All That's Left to Tell(26)

They had rounded the long bend, and now the Nevada desert lay out flat again. Claire saw how she was gripping the steering wheel tightly, and then releasing the grip, a rhythm she realized had persisted through the woman’s story. The woman had turned away and was looking out the passenger window.

“That’s so sad,” Claire said.

The woman shrugged her shoulders, and when she spoke her voice was again buffeted by the air streaming in.

“It is, I guess. But that’s the way it works. I don’t know how it will be for you, with all of these years passed.”

“Well, he hasn’t died yet,” she said. “How’s your mom now?”

But the woman didn’t answer this question. She was resting her chin on her hand, her elbow propped into the empty space of the window. Her eyes were closed.

Claire thought about her own father. She was now as close to his age at the time she last saw him as she was to nineteen. Closer. When she’d left, she’d taken no photographs, no images stored on smartphones, and so her memory of him—sandy-headed, a wide, lopsided smile that warmed when he saw her, his waist thickening in the middle after too many corporate lunches—faded as soon as she conjured it like the flash of a camera after you close your eyes. For some reason, she could remember her mother more clearly, probably because to Claire she had always been so beautiful. Thin, pale, taut skin. Ageless. She’d still looked like a girl when she braided her hair some summer mornings because she wanted to keep the back of her neck cool. But her father. Jack had asked about him, and no, she never had told him about the kiss, but she did tell him about some of the things she remembered. How sometimes he had a temper, and once smashed the picture window in their house with a hammer because his paint job had sealed it closed and he couldn’t get it open to let the air in. Or how he could be kind, and took in two stray cats that had begun to beg for food, even though because of allergies he had to drink Benadryl almost every day to keep from sneezing. Once, when she was maybe eight years old, he’d taken her to the circus, and she hadn’t wanted to go because a friend had told her circuses were for little kids, and besides, she felt sorry for the elephants, but they had gone anyway, and she’d liked the tightrope act, and afterward she let her father carry her on his shoulders as he hadn’t probably for over a year. He’d found a long, painted line in the parking lot, and started walking across it like a tightrope, wobbling as he tried to keep his balance, and she was laughing over the thrill of possibly falling, and she’d slapped her hands over his eyes once when he’d lurched slightly out of control, and he’d said, “Marc the Magnificent, who can walk the high wire even with a blindfold!” And she’d kept his eyes covered, and he’d laughed, and started taking baby steps so she wouldn’t fall.

When she’d told Jack that story, he’d said, “So how can you go fifteen years without seeing the guy? I mean, my old man is as poker-faced as they come; I don’t think I heard him laugh more than a half-dozen times growing up, but if a few months pass and I haven’t heard from him, I’m picking up the phone.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose, if that makes sense,” she’d told him. “I don’t think I was being deliberate.”

None of the years since she’d last seen him had been easy, and yet, as they accumulated, and the gulf between her and her father and mother widened and deepened, she felt less tethered. No, her life hadn’t begun the moment she met Jack, but those other voices over a gulf were muted, no matter how beseeching, and that was somehow comforting.

The thought of this made her ease back on the accelerator pedal, and brought the woman out of her daydream.

“Can we stop soon?” the woman asked. “I need to use the bathroom.”

“Sure. There was a sign a couple of miles back. We could use some gas, anyway. Maybe a snack.”

The woman volunteered to pump the gas while Claire went in and paid and bought a couple of packages of peanut butter crackers that were on sale two for a dollar. She was still conscientious about every penny spent. Gas and tolls would be bad enough, and she’d told herself she’d sleep in the bed of the truck on a rolled mattress if she could pull off in safe places. That might be more complicated with the woman hitching a ride. She walked back out to the truck and waited for Genevieve to use the bathroom. She stayed standing alongside the pump and stretched her legs. It was midafternoon and the sun fully overhead, making the tiny gas station and the shimmering landscape shadowless. When the woman climbed back into the cab, and Claire pulled onto the freeway, she saw that she had several twenties folded into her palm. She peeled off one and handed it to Claire.

“Here’s for my share of the gas and snacks.”

Claire glanced at her. “You don’t look like someone traveling with that much cash.”

“I’m not. I mean, I wasn’t. The man left the cash register open when he turned away to give me the bathroom key, so I took it when he wasn’t looking.”

Claire laughed and said, “Right.”

“You don’t believe me?” She was staring at her with those gray eyes.

“What the fuck, Genevieve. Are you serious?”

“I didn’t take it all. Just eighty dollars.”

“How do you know he didn’t get our license plate?”

“He didn’t see me take it. He won’t find out till later when he counts up the drawer, and even then he might not figure it out.”