Amy & Roger's Epic Detour

Roger dropped his hand. “Yeah, you should come,” he said. “I mean, if you don’t have plans, that is.”

Lucien looked from Roger to me. “Really?” he asked. “I don’t want to impose on y’all.”

“Not at all,” I said, surprised that these words were coming out of my mouth. I had spent so long trying to avoid strangers, and now I was inviting them along? Apparently, I was. I wondered when that had happened. “You should come.”

“Well, okay,” said Lucien, smiling at us. “That’s real nice of you. I appreciate it.”

“Come on,” Roger said, as he opened the driver’s-side door. “I’ll drive.”

“Great,” Lucien said, heading over to the Liberty. “All our cars are around back.” Roger met my eyes as he said this, and we exchanged a tiny smile. I wondered how many cars he was talking about, how many there had to be to use the the word “all.”

Lucien opened the passenger-side door, and startled, I took a step back, figuring that maybe he really liked riding shotgun, or something. It took a silent, confused minute of him holding the door open expectantly for me to realize that he had opened it for me, and was just waiting for me to get in.

“Oh,” I said, climbing in. “Um, thanks.” I reached to close it, but a second later, he did it for me, shutting it gently.

He got into the backseat, buckling himself into the middle and leaning forward between our seats. “Have either of you ever been to Louisville before?” he asked.

“Nope,” Roger said, and I shook my head.

“That decides it,” he said, leaning back against the seat and smiling. “We’re going to the Brown.”

The Brown, it turned out, meant the Brown Hotel in downtown Louisville. Before we got there, Lucien gave us a quick tour of Louisville, which was lovely. It was the cleanest city I’d ever seen—certainly cleaner than Los Angeles. But it was beautifully landscaped, with trees in bloom all around us, making the air smell wonderful. The streets were wide, and nobody seemed to be in a particular hurry—another big change from L.A. There was horse stuff everywhere—which made sense, considering that this was the home of the Kentucky Derby. I noticed that some of the license plates in front of us even had horses on them, which seemed like a nice touch. Louisville just felt peaceful, which I hadn’t expected.

Lucien had us drive past the Louisville Slugger Museum, which had a bat the size of the building leaning against it. I gawked at it and made a mental note to have Roger drive by in the morning again so that I could take a picture. Charlie would get a kick out of it—he’d always loved baseball. This thought jarred me a little bit, and made me realize how little I’d been thinking about my brother—or how much I’d been trying not to think about my brother. I had a suspicion that it was the latter. But I didn’t want to think about Charlie. He was too tangled in everything that had happened, and then everything that had happened with him afterward…. I stared out the window, trying to concentrate only on Louisville passing by.

Lucien directed Roger to a very fancy-looking hotel. It had a huge red canopy, with THE BROWN written on it in gold lettering. It looked nice, and way out of our price range.

“This looks great,” Roger said, glancing over at me, and I had a feeling he was also thinking of the four hundred dollars and change that was all the money we had. This place looked like it probably cost that much for one night. “But I’m not sure this is exactly the kind of place we were planning on staying tonight….”

“No worries,” said Lucien. “We’re just eating here.”

“Oh,” Roger said. “Got it.” It seemed like restaurants at this hotel might also be a little more expensive than the fast-food and diner dinners we’d been having, but I figured we could probably afford it for one meal.

Lucien’s directions brought Roger around to the valet entrance, and before we could say anything, three doors were opened simultaneously by valets in white coats. I stepped out, glad once again I was wearing Bronwyn’s clothes. I noticed that Roger was tucking his white T-shirt hurriedly into his jeans. Lucien stepped over to the valet who’d opened Roger’s door and shook his hand, and I saw a flash of green pass from his palm to the valet’s as he did this. Then he motioned us inside the hotel, as the doors were pulled open for us by two more valets, who seemed to appear out of nowhere. We stepped inside, and I looked around, my mouth hanging open a little. I was now certain this was out of our price range—this was an extremely nice hotel. There were chandeliers above us, and thick, patterned carpet on the floor, and there seemed to be a lot of shiny brass fixtures everywhere.

Lucien led us across the lobby—filled with antique-looking couches, Oriental rugs, and oil paintings of horses—and down three steps to J. Graham’s Café and Bar. There was a crowd standing around the host’s podium, but Lucien just walked up to the front, and we were seated right away, in a corner booth that looked out on the quiet street, lit with streetlights. “Enjoy your dinner, Mr. Armstrong,” the host murmured as he handed us menus and departed.

I looked at Lucien, surprised. “They know you here?” I asked.

Lucien shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “We’ve been coming here a long time,” he said. “Every Derby season, the parents rent out a suite on the eleventh floor. So you get to know the staff.”

“Right,” I said, as though this was perfectly normal, and not at all intimidating. I looked around the tastefully decorated, clearly expensive restaurant and realized how long it had been since I’d been somewhere like this. Roger and I hadn’t encountered cloth napkins in quite some time. I started to open up my menu, but Lucien laid his hand on top of it.

“If I may,” he said, looking between Roger and me. “The Brown makes a famous dish that originated here, and if you haven’t had it, you really should.”

I thought about Roger asking me before where my sense of adventure was. I knew that he’d been kidding, mostly, but the question was now reverberating in my mind. Even Old me had always been a little cautious. I had to be, with Charlie not taking any caution at all. And I’d been reading maps too long not to want to follow some sort of plan and have an ending in sight. But I had told my mother off, and the world hadn’t ended. And here I was, cut loose and in Kentucky, with Roger and a stranger, at a fancy restaurant, wearing someone else’s clothes. Maybe my sense of adventure wasn’t lost. Maybe it had just been lying dormant. I pushed my menu away. “Sounds good,” I said, hoping immediately after I said this that the famous dish wasn’t snails. Or anything to do with sweetbreads, which I’d found out the hard way in England were neither sweet nor breads.