He Started It(40)

“Anyway, we had a lot of time to talk—obviously—and Derrick explained to me what he meant about the truck thing. Why he thought the story sounded so weird. And yeah, he said it totally wrong and he didn’t have to call us assholes, but the fact is he made sense.”

We’re on the road now, but not on the interstate. Eddie has pulled into a drive-thru fast-food place. He orders a mountain of food and asks us if we want anything.

Today, this is breakfast.

Soon the car smells like it’s been dipped in grease. Eddie parks so he can eat, stuffing food in his mouth while explaining Derrick’s theory to us.

“I told him how it all started, about how you guys saw the truck, how the tire was flat again and the relay starter had been taken. It’s funny, you know, how a person who isn’t involved can see it all so clearly. How each thing that happened has a dozen explanations for why it had nothing to do with what happened in Alabama.” He stops to take another bite of his breakfast sandwich. “Like the tire. Maybe we really did hit nails. Or the relay starter. There we are, in some rundown motel in the middle of nowhere, and maybe someone needed a relay starter for their own car. Or maybe someone sold it to make a couple dollars.”

“We saw the truck,” Krista says. “I saw the guy in the parking lot.”

He shrugs. “You know how many black trucks there are in this country? And the guy you saw? It was late. Dark. Could’ve been any old guy who happened to be around, for God’s sake.” He shakes his head, bites on a hash brown. “We took a bunch of things that had nothing to do with one another and we mashed them together into some kind of story.”

That last sentence doesn’t sound like Eddie. He’s just echoing Derrick.

Krista knows. “Bullshit.”

“Wait a minute,” Portia says. “Doesn’t this mean you broke the rules?”

“What rules?” Krista says.

“Oh my God,” I say, looking at Eddie in the mirror. “You went to jail. Grandpa said—”

“We couldn’t go to jail. Yeah, I know,” Eddie says. “But this isn’t what he meant. You know that. One night in jail isn’t prison.”

Maybe, maybe not. But it’s something to consider.





For the first time, I notice the car smells. Maybe it’s because our dirty clothes are piling up in our bags, maybe it’s because we spend so much time sitting in the same spots. I roll down the window. Portia gets most of the air. It hits her in the face and she moves to the other side of her back seat.

“I hate Colorado,” she says.

“Same,” I say.

“Same!” Krista yells.

Felix shrugs, Eddie doesn’t say a word. Probably too busy thinking about his new bromance with Clemson.

“Seriously,” Portia says. “Nothing good has ever happened to us in this state. Nothing.”

She is thinking of Grandpa, of Nikki, and I can’t disagree with her. I also don’t want anyone to ask.

“What happened here before?” Felix says.

Too late.

“Food poisoning,” Portia says.

I glance back at her, she doesn’t look at me.

She continues. “We were all cooped up in the motel room like we were quarantined or something.”

“For how long?” Krista says. She also turns around in her seat, now facing the back. It’s the first time she has said anything since we picked up Eddie.

“Days,” Portia says. “It felt like weeks.”

To a six-year-old, it probably did. She didn’t even understand what was happening. As far as she knew, Grandpa was sick, Nikki was in charge, and we were stuck in Colorado.

And Grandpa was a bad, bad man.

Now that I’m an adult, I understand how betrayed I felt. Between the kidnapping and the abuse, my grandfather wasn’t who I thought he was and never had been. Our grandfather was a man who hit his wife.

At twelve, I couldn’t say all that, couldn’t put what I was feeling into those kinds of words. If I had to describe my feelings right then, I would’ve said my grandfather was a monster.

I didn’t have to say that out loud because Nikki did.



* * *



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We were out of money and needed more, and the only way we could get it was with Grandpa’s debit card. All we needed was the pin number.

Nikki asked for it, and he gave her the number 4-2-5-9. She ran down to the corner store to get some cash. Or so we thought. A few minutes later, she ran back in, all out of breath and puffing anger everywhere.

“Wrong number,” she said to Grandpa.

He was lying on the bed and he looked pretty bad. Smelled, too. “No, it isn’t. The number is four, two, nine, five.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“Yes, it is. Four, two, nine, five.”

Nikki ran out again. I have to admit, I thought he just mixed up the numbers. With all the pills he was drinking in the water, it seemed reasonable he would do that.

A lot more time passed before Nikki showed up again. She wasn’t out of breath and didn’t yell. She sat down next to Grandpa on the bed and took his hand in hers.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said. “The third time I get that number wrong, the machine is going to take the card.”