Melissa Senate (8 page)

I felt like taking her hand, looking deeply into her eyes, and promising her that, yes, we were leaving in a half hour tops and that she’d never have to see us or talk to us again. I took a muffin instead and nodded.

“So, Sally,” Stella said, “before we hit the road, Ruby and I thought you might be able to tell us a little something about our father, anything really. Why he might have left, just walked out.”

Sally’s brow furrowed. “As I’ve said, I really—”

“We lost our mother two years ago,” Stella interrupted. “So we can’t ask her.”

The expression didn’t budge. Sally did purse her lips somewhat, then said, “Well, I really don’t think you want my opinion. But since you’ve asked numerous times, I’ll tell you. Your father was a selfish lout and I’m sure he still is. Eric never cared about anyone but himself. Last night, when I got home, Rory went on and on about how your father is probably like some kind of superhero to you, and you want to hear that he left for your own good or whatever, but the truth is the truth. Another muffin?” she added, pushing the basket closer to us.

“The Amazing Invisible Man,” Stella said, shaking her head at the proffered muffin. “Some superhero.”

I took a muffin, my appetite gone, though. “If you don’t mind my asking, Sally, what happened between you and our father?” It was odd to call her just Sally. Somehow it seemed disrespectful. But we could hardly call her
Aunt
Sally.

She sighed and clasped her hands on the table in front of her. “Well, of course we always had a strained relationship, even as children. But when our parents died—in a car accident—Eric tried to hide thousands of dollars of their money from me. He also hid some of their assets. He did things like that his entire life.”

Our parents.
She was talking about our grandparents. But again, there was no connection; they’d died before we were born, and I didn’t remember my father ever talking about them. There were no pictures of them around the house. Eric Miller certainly wasn’t much of a family man.

Our silence must have unnerved her, because Sally went on. “It was no surprise when I heard through a cousin that Eric ran off with your bank account after peddling you two as child models. He lived off you, then when no one was interested in you anymore, he stole your money and took off. What a piece of garbage. He never gave a rat’s ass about you two.” She shook her head, then emptied a packet of Equal in her coffee.

A little harsh there, Auntie. I was all for reality, but there was something to say for Rory’s superhero theory. Who wanted to hear, albeit all the proof, that their father didn’t care about them?

Neither Stella nor I said anything. I sipped at my orange juice to have something to do with my hands. Stella seemed close to tears.

“Did you know he cheated on your mother while she was pregnant with you?” Sally asked as though she had to prove her point. “He was constantly cheating. He used the ‘I can make you a star’ routine, and so many idiots fell for it. Can you imagine being nine months pregnant with twins and knowing your husband is out sleeping with some woman he met in a bar?”

Suddenly Sally was full of information?

“He stuck around for six more years,” Stella pointed out, her cheeks red. “So he must have cared about us. And loved our mother.”

Sally shook her head again. “He cared about the gravy train. Period. Why your mother put up with—”

“Don’t you say one word about my mother!” Stella yelled as she shot up. She grabbed her tote bag and ran out of the room, and then I heard the front door slam.

Sally looked at me for a moment. “I didn’t mean to upset her. I told you you shouldn’t have bothered coming all this way for information. I could have told you all this on the phone, Stella.”

“I’m Ruby,” I said, grabbing my own bag and running after my sister.

Stella was in the car, on the passenger side, half boiling mad, half about to cry. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“But we didn’t say goodbye to Rory.”

“We’ll call him,” she said. “I have to get away from this house or I might murder her. I swear to God I might kill her.”

I checked the trunk to make sure our suitcases were indeed in there. They were.

“Do you want the top down or up?” I asked.

“Up,” she said, so I left it as it was. The morning sky was gray, just a hint of sun peeking out. We had no idea what the forecast was, but it looked like rain was coming.

When we were back on the highway, Stella took a mutilated malt ball out of her mouth and let out a very deep breath. “I can’t believe her. Do you believe her? What a
bitch!
Like we needed to know he cheated on Mom when she was carrying us? Like I fucking needed to know that?”

“I told you she was a crab,” a male voice said from behind us.

I almost crashed into the SUV speeding past us in the fast lane.

Popping up from the backseat was cousin Rory. “I have almost two hundred in cash and more in the bank. I’ll pay for gas if you let me come with you.” He held up a brown paper bag. “I also have a carton of eggs and Bisquick if you get hungry. And four gorgeous Granny Smiths. Organic, of course.”

When Stella finally caught her breath, she said, “You don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Do I care?” he asked. “Just get me out of Cleveland. Or
I
might murder her. It’s weird—I had every intention of taking the groceries inside, whipping up breakfast, and then saying goodbye with a ‘keep in touch,’ but then I just jumped in the backseat of your car and lay down and waited for you to come out and drive away. And here I am. Man, I wish I’d thought to take my iPod for the walk to the store. It’s the only thing I’ll miss.”

Stella smiled at him. “Can I have one of those apples?”

A
T AN INTERNET CAFÉ JUST OUTSIDE OF
S
OUTH
B
END
, I
NDIANA
,
we put Rory Miller-Geller in charge of making our next three reservations. Tonight, in South Bend, tomorrow in Chicago (but on the cheap) and the next night in Lincoln, Nebraska. He dutifully headed to the computer stations at the back with his soup bowl of coffee and an overstuffed panini. Not only had he treated for the drinks and food, but he’d filled up the car as promised.

Rory was so friendly and chatty that in minutes he had advice from those sitting around him on where to stay and where not to stay. He’d been told not to miss the Touch-down Jesus mosaic on the Notre Dame football stadium, and to check out the “future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk” just south of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Stella and I sat in overstuffed purple chairs, our lattes (decaf for Stella) and treats and
What To Expects
on the battered coffee table in front of us. Hundreds of names were written in pen or pencil or carved in with keys into the wood. A tradition, apparently. Stella borrowed the red marker from the teenager who’d just written her and her boyfriend’s initials in a heart, and wrote
SM and S or C was here.
I borrowed it next and wrote
Ruby
in tiny letters down the leg. It reminded me of sleepaway camp as a kid and writing our names in toothpaste on the bunk walls.

Rory rejoined us, sitting down on the tattered sofa across from us. “I made reservations at an inn around the corner tonight,” he said, signing his own name on the table. “Then we’re staying at my friend Popper’s apartment in Chicago and then I booked rooms at some little guesthouse in Lincoln, right in the center of everything.”

“Popper?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Can we trust someone named Popper?”

“Pete Popperscowski. My college roommate. Great guy. I just graduated from the University of Chicago last month. I wasn’t going to come back to Cleveland, but then my mom just seemed so…alone, but six weeks with her was way enough.”

“What’s your dad like?” Stella asked, nibbling at her brownie.

“Henpecked. I’m sure the new girlfriend will drive him crazy, too. She’ll probably kick him out and he’ll go home.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Your mother would take him back?”

He shrugged. “I think she’ll allow him the late-life crisis. And I do think he’ll be back. It clearly wasn’t a one-night stand or some meaningless affair, but it’s not love. Real love, I mean.”

“Was it real love between your parents?” I asked. How could it be if one of them left? Wasn’t the entire point of real love the staying together? The couplehood? The thick and thin, the richer and poorer, the sickness and in health? Or did that allow for screwing up, thinking that over, and then coming back,
accepting
back?

“They usually ate meals in silence,” Rory said, “except for my dad asking my mom for more mashed potatoes or whatever. They watched the same TV shows, like
CSI
and
Law and Order.
They went to Home Depot or a craft show on the weekends. But they did all that for twenty-three years. So what’s not real love about it?”

Stella and I both nodded; he wasn’t wrong, exactly.

“Lemme ask you something, Rory,” Stella said, putting down her soup bowl of coffee on the table in front of us. “Do you think you can feel real love on a one-night stand? I mean, if not talking and watching TV for twenty-five years is real love, do you think you can have an amazing connection with a woman you pick up in a bar, if you talk nonstop about everything and everything all night long and feel the most intense attraction you’ve ever felt?”

He glanced from me to Stella. “Why is it a one-night stand if the couple had an amazing connection and the wild attraction? Doesn’t the amazing connection negate the one-night stand? There’s gotta be a second date after an amazing connection.”

Stella stuck her fork into her brownie a few times. “Well, let’s say that you met a woman in a bar, drank a little too much, had this amazing connection—I mean, you both said you even felt the presence of God in the room, but because you drank so much—”

“The presence of God?” he repeated. “That must have been some fuck.”

I burst out laughing, but Stella apparently didn’t think it was funny at all. She shot up from the table and ran to the back of the café where the restroom was, yanked at the door handle, but it was clearly occupied, so Stella was stuck standing there, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Oops,” Rory said to me, grimacing. “Are you guys religious? I didn’t mean to offend—”

I put my hand on his arm. “No worries. Guy trouble, that’s all.”

“Ah. That I know something about. Girl trouble, I mean.”

I smiled. “Let me go talk to her.”

By the time I said excuse me to four people whose legs or chairs were blocking the aisle along the path to where Stella was standing, the bathroom became free and she disappeared inside. I waited for a moment, then knocked. “Can I come in?”

She pulled open the door. “You think that’s so fucking funny?” she screamed at me. “Well it’s not.” And then she burst into tears and slid down on the floor. “I really fell in love with him that night,” she said. “And I can’t find him! What if I never find him?”

I squeezed in and shut the door and locked it, then kneeled down next to her. “We’re going to find him, Stella. I promise you. Actually, I promise you we’ll look everywhere. I assume you looked where you found him in the first place?”

She sniffled and nodded. “That place and every bar and restaurant in the area. And then I started scouring other neighborhoods.” She threw up her hands.

“We’ll find him,” I told her again. “Come on back to the table. Rory’s worried he offended you.”

“Well he did,” she said. “And so did you by laughing.”

“We’re both sorry,” I told her, picking off a square of errant toilet paper from the back of her thigh.

At the table, Rory apologized again, and Stella dismissed it with a wave of her hands. “If we’re fighting, we must be family,” she said, smiling. She sipped her coffee and took a bite of her brownie. “Okay, let me ask you this, Rory. What would you do if you had this amazing connection with the one-night-stand chick, and then she…got pregnant and found you and told you. What would you do?”

“First of all, I just want to state for the record that I wouldn’t get a girl pregnant on a one-night stand. I’d use a condom. But if it broke or something, I’d see the situation through. If she wanted to keep the baby, I’d support her. Financially and all ways. It’s my kid, right?”

“Could you imagine falling in love with her?” Stella asked. “Someone you didn’t know who was pregnant with your baby?”

“I don’t know her because it was a one-night stand?”

Stella nodded. And waited.

He looked at her for a long minute, understanding dawning. “Yeah, I can imagine falling in love with her. If she was cool. Like you,” he added, squeezing her hand and then excusing himself to the bathroom.

That seemed to make Stella feel better. She leaned back in her chair, gazing at the ceiling for a moment. “Isn’t it strange that no one can tell? That at this very second, a baby is growing inside me, developing knees or fingernails or eyelashes and that no one even knows he or she is in there?”

I smiled. “Do you like that it’s private? It won’t be for long.”

“I don’t know. I feel so…responsible for it, you know? I’m the only one, Ruby. I’m all little Silas or Clarissa has.”

“You have me,” I said, patting her knee.

“And me,” Rory said as he joined us again. “I know I seem like a cousin fifty times removed, but I’m technically a first cousin.”

“You don’t seem so removed,” Stella said.

“Cool,” Rory said, and it was.

Rory decided to stay put in Chicago. And Popper turned out okay. He lived in a skyscraper across from a giant stainless steel sculpture that looked like a bean. For twenty-two-year-olds, Rory and Popper were pretty mature. They took us out on the town, for deep-dish pizza, of course, and then to a jazz club where Popper said Norah Jones had once shown up and sang unannounced. She didn’t that night.

I told Rory to call his mom and let her know he decided to hitch a ride with us to Popper’s, where he was going to stay till he found his own place. He promised he would, told Stella she was going to make an excellent mother, and then we spent a half hour trying to figure out if Rory and the baby would be second cousins or first cousins once removed. We asked just about everyone in our path, but got different answers each time.