Don't Fail Me Now(72)

“Yeah,” Leah says, fixing us with a look so fierce I’d swear she had some Means blood in her, too. “That he couldn’t break us.”

“Okay then,” I say. “I guess we better go catch that bus.”

I look into both of my sisters’ eyes and realize we’re all thinking the exact same thing right now:

We could take him.

? ? ?

Back at the car, Denny is busy scratching the letters R.I.P. onto Goldie’s hood with the four-color pen.

“I hope it’s cool,” Tim says sheepishly. “He was pretty adamant.”

“Sure.” I run my finger along one of her more impressive dents. “She deserves an epitaph.”

“You know, we don’t have to leave her,” Tim says. “We could call a tow. Maybe it’s fixable.” Even he doesn’t sound convinced, but it’s sweet that he’s trying.

“That’d cost a lot of money, plus, what are we gonna do, swing back through on the way home?” I shake my head. “She’s gone.” Tim looks more upset than I would expect.

“I’m sorry I was mean to her,” Leah says, staring over Denny’s shoulder like she’s at an open-casket wake.

“It’s okay, she’ll just haunt your dreams,” Cass jokes. “You’ll be about to make out with Justin Bieber, and then you’ll realize you’re in the backseat sitting on a bag of Funyuns.”

“She did us proud, though,” I say. “We couldn’t have made it without her.”

We pack as much as we can fit into our backpacks, and the stuff we can’t take I arrange into a little shrine in the trunk: Mom’s cassette tapes, the siphon pump and sock wrench, some rags made out of ripped-up Tshirts, two crushed packets of ramen noodles.

“Why don’t I find a junkyard that can come and get her?” Tim asks.

“I just don’t want to wait for them to come,” I say. “I don’t want to see her get dragged off.”

“Max can wait,” Denny says.

“If we leave, though, that means Max gets left behind. For good.” I try to sound sad instead of hopeful, but it’s hard when Cass and Leah are struggling not to laugh.

“I know, duh.” Denny rolls his eyes.

“So . . . you’re okay with that?”

“Yeah,” Denny says. “Tim says when I get scared, I can talk to real people. Plus, I have a picture of him at home I can look at if I miss him.”

“A picture?” Cass asks skeptically.

“Mom has it in her room,” Denny says, “on the dresser.” Mom’s clothes are usually strewn around like a tornado hit, pooled on the floor, hanging on chair arms and doorknobs, piled on the bed. I don’t know if I can even remember what the dresser looks like under all of the crap she’s got stacked on it. But I know the photo Denny’s talking about. In it, a man is sitting on a stoop, smoking a cigarette and giving the camera a mischievous grin, exposing his dimples. His dark hair is shaggy and hangs in his eyes. He’s wearing a white undershirt, jeans, and Converse sneakers. In the picture he looks like he could be any bad-boy flirt at any high school, the kind you can’t stop thinking about even though you know he’d hurt you if you ever let him in. He could be anyone, but he’s not. He’s my father. All this time Denny’s been making imaginary friends with Buck. No wonder I never liked him.

“I think you’re right,” I say, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I think it’s time to let Max go.”

We take one last look and then file onto the shoulder, walking away from the car, one by one, in silence.





TWENTY


Tuesday Night/Wednesday Morning

Kingman, AZ Los Angeles, CA




The bus ride goes by in a blur. It’s pitch black outside by the time we leave, and the sun comes up just as we’re entering the Los Angeles city limits, the downtown skyscrapers encased in a haze of majestic-looking smog. I sleep in fitful spurts, each time dreaming I’m walking into the hospice center for the first time. In one dream, Buck is sitting at the front desk, beaming, looking healthy but dressed in a paper gown. I just wanted to see you, he says. Don’t be mad at me, baby. In another, he’s suddenly wizened and elderly, unconscious in a bed with Dr. Chowdhury standing over him. We’ve been able to pick up activity in most of the major areas of concern, the doctor says and then turns on a shower that begins to flood the room. In the last one, Bucks’s gone missing. He was just here, a nurse says. Would you like to wait? And in the dream, even though I know he isn’t coming back, I sit down on a plastic folding chair and put my hands over my eyes. I wake up from all of them relieved at first and then filled with empty dread.

Tim sits with Denny, who almost immediately passes out on him, but a few times he reaches over and grabs my hand from across the aisle. Once we both fall asleep that way, and a woman has to wake us up so she can get back to the bathroom. Cass and Leah sit behind me, but I hardly hear them exchange a single word, and when I look back I see them dozing, the ear buds from a shared set of headphones making a Y between their heads. The thought occurs to me somewhere in the midst of the Mojave Desert that maybe it’s not the destination or the journey that matters in the end, but rather who’s there to help you haul your baggage around. The five of us have gone from distrustful strangers to something approaching a family in less than a week. Tim and I have gone from fast-food nemeses to something approaching a couple.