Mosquitoland(43)

“Just because I don’t have a license—God, seriously, how good were these when they were warm? Never mind, I don’t wanna know. Anyway, I know how to drive.”

“I’m sure you do. But really, it’s no problem. I’m sort of passing through, anyway.”

“You’re passing through Cleveland. On your way to what, Lake Erie?”

He gives another one of those half smiles. “Canada, actually. Or—Vermont.”

Before I have a chance to point out that Cleveland really isn’t on the way to Canada or Vermont, the skies open up. It’s a heavy rain, each drop bursting like a water balloon on the windshield. After a few minutes of squinting and leaning over the steering wheel, Beck gives up, and pulls to the side of the highway to wait it out. In the new stillness of the truck, the warbled radio mixes with the pounding rain to create an odd sort of half silence. Broadcasters are going through stats now, filling time during the rain delay. Walt has his hat pulled down over his face, but other than that, he hasn’t budged.

“So you’re from Cleveland, then?” says Beck, sipping his soda.

I shake my head and unwrap the burger. “After things went to shit, Mom sort of relocated there. It’s where she always wanted to be anyway. I grew up in Ashland, about an hour outside Cleveland.”

“And she’s in the hospital for this . . . disease, right? Your mom, I mean.”

Reaching between my feet, I unzip my backpack and hand over the envelope with my mom’s PO Box address. “For two months, I received a letter a week. Then three weeks ago, they stopped. This was the last one I got, and the only one since the move.”

“You think your stepmom, Cassie—”

“Kathy.”

“Right, Kathy.” He hands back the envelope. “You think she’s been hiding letters from you?”

“She always gets to the mailbox first. She tried to get me to quit calling so much. It’s obvious she doesn’t want us to communicate. Plus”—I pull out Kathy’s sixth letter—“here—this is the letter from Mom to Kathy, the only one I didn’t flush. I’m pretty sure Mom asked if I could visit, to which Kathy said no, to which Mom replied . . .”

“Think of what’s best for her,” says Beck.

“Bingo.”

Beck holds it for a minute, slurps his drink. “It’s got an error.”

“I know.”

“Think of whats best for her.” He holds up the note as if I haven’t read it a hundred times. “She forgot the apostrophe.”

“I know.”

He looks down at it again. “Hmm.”

“What now, a dangling modifier?”

He smiles, hands back the crumpled letter. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Well, if it’s probably nothing, then it might be something. What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Well you can’t just say hmm, and then say it’s nothing. A hmm is something. You have to tell me.”

He chews his straw in I-don’t-know-what . . . knee-wobbling sensuality. “So. You just gonna go camp out at this PO Box and hope your mom stumbles in from the hospital to check her mail?”

I smile-slash-glare at him, and—bloody hell, there’s my cute face again. Strangely, I’m not as frustrated as I want to be. What I want to be is Beck’s straw for two minutes. I swallow my last bite of burger (hoping he doesn’t notice it took all of twenty seconds to inhale), then say, “I have a plan, and it is this. Step one, get to Cleveland. Step two, figure shit out. This is my plan.”

“Flawless, if I may say so.”

“You may.”

Walt interrupts with a colossal snore. It tapers off a little, but still, how he fell asleep in that position is beyond me.

“What’s his story?” asks Beck.

I give him a brief rundown of what little I know of Walt: dead mom, likes “the shiny,” New Chicago, et cetera. Honestly, I’m stalling a little, buying time to consider Beck’s offer to drive us the rest of the way. It’s attractive for a few reasons, the main one being—well, I’ve never driven on the highway. I haven’t driven much at all, for that matter. With only one good eye, it makes for quite the Evel-Knievel-motocross-ass-grabbing-death-defying experience. The stuff of YouTube legends, really.

Beck clears his throat. “So there’s probably something you should know.”

Here we go. Without meaning to, I reposition myself in the seat. My curiosity about Beck is suffocating, and it’s just—I want so badly for him to be real, to be good, to be a person of major f*cking substance and despair.

He looks me directly in the eye, leans in, and says, “Uncle Phil is a perv.”

At this, my brain splits into two very distinct factions: the first encourages me to gasp, to throw my hand over my mouth, to say No, not Uncle Phil! Beck, darling, say it ain’t so!; the second sits in silence, unmoving, thoroughly disappointed.

“Total degenerate,” he continues. “At the last family reunion, he told everyone his bald spot was a solar panel for his sex machine.”

I sit in silence. Unmoving. Thoroughly disappointed. (The second faction appears to be winning out.) “What?” he says, noticing my less-than-enthusiastic response. “I’m kidding. I mean, I’m not, Uncle Phil is a perv, but—”