All That's Left to Tell(25)

“Your father,” the woman said. “He’s probably sick, isn’t he?”

Claire remembered the man at the sandwich shop in the national forest, and wondered if everyone along this highway was trained to read minds.

“Yeah, he is,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Well, you got a baby, too, right?” The woman leaned over and picked up a tiny rag doll that Lucy had tossed from the car seat weeks ago and had become a permanent feature of the floorboards.

“Yep. A little girl. She just turned three.”

“What’s her name?”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy,” the woman repeated. “Like Lucille Ball. I Love Lucy. Or the woman in the country song who left her husband with the crops in the field.”

Claire smiled. “I have to admit, when she was born, we never thought of that song. It’s my maternal grandmother’s name.”

“It’s a nice old-fashioned name.”

“Like Genevieve,” Claire said.

“Yeah, I guess so.” The woman looked out the window and seemed to watch the barbed-wire fence line that went on forever.

“Anyway,” she said, her voice vibrating like a fan blade before she turned back toward Claire. “I figured you wouldn’t be driving all this way without your baby or husband if you were just going to spend some time with your dad.”

“He’s in the hospital,” Claire said. “Congestive heart failure. I guess he’s had it for a while.”

The woman nodded. “So how many years has it been since you’ve seen him?”

Claire couldn’t help but cast a look at her.

“You said I guess. That means you didn’t know about his illness before he called you on the phone.”

“He wasn’t the one who called,” Claire said. “It was a woman I never met. My parents are divorced.”

“I see. He must be pretty sick.”

“I think he is. But to answer your question, I haven’t spoken to him in around fifteen years.”

The woman nodded and looked out the windshield. She pulled a strand of hair that was blowing around her face back behind her ear, and then suddenly pointed at a telephone pole. “Look, a hawk! It’s perched right on top there.” It lifted into the sky just as they passed.

“That’s a long time,” the woman continued. “My own father died a few years back. A stroke. He was still pretty young. I didn’t have to drive across the country to see him, but I still didn’t make it in time. I mean, he was still alive when I got there. But I don’t think he recognized me. He only had one eye. I mean, after the stroke, he had one that still worked. It just sort of kept moving back and forth across my face, searching for something. I was holding his hand when he died. I’d never seen a person die before.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire said. It struck her that she had never seen someone die, either, and that of the people she had known, except for a boy from high school she’d heard was killed in a car crash, she had come closer to dying than anyone.

“It’s something you’re not ready for. I mean, it happens in its own time, out of your control. All the things I remembered about him. They didn’t crowd in till afterward. I wanted to say, ‘No, wait, Dad! I’m not ready.’ But I don’t imagine he was ready, either. It was just his body. His body didn’t leave him any choice.”

“How old was he?”

“Sixty-seven. He and my mom had me when he was older. The last of three kids. Two brothers and me.”

“Do you miss him?” Claire was surprised at her own directness, but the woman seemed so unselfconscious.

Genevieve shifted her eyes to Claire’s face. Claire felt the awkwardness of being looked at while she had to keep her own eyes on the road. Finally, Genevieve said, “Not much more now that he’s dead than I did when he was alive. My mother was the one who raised me. Raised us. My father worked hard as a salesman. It’s not that he was mean or stern. He was just away. The strange thing is—”

She stopped and looked out the window at the road.

“So we’re on Interstate 80, right?”

“Yeah. I’m hoping to make Salt Lake City by tonight.”

“That’s a long haul, but I bet we can get there. Like I said, I’ll be happy to drive.”

Already the woman was saying we. They were headed around a bend with a high, bald hill and a few clumps of bushes toward the top.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Claire said. “So you were saying?”

“So I mean, we’re going to take this trip together. All these hours here in this little truck. Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa. The landscape is pretty sometimes, but it’s mostly bleak. And there will be long stretches of miles and miles that neither of us will remember. But some things will happen along the way, and we’ll talk sometimes like we’re talking now. And then you’ll drop me off in Chicago, and we will probably never see each other again. But when you look back, you’ll remember those things that happened and these conversations separated by all the quiet highway hours.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. So when someone dies … So when my father died, what happens is like you have Interstate 80 stretched out over a lifetime. But all those hours, all those weeks and months where nothing was happening, where you were living your life without even thinking about him, those spaces fall away, and the memories you do have slam into each other, one after another, and they’re moving too fast to stop. It’s one thing if you’re someone like me. I mean, it’s true that even thinking back to your father asleep in his chair can hurt a little once he’s gone. But I didn’t have that many memories of him. A time we played catch because I wanted to make the softball team. Or the time my mother was in the hospital and one morning he had to brush out my hair before I went to school. You remember how sometimes he pulled too hard, and your eyes watered, and your scalp stung, but it was your father brushing out your hair, which never happened before, so you didn’t say anything. But, like I said, there weren’t that many things I remembered, so they didn’t pile up. But my poor mother. She got through the funeral okay, with all the people I hadn’t seen for years, or had never seen, taking her hand and telling some little story of her husband. I wish they hadn’t put him in a casket for everyone to see. But afterward, when the people left, and we went home, and I was standing in the kitchen with her. I was saying something about how nice everything had gone, and when I turned to look at her she was standing at the sink, clutching the edge of the counter. She had her eyes closed tight, and she was saying, ‘Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.’ Just like that. All the empty hours and the stretches of loneliness she used to confide in me about, they all fell away, and everything else was slamming into each other. And she kept saying, ‘Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.’ I could see how they were banging into her rib cage from the inside, and there was nothing I could do but wait till they stopped.”