VenCo(22)

Lucky elbowed her in the ribs.

“Oww! What? The cat doesn’t know how long I’ll be gone for!” Stella rubbed her side. “He might think I abandoned him with this nut.”

“A fruit, honey. Not a nut.” Clermont was not only used to Stella; he loved her, and wasn’t insulted. “And unless you’re not telling me something, you’ll only be gone for two days. He’ll be fine. We’ll bond over your absence.”

After he’d given Stella a big hug, and a sip of his martini for good luck, they carried their stuff down the stairs to Stella’s old green Pathfinder and tossed it into the back seat.

As Lucky climbed in on the driver’s side, she heard her grandmother muttering, “Ozzy’ll have my head for not taking it through the car wash before we head out.” It was always a bad sign when Stella started talking about Grandpa Oswald in the present tense, and Lucky hoped this trip wouldn’t send her over the edge. More than that, she hoped that whatever this job offer was about, it would mean she wouldn’t have to put Stella into some publicly funded home.

“Alright, we’re off!” Lucky tried to sound cheerful as she turned the key.

“Jesus, why are you making such a big deal about this?” Stella said. “We go get groceries every week.”

“Grandma, we’re going to the States, remember? We brought our passports.” Lucky backed out onto the street.

“Right, right,” Stella replied. “I know. Massachusetts. So you can see someone about a job. I know where we’re going.” She sounded testy now.

“Right. Sorry.” Lucky turned onto the main road that would lead them to the highway they would take south and east.

“Did Jinx seem sad to you when we left?” Stella was biting the thin skin around her nails.

“He looked fine. He’s probably pissing in my shoes as we speak.”

“That’s because you hate him and he knows it,” Stella responded. “You don’t hide your shit all that well.”

Lucky concentrated on the road and tried not to read too much into things. She wanted this trip to be fun for Stella, especially if their little family had to be broken up after it was over. She used her cheerful voice: “I heard the world’s smallest church is just outside of Syracuse. We can stop there on the way.”

“Do I have time for a nap?”

“Yeah. I’ll wake you up when we get to the border crossing at Niagara Falls.”

Stella leaned against the window. “I hate Niagara Falls. Makes me have to pee.”



Crossing the border went about as well as could be expected with a senile senior who made inappropriate jokes about being kidnapped and couldn’t remember if she had ever been to the States before, let alone when. The agent took Stella in stride, though, and they had passports and vaccination certificates, no priors, and nothing weird in the car except for themselves. Once they were onto the interstate, Stella fell asleep again, waking with a start about an hour into New York State. “Let’s stop for the night—I wanna watch TV.”

“Can’t you just listen to the radio for a bit?” Lucky wanted to make a little more distance. “I don’t want to be late for the meeting tomorrow.”

“What is this, 1952? I don’t want the radio, I want to watch TV. We have options now, you know.” She crossed her arms over her chest. She got surly at night, more confused than in daylight hours.

Lucky sighed. “Okay, look, we’re close to Rochester. We’ll find a place there. Does that work?”

“I guess. You know, Ozzy’s not gonna like that we left him behind. He likes road trips. We used to take them all the time when we were younger.” She giggled a bit. “They used to make him all romantic.”

“I don’t need details,” Lucky cut in. She definitely did not want details. Sometimes she got them anyway, like when Stella explained that after her grandfather passed on, she stopped cleaning the floor, because that was one of their games, him “walking in” on her down on her hands and knees, scrubbing away. Lucky never pushed her to help with the floors again. Maybe that had been Stella’s plan all along.

Her grandmother kept on talking. “We would drive to some small place and hole up in a motel for a few days, checking out the local sights even if there were none. Shopping in another town’s Walmart makes you feel like Indiana Jones. God, I love Indiana Jones. You ever watch those movies, Luck, the old ones, with the hat and the whip?”

Lucky turned on the radio to drown her out. Twenty minutes later they pulled into a Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of the city. Stella complained that there were no parking spots right by the rooms—“I like to see my car from the window.” But once she kicked off her tennis shoes, pulled off her pantyhose, and settled on the bed with the TV remote, she seemed just fine.

“I’m going to go get us some snacks from the 7-Eleven across the way,” Lucky told her. She paused at the door, raising her voice and enunciating so she wouldn’t be ignored. “Do not go anywhere.”

“Yeah, yeah, where am I gonna go? I don’t even have shoes on!”

“Well, where’d you go last week in your socks, eh? Down to the corner store for smokes.”

“So?”

“You don’t smoke!” Lucky shook her head, closing the door with a bang. Out in the hallway, she immediately felt bad. This was maybe their last adventure together, and it was turning into The Odd Couple on the road.