Five
The roadside is littered with last night’s carnage, a raccoon here, a possum there, occasionally someone’s household pet reduced to an unrecognizable smear. Neither Molly nor I say a word. I hate the idea of creatures suffering while people sleep, oblivious.
This morning’s breakfast—the Bright Eyes Surprise, which I’d ordered solely because I liked the name—churns in my stomach. From the driver’s seat, Molly reaches over and turns up the radio. She glides into the passing lane to get around a semi with a tweeting cartoon robin on the side.
I refold the map to encompass the day’s journey. We plan to make tracks today, covering at least four hundred miles. The few towns along the way are no more than pinpricks with quirky names, like Nickel Box and Mulehorn and Futch’s Corner. Mostly, it appears we’ll be crossing uninhabited terrain, much of it protected by the Department of Natural Resources, shaded in green.
“Do we have plenty of gas?” I ask.
“Three quarters of a tank. Same amount we had the last time you asked, ten minutes ago.”
The biggest of the pinpricks, Futch’s Corner, lies at the halfway point. We’ll get gas there.
“I can’t decide whether to quilt or read,” I tell Molly.
“Why don’t you listen to music and look at the scenery?”
“I already did that.”
She laughs a little, shakes her head. “You always have to be busy doing something.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Except you might miss something. Chill, Mom.”
“All right. I’ll look out the window.” The most interesting thing I spot is a red-winged blackbird in a thicket of cattails.
If I’m being honest with myself, there’s a reason for staying busy. Being preoccupied with other things means I don’t have to be preoccupied with my own baggage. I’m sick of myself, of my indecisiveness and mental whining. My daughter’s leaving the nest, as all daughters eventually do, and my job is to let her go and move on with my life. It should be a simple matter to set a goal for myself, one that doesn’t involve Molly, even indirectly. Maybe I don’t have a college degree, but I’m not stupid.
I know I have to figure out who I am again, now that I’m not Molly’s mom. Well-meaning friends tell me to go back to being the person I was before Molly. Am I that twentysomething woman who used to sleep late and smoke Virginia Slims and never felt the need to look at a clock?
That’s not me anymore. It can never be me again. I don’t want to go back to being that person who lived each day so thoughtlessly, spending the moments like nickels in a slot machine, as though she had an unending supply of time and could squander it any way she pleased.
Other friends remind me that my marriage moves to the front burner now. Dan and I will have to figure out how to be a childless couple again. What were we before we became Molly’s parents? What did we used to talk about, dream about, laugh and cry about? A better stereo system, a bigger house, an extra week’s vacation from work? How could those things matter now?
It was Molly who showed us the things that matter most. They’re the moments that sneak up on you unexpectedly, when you’re barely paying attention. You’re going out to see if the mail has come, and you discover that your child has learned to ride a two-wheeler and is as thrilled about it as if she’s learned to fly. Or you uncrate the new refrigerator you scrimped and saved for, and she shows you that the best thing about the new appliance is the empty box.
Before Molly, what was it that mattered to Dan and me? When we were first married, he’d grab me the second he woke up each morning and say, “You’re here!” as if I were the answer to his dreams. I can’t remember when he stopped doing that. Granted, it would seem tedious and downright weird if he kept it up indefinitely, but there was a clear appeal in knowing exactly where I stood with him.
* * *
Inside the oval hoop is a swatch of my mother’s favorite cotton blouse, the one with tiny umbrellas printed all over it. For some reason, I’m inspired to stitch a message: “Do the thing you fear.”
Not the thing your mother fears. The thing you fear. I hope Molly will understand the difference.
Something extraordinary flashes past my line of sight. “Molly, slow down,” I say. “Look over there.”
It’s a turnoff marked Leaning Tower of Pisa, Iowa.
“Let’s check it out,” I say.
Molly looks dubious. Her gaze flicks to the dashboard clock. I feel a twinge of annoyance at her eagerness to reach our ultimate destination. Can’t she slow down, just a little?
“You’re the one who wanted me to watch the scenery and chill,” I remind her. “We’re making good time,” I point out.
“All right. Let’s do it.”
We go take a look at the leaning tower, and it is exactly that. A water tower that has listed to one side. In the next big wind it could topple, explains a placard in the field beside it. We take pictures to email to Dan. We’ve been calling him to check in each day. The conversation is predictable—we’re to keep the tank full and check the oil and tire pressure at least once a day. We’re to take care of ourselves.
“See?” I try not to act too smug as we return to the car. “You learn something new every day.”
Molly decides to give me a turn at the wheel. She wants to phone Travis and she’s not allowed to do it while she’s driving.
“No freakin’ signal,” she says, scowling at the screen of her cell phone. “That’s lame.”
“You’ll just have to watch the scenery and chill.”
She rummages in her bag and pulls out the folder of information sent to her by the college. “Kayla Jackson from Philadelphia,” she says, referring to her roommate. “I wonder what she’ll be like.”
“Lucky,” I say. “She was matched up with you, wasn’t she?”
“Her mother’s probably saying the same thing. Oh, man, what if we can’t stand each other?”
“You said she sounded great in her email.”
“Sex predators sound great in email, Mom.”
My head whips in her direction. “How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that. Geez, don’t get your panties in a twist. I don’t talk to perverts on email. I don’t talk to perverts at all.”
“Suddenly I feel as if we haven’t discussed this topic enough.”
“What, perverts? I’ll talk about perverts anytime you want, Mom.”
“All joking aside, honey—”
“Mom. We went through this a long time ago, the stuff about respecting myself and using my head. That women’s self-defense class went on for twelve weeks and yes, I read The Gift of Fear. I’m as safe as it’s possible to be.”
“You have all the answers, don’t you, Missy?”
“I’ll have even more once I’m in college.”
We stop for lunch and a fill-up in Futch’s Corner, a town with four stoplights, a defunct train depot and a bus station. A row of storage silos covered in graffiti lines the main road. The lone café has a pictorial menu, which makes it easy to avoid the chopped salad, which in these parts appears to be coleslaw.
In the booth next to us, an elderly couple sits across from each other, slowly and methodically eating their cups of beef barley soup with soda crackers on the side. They manage to get through the entire meal without uttering a single word. The wife puts cream in both cups of coffee. When they get up after finishing their meal, the husband keeps one hand on the small of the wife’s back.
“Old people are so cute, aren’t they?” Molly remarks.
Old people are a nightmare. It’s too easy for me to see myself and Dan in a couple like that, silent and companionable, with nothing to say to each other. I want so much more for us, laughter and interesting conversation, the richness of shared moments. I used to think I knew what my life would look like after Molly, but now I’m not so sure.
Once she’s away at school, Dan and I are going to have to face each other once again with nothing between us, no sports matches to attend, no car pools to drive, no curfews to enforce, no school calendar to dictate our lives. To me, it looks like a void, a yawning breach. Empty space. It’s supposed to be a good thing, but I’ve never been the sort to tolerate empty space. Maybe that’s why I like quilting. Each piece fits perfectly against the others to fill the grid completely.
* * *
On the highway heading east again, we come upon a breakdown pulled off to the side of the road. I slow down but don’t stop. The hood of the car is raised and there’s a woman standing beside it. She has a baby on her hip and there’s no one else in sight. I go even slower, checking the rearview mirror, hoping to see that she’s on a cell phone, getting help.
She isn’t. She’s jiggling the baby and taking a diaper bag out of the car.
Someone else will come along and help her, I figure. But this is a lonely stretch of highway and there’s no one in sight in either direction.
“What are you doing?” Molly asks when I stop and make a U-turn.
“Making sure that woman back there is okay. Maybe she needs my cell phone.”
“Mom. Aren’t you the one with all the rules about not picking up strangers?”
“I didn’t say anything about picking her up. But I’m not going to leave her stranded.” I pass the breakdown, pull another U-turn and park on the shoulder in front of the woman’s car, a dusty Chevy Vega with Nevada plates.
“Thanks for stopping,” she says. “I blew a radiator hose.” She doesn’t appear to be much older than Molly. She’s wearing a man’s ribbed tank top under an open shirt, shorts and flip-flops. Her eyes are puffy and the baby is fussing.
“Have you called for help?”
“I don’t have a phone and the last town’s forty miles back.”
“Let’s try my cell phone,” I offer, getting out of the car and handing it to her.
The baby glowers at me. It’s a boy, maybe fourteen months, and he smells like ripe fruit. His nose is running green sludge, and he has a rattling cough. As his mother dials the phone, he pokes a grubby finger at the buttons.
“Nothing,” she says after a moment. “No signal. Thanks anyway.” She hands back the phone. I resist the urge to clean it off on my shirttail.
The baby barks out a cough. The woman looks around. A breeze shimmers through the silver maples and a few dry leaves fall off, scattering. There is a folded umbrella stroller and a car seat in the back of the car.
The silence stretches out. I take a deep breath, violating my own better judgment as I say, “We’ll give you a ride.”
“You don’t have to do that.” Despite her words, the woman looks as if she might melt with relief.
Molly gets out of the car, map in hand. The cranky baby glowers at her.
“Really, you don’t,” the woman persists.
“It’s fine,” I assure her. “Where are you headed?”
“Honeymoon,” she says. “It’s my hometown. I’m moving back there, but this piece of crap car doesn’t want to cooperate.”
Molly finds the town on the map. It’s about fifty miles to the north on a road marked with a faint gray line, well out of our way. The smart thing to do would be to drive on until I get a cell phone signal and then call in the location of the breakdown.
Maybe I’m not so smart. I keep thinking if Molly were stranded, I’d want a nice woman to stop. “Molly, can you give me a hand with the baby’s car seat?” I ask.
My daughter’s eyebrows lift, but she instantly complies.
I introduce myself and learn that the woman’s name is Eileen. Her baby is Josten. “His grandparents have never seen him,” she says. “I sure appreciate this.” Wrinkling her nose, she adds, “He needs a change.” She lays him on the back seat of her car. The creases of the seat are filled with bits of broken cookies and dry cereal. “Last one,” she says, extracting a diaper from the bag.
The little one yowls as she peels off his romper and diaper. “Cut it out,” she snaps as he kicks at her. “Josten—oh, Josten. What a mess.” She digs in the diaper bag. “Shoot. I’m out of baby wipes.”
Molly looks on in horror for a moment, then grabs something from the quilt bag. “Here, use this.”
It’s a piece of an old Christmas tree skirt from Dan’s and my first Christmas together. You can’t really tell it was ever a tree skirt; it just looks like a green tablecloth.
“Are you sure?” Eileen asks.
“No problem,” I tell her.
“Thanks.”
Molly’s expression is priceless as she watches Eileen dry the kid’s tears and wipe his nose, then clean his bottom. This is a better justification for birth control than any lecture from me, although it means a sad end for the old tree skirt. Eileen puts on a clean diaper, but the romper is soaked through. The baby starts wailing again.
“I don’t have a change of clothes for him.” Eileen looks like she’s about to lose it, too.
I glance at the quilt bag, hesitating only a moment. At the bottom is a pair of Oshkosh overalls in candy pink. “This will probably work. It was Molly’s when she was about his size. See if it fits.” I answer the question in her expression. “I brought along a bag of old fabric scraps to add to the quilt I’ve been working on.”
“Then I can’t take this.”
“Sure, go ahead. I’ve got plenty. I have enough.”
She threads him into the overalls. The baby cries as she straps him into his car seat, the sobs punctuated with liquid coughs. Eileen gives him a plastic bottle of Gerber apple juice, but he flings it away. Molly is actively trying not to cringe; I can tell.
“Hush,” Eileen says. “Please. Sorry about him.”
“You don’t need to apologize. Is he running a fever?”
“A little, I think. I gave him some Tylenol drops right before you stopped.” She loads in the diaper bag and her purse, then locks her car, and we all take off.
Eventually, the storm of crying subsides as the monotony of the ride lulls the baby. The stretch of road that looked so innocent on the map is narrow and curving, with a posted speed limit of forty. It’s too late to change our minds now, though. We’re committed.
We learn that Eileen and her boyfriend went to Vegas together to get work. “My mother didn’t want me to leave, but there was nothing for me in Honeymoon, except maybe some crap job at a fast-food place. Vegas was our best bet, especially since I wanted to be a dancer. I was a dancer, until I got pregnant.”
“Onstage, in Vegas?” Molly turns to her in interest.
Eileen nods her head. “I was in the chorus line of a show at the Monte Carlo.”
“That’s so cool,” Molly says.
“It was. But…harder than you’d think, especially with a kid and a lousy boyfriend. My mother danced, too, but never professionally. She always wanted to work onstage and didn’t ever have the chance.”
“Then it’s great that you got the opportunity,” I tell her, trying to say something positive.
Eileen gives a brief, humorless laugh. “I doubt my mother would think so. She was scared I might succeed at something she never got to do.”
I have no idea what to say to this. I peek in the rearview mirror. Eileen is stroking the hair off Josten’s forehead. “Mama tried like hell to talk me out of going, but I went anyway,” she says. “Big mistake.”
“What, leaving home?” Molly asks.
“Leaving with him. With my boyfriend, Mick. My ex, now.”
There is no air of I-told-you-so when we stop at a modest clapboard house at the far side of a town called Honeymoon. Eileen’s mother, who doesn’t look a day over forty, gathers her into a hug that emanates relief and gratitude. She inspects the baby, now groggy and mellow from his nap, and holds him against her as if he’s a missing piece of herself. “Look at this doll, baby,” she whispers, shutting her eyes and inhaling. “Just look at him.”
Through the lines of fatigue around her mouth, Eileen beams. “It’s good to be home,” she says.
“I’m glad you’re here,” the mother replies. “No idea what I did without you.” Then she turns and thanks me in a trembling voice. “Would you like to stay for supper?” she asks. “I got some sweet corn from a neighbor. And I just made some lemonade, fresh.”
“Thanks, but we have to keep going,” I tell her.
Molly surprises me by saying, “Maybe a glass of lemonade…”
The woman, whose name is Shelley, serves it in mismatched glasses and asks us about our trip.
“My mom’s dropping me off at college,” Molly says.
“Goodness, college. That’s exciting.”
The baby starts fussing himself awake and Eileen turns away to tend to him. I admire the patchwork quilt draped over the back of the sofa, and Shelley tells me it’s a family heirloom.
“I’m working on one myself,” I say. “It’s my biggest project to date.”
“I like sewing,” she says. “I made all of Eileen’s costumes for her dance routines. I don’t sew much anymore. The local fabric store folded, and the nearest superstore’s thirty miles away. They got everything you need there, but I miss the shop. All the women were friends, you know?”
I think of the shop back home. Here in the middle of nowhere, this woman had nailed it—a community for women.
She gives us a local map that shows more detail than my Triple-A triptych. She indicates a route back to the highway that will put us a good eighty miles ahead of where we were.
Molly takes over driving again. I pick up my quilting. She says, “Dad’s going to freak when you tell him we picked up a stranger.”
“She needed a lift. We had no choice.”
“I’m glad we helped her out. We’re behind on our schedule now, though.”
“We don’t need to be anywhere specific,” I note. “It was a goal, the four hundred miles.”
We drive through a few towns fringed by strip malls or trailer parks. There is an air of exhaustion that seeps into the atmosphere of these places, and we’re glad to leave them behind.
By the time we reach the highway, dusk has fallen and it’s time to find food and a place to spend the night. An eerie emptiness hovers over the open road and few cars pass by.
“It’s looking bleak,” Molly says. “How far to the next city?”
“Almost a hundred miles. You up for it?”
“Looks like we don’t have a choice.”
She plugs an adaptor into her iPod so we can listen on the stereo speakers, and we get into a discussion about the stupidest lyrics ever written—“This Is Why I’m Hot” would be my pick. But Molly points out Van Morrison’s “Ringworm” and then we dissect the lyrics of some old Yes songs.
“Anything sounds stupid if you listen too closely,” I say.
Molly switches to a track that’s in French. “Clearly, we’ve been in the car together too long.”
A few minutes later, I spot a billboard rising from an alfalfa field, with a light shining on it. “Ramblers Rest, in Possum, Illinois. Want to check it out?”
She nods and drives another mile to the next sign. There’s a red-neon light indicating Vacancy in the window of the office, which also contains a convenience store. The tires crackle over the gravel in the drive.
“What do you think?” Molly asks.
“It’s worth a look. If it’s horrible, we’ll drive away.”
It’s not horrible, just a bit strange. Ramblers Rest consists of a group of small, self-contained wayfarers’ cabins at the edge of a small trout pond. Our room is plain but clean, with walls of scrubbed pine, checkered curtains and an old-fashioned prayer posted above one of the beds.
The proprietor, a man in jeans and a plaid shirt, tells us there’s a bonfire down by the pond where guests gather around to sing songs and toast marshmallows.
“Songs?” Molly mutters. “No way.”
“We could harmonize ‘You Are My Sunshine.’”
She cringes, and I send her a wicked grin. “Or ‘Kumbaya’?”
The closest restaurant, our host says, is a place called Grumpy’s, a few miles down the road.
“They’re probably closed now,” he warns.
Starving, we head up to the convenience shop adjacent to the office and buy hot dogs to roast over the fire, plus bright yellow mustard and squishy white buns—the kind of meal that is forbidden in a proper kitchen. On a whim, I buy the ingredients for a kind of dessert we haven’t made since Molly’s childhood camping trips. We hike down to the water’s edge where a teepee-shaped bonfire roars at the night sky. There are at least three discrete groups here, but all share that sort of instant camaraderie that seems to crop up among strangers at campgrounds. They make room for us in the firelit circle and we roast hot dogs, sharing the extras.
It’s amazingly tranquil around the pond, the sky intensely black in the absence of city lights. It’s so dark you can make out the colors of the stars—red and violet, silver and the shimmering green of moss in shadow. Their reflections glow like coins on the surface of the water.
Molly and I sit shoulder-to-shoulder and make small talk with the other travelers. There’s a young family from Cottage Grove, who just sold their house and are moving to Cleveland. A not-so-young family is there, too. The parents are about my age, but the kids are little, with Asian features, so I assume they’re adopted. A retired couple, who seem self-contained and not as eager to mingle, tell us they’re on a monthlong driving tour of the midwest. Molly, of course, gravitates toward two boys who seem to be about her age. They’re juniors at Penn State, so leaving home is routine to them, and they’re driving themselves.
She seems to have forgotten about dessert, but the younger kids eagerly gather around when I ask them if they want to help. I demonstrate how to put a little whipping cream and sugar into a small Ziploc bag. The sealed bag then goes into a larger plastic bag of ice and salt. This is the kids’ favorite part—you shake until the cream and sugar in the sealed bag turns to ice cream.
“What a great trick,” the young mother says to me, watching her little ones shiver and shake.
“I learned it from my mother.” I look across at Molly, who is now explaining the process to the college boys, who are totally into it. Before long, everyone around the campfire is making ice cream in a bag, the kids turning it into a wild dance. Sparks land on someone’s blanket, and a tiny flame ignites. Fortunately, it is spotted and beaten out. People tuck their loose blankets away from the fire, and we’re more vigilant after that.
Everyone pronounces the ice cream delicious. In fact, it’s a bit bland, but flavored by the fun we had making it. One of the college boys plays a harmonica. Then, possessed by the silliness of knowing we’ll never see these people again, Molly and I sing “You Are My Sunshine” in perfect harmony, and our listeners are polite enough to clap. We stay by the fire way too late, until I feel the stiffness of the long day and the cold night at my back.
“I’m heading to bed,” I tell Molly. I worry that she might want to linger here with the college boys. Her eyes glow when she talks to them. I battle the urge to remind her that these guys are strangers and we’re in a strange place. Pretty soon, I won’t be around to protect her at all, so I’d best get used to the churning nervousness in my gut.
She surprises me by getting up and helping collect the trash and leftovers. “I’m going to turn in, too. If we get an early start, we can make up for the time we lost today.”
We didn’t lose any time. I know exactly how and where we spent it, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
As we walk together to our cabin, Molly says, “Those kids loved making the ice cream.”
“Remember the first time I made it with you?”
“The Brownie campout at Lake Pegasus. I was—what—six years old? And I had the coolest mom.”
What I remember about that campout was feeling inadequate. The professional moms, as I’d come to regard them, had remembered everything from bug spray to breakfast bars. They knew how to roast a whole meal in a foil packet, braid a lanyard into a friendship bracelet and name the constellations. My clever little ice cream trick didn’t seem like much. Now I’m ridiculously pleased to know she thought I was the coolest.
Molly goes off to shower. I flip through the Triple-A book, wondering what tomorrow will bring. On the back cover is an ad I never noticed before, with a list of phone numbers—who to call in event of a breakdown.