, she wouldn’t have been able to pick less interesting places to break up the trip: Gallup, New Mexico. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Terre Haute, Indiana. Akron, Ohio. “That’s what my mother mapped out,” I said, as I pulled on my seat belt and snapped it in, taking a deep breath and then letting it out. I could feel my heart hammering in my chest, and we weren’t even moving yet, which didn’t seem to me to be a good sign.
“Do you have GPS?” he asked, flipping through the pages. I saw his expression grow less cheerful as he did so, and I figured that he must have reached the part about Tulsa.
“No,” I said. We’d had it in the other car, but we no longer had the other car, and I didn’t really want to go into why. “But I’m a pretty good navigator,” I said, reaching around to the backseat and grabbing the road atlas. “And I think she printed out the directions for each location.”
“She did,” Roger said, still frowning down at the papers. “Do you know why she planned the trip this way?”
I shook my head. “I think she did it by mileage.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked through the pages again, at the maps and lists of hotel reservations, and seemed a little disappointed. “Well, that makes sense.”
“You know that I don’t …,” I started. I wanted to find out what he knew without actually telling him anything. I cleared my throat and started again. “You know I’m not driving, right?”
“That’s what my mother told me,” said Roger, putting the stack of paper on the console between us. “Do you not have your license?”
I look at him, shocked. I studied his expression for a moment, trying to figure out if he was asking this question genuinely. He seemed to be. I felt my heart start to beat a little faster, but with relief this time. He didn’t know. He hadn’t heard the details. He had no idea what I’d done. It felt freeing, like I could breathe just a little bit easier. “No,” I said slowly. “I have my license. I’m just not … driving right now.” Which was a terrible explanation, but it was all I could come up with on the spot.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “I love driving.”
I had once too. It had once been my favorite thing to do. Driving was when I organized my thoughts and listened to music, my therapy on wheels. It seemed wrong that in addition to all the things that had been taken from me, that had to go as well. I gave a shrug that I hoped seemed nonchalant. “I guess it’s just not my thing.”