Girl Out of Water(52)

As if a grain of good can negate a field of bad.

“Look,” Aunt Jackie says, “why don’t you leave the kids here and take some time for yourself? It’s a beautiful day out. Call that new friend of yours. Lincoln, right? He’s not so bad looking, you know.”

Calling Lincoln not so bad looking is like calling the Pacific Ocean damp.

“I don’t know… Are you sure?” I’m kind of uneasy leaving Aunt Jackie alone, but I guess the kids are here if she needs something. And the next door neighbors are home too, and like she said, she can always use her phone. Not to mention, she just got released from being monitored by doctors 24/7, so besides her legs, she probably couldn’t be any healthier if she tried.

Aunt Jackie reaches over the comforter and squeezes my hand. “I’m sure.”

Half an hour later, Lincoln picks me up in a Jeep Wrangler with a bit of rust and nicked paint. When I texted him using the number he’d put into my phone and asked if he maybe wanted to hang out and skate or grab lunch or something, he responded saying it must be fate because his shift at work just got canceled. Then he asked if I could be gone for approximately nine and a half hours.

In true Lincoln style, he refused to tell me anything more, and though I felt uneasy about being away that long, I said yes.

“Bring us back presents!” Nash shouts as I head out the front door.

I turn toward him. He’s in the living room, sitting on the floor and playing video games, next to Parker who is still piecing together the giant puzzle. “How do you know there’ll be presents where I’m going?”

Parker looks up and furrows his brow. “There are presents everywhere if you look hard enough.”

“Okay there, Confucius. I’ll see you later.”

As I head out to the car, I glance at the house and the closed curtain of Emery’s room. If there are presents to be found, one for her is at the top of the list.

? ? ?

I learn three things driving in the car with Lincoln:

1. He owns all eighteen Bruce Springsteen albums and refuses to listen to anything else until I’ve listened to all eighteen Bruce Springsteen albums.

2. He uses something called a spinner knob, this little black device attached to his steering wheel, to help him make turns one-handed. On straightaways, he grips the wheel with four fingers and idly touches the knob with his pinky.

3. He cannot drive farther than ten miles without providing at least one “fun fact” about a plant we pass.

We’re shooting down the highway, about two hours into our apparently three-hour drive, “State Trooper” blasting from the speakers, muffled by the heavy wind thrashing through the open-top jeep, when Lincoln swerves to make the upcoming exit.

I yelp and grab onto the metal frame of the car for support. “You know a family member of mine was recently in a near-fatal car crash?” I ask. “What are you doing?”

“Food!”

As he says the word, my stomach grumbles. I hope he’s planning on pulling into a fast food drive-thru because it’s been many hours since my four eggs, two bowls of cereal, and Pop-Tart. But he doesn’t pull into a drive-thru, he pulls into an almost-empty parking lot of an almost-empty grocery store that looks like it’s half a century old. The sign reads “Grocery” in chipped, faded green paint, and exactly one cart sits outside on the curb.

“Okay,” Lincoln says. He turns off the ignition and climbs out of the car. “We’re going to play a little game.”

“What game is that?” I ask, getting out of the car.

He slips two ten-dollar bills from his wallet. He passes one to me and stuffs the other into his pocket. His eyes light up as he explains the game. “We both have ten dollars and five minutes to find the best food we can, check out, and meet back at the car. Please keep in mind that there will be zero cooking facilities at our final destination, unless you have a permit to build a campfire on government property.”

“Unless I what?”

“Go!”

Instead of answering me, Lincoln shoots off into the grocery store, and since I don’t like losing—ever—I shove my questions aside and rush off after him.

I burst through the not automatic double doors and into an employee wearing a red apron, who stares at me like the devil herself just came in for some light grocery shopping. “Sorry, sorry!” I call out, rushing past him.

I pace in front of the tops of the aisles and scan. Lincoln is down one of them. He presses his basket into the shelf with his hips, while quickly throwing in items. I don’t have time for pacing. Too bad Spinner isn’t here. He’s got a nose for awesome food. But I’m on my own, so I pick an aisle at random, speed down the worn linoleum floor, and happen upon the perfect thing.

We check out separately, and Lincoln insists we keep our bounties hidden in their brown paper bags until we get to our final destination. My growling stomach disagrees with this, so he tells me to open the glove compartment. Inside I find a few granola bars in different flavors, little bags of Skittles that look suspiciously Halloween-themed, and an apple with more squish than any apple should ever have. I chuck the apple out the window and smile because this messy glove compartment proves that Lincoln has at least one flaw and is therefore human.

“Almost there,” he announces, two granola bars and a bag of hardened Skittles later. In the last three hours Nebraska has turned from suburbs to commercial highways to this flat expanse of road and empty land and little else, exactly what I always imagined Nebraska to look like.