Amy & Roger's Epic Detour

“You can’t think that way. It wasn’t your fault,” Roger repeated, softly but distinctly. “It wasn’t.”

“You don’t know that,” I whispered.

“You don’t know that it was,” he said. “It was an accident,” he said. “A terrible accident. There’s nothing you could have done. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was,” I said hoarsely, not wanting to believe in this reprieve that he was offering me. Because it seemed almost too much to begin to believe in, what he was telling me. And what if he was wrong?

“No,” he said simply. “I don’t lie. I promise you, it wasn’t your fault.”

It was this that finally got through. Roger hadn’t lied to me this whole time. I knew I could trust him. He wouldn’t start lying now, not about something this important. The thought that this hadn’t been my fault, that I wasn’t to blame, that it had been nothing but back luck and a chain of events I had no control over, was what finally did it. The last few straining boards on the dam burst open, and I started really crying, letting out everything I’d been holding tightly inside. I was relieved, but mostly I was just sad. Sad that I’d been holding on to this when I didn’t have to.

Roger slowed the car down, signaled, and pulled off the highway and into a rest stop. He parked the car in front of the picnic tables and killed the engine. Then he unbuckled his seat belt, pressed the button to undo mine, and slid to the edge of his seat. The center console was between us, but he leaned across it and put his arms around me, as easily as if he’d always been doing it. And I didn’t think about anything else but how nice it felt to have someone holding me, someone who wasn’t going to let go any time soon. And I turned my face into his T-shirt and just let myself cry, past the point of caring if I got snot all over it, just finally feeling like I could let go, that I could do this. Knowing that he could handle it, and would be there for as long as I needed him to be.

As cars sped by on the Interstate just out the window, Roger smoothed my hair away from my forehead and rocked me back and forth slowly.

“Virginia!” Roger called, two mixes and four rounds of Twenty Questions (Eleanor of Aquitaine, Jonathan Larson, Sir Francis Drake, and Bernadette Peters) later. He pointed out the window at the sign passing us by and smiled at me.

I looked over at him, still reeling a bit that I had told him, and that he had been okay with it. He wasn’t looking at me differently, as far as I could see. I couldn’t quite believe that it was true. But if it was … it was like another weight had been taken from my shoulders. And it was a relief, now that he knew. Now that there were no secrets between us. Just in time for the trip to end.

“Do you know the Virginia motto?” he asked. “It’s Sic semper tyrannis, which means—”

“‘Thus always to tyrants’,” I finished for him. Roger glanced over at me, eyebrows raised. “And,” I continued, “it’s what Booth yelled after he shot Lincoln.”

“Impressive,” he said, smiling at me.

I took a breath and told him what I hadn’t been able to tell him five days ago. “My father was a history professor,” I said, barely getting caught up on the past tense this time. “And that was his time period.”

“That’s a good period,” Roger said. He glanced over at me, as though making sure I was okay with this. “Did he like Lincoln?”

I smiled at that, thinking about the Lincoln facts on the note card in my father’s favorite book, the one that had come with me across the country. “Almost as much as Elvis.”

“So,” Roger said two hours later, turning down Into the Woods on my mix and looking out the window, “we’re looking for a DQ.”

“We are,” I said, as we pulled onto the main street. We drove up and down a few streets that seemed much too nice to have Dairy Queens on them. We only found it, twenty minutes later, because I ran into a gas station to ask for directions. We were directed to an area of town that was a little seedier, with check-cashing places and liquor stores replacing the boutiques and coffee shops we’d seen when we first got into town.

“There,” said Roger, pointing. The Dairy Queen, its red and white sign not yet lit, was next to a Greyhound bus terminal. He pulled into the parking lot and looked at the sign that hung just a few feet before us, clearly above where the buses pulled in and left. It looked like there was only one place for both, since the sign read ARRIVALS DEPARTURES, without anything even separating the words.

“All right,” I said. Roger killed the engine and we both got out, Roger stretching his legs. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “Want anything?”

“A Blizzard would be amazing,” he said.

“What kind?”

He smiled. “Surprise me.”

“You got it,” I said. I looked at the Dairy Queen and realized that it was a takeout-only franchise, with just a counter for ordering, but no place to sit inside. This explained the inordinately high number of people eating ice cream in their cars or sitting on their back bumpers.

I headed over to the DQ window, pulling Muz’s letter out of my pocket. I hoped he knew what he was talking about, because I didn’t want to have to be on the lookout for people who looked like they might be named Corey, or to have to try and explain this situation to the counter workers.

I looked back at the car as I crossed the parking lot and saw Roger sitting in our usual spot in the way-back, legs hanging over the edge.

“Hi,” I said as I approached the Dairy Queen ordering window to speak to the bored-looking attendant, who was wearing his DQ hat turned to the side.

“Help you?” he asked with a deep sigh.

“Yes,” I said. “Muz gave me this to give to Corey? He said you could get it to him?” I slid the envelope across the counter, looking at him closely to see if this code meant something to him.

“Fine,” he said, taking the envelope, his expression not even changing, as though he constantly intercepted mail for people in between taking sundae orders. Who knows, maybe he did. “Anything else?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, a little amazed that the transaction had gone so smoothly. “Um …” I looked up at the menu boards and knew exactly what Roger would want—a Reese’s Pieces Blizzard with half vanilla ice cream and half chocolate. After a moment of deliberation, I ordered, choosing an Oreo Blizzard for myself. I paid and walked the treats over to the car, still shocked that the hardest part of that process had been figuring out what to order.