Chapter 12
Taco Bell never tastes better than it does on a road trip. And when you’re trying to regain the enthusiasm you had before the bumper sticker on a pickup truck pierced the joy of your vacation bubble, a crunchy taco made from Doritos can be downright magical.
“Fun fact,” Will said, trying to lighten the mood as he wadded up the paper from taco two and prepared to unwrap taco three. It was late afternoon, and the dining room was empty except for the two of them. “That summer I worked at Cedar Point, a few of us went to the local Taco Bell, and they challenged me to chug a sixty-four-ounce mix of ten different fountain sodas in a minute and a half or less.”
“And?” she asked.
“Eighty-eight seconds.”
“Wow. I don’t know whether I’m turned on or repulsed. What did you get for doing it?”
“They were supposed to cover my Taco Bell for a month. Of course, after I proceeded to throw up my Mexican Pizza through my nose, I never went back. Until today.”
Rachel set her cup down abruptly. “Hold on. Are you saying this is the first time you’ve had Taco Bell—since we were in college?”
“That is what I’m saying.”
“Oh my God. You think you know a person.”
“Yeah, I’m not proud of it.”
“So is this the best moment of your life right now? And rest assured, I’m not fishing for you to say it was our wedding or something.”
“I’m eating a taco that’s a large part Dorito, so I’d have to say yes.”
“Not since college,” she muttered as she stood to go to the bathroom. “Man.”
While she was gone, Will decided to restart his phone, which still seemed to be glitching even though they’d reemerged from the wilderness. Once it turned back on, he got a text from his mom that she’d sent an hour before but that hadn’t come through.
You and Rachel should try a couples yoga class. There’s one at my studio for people who are expecting, so I’m sure you could find one by you.
Will had written her from the CVS after brunch and said he was worried because Rachel had been talking in her sleep (he hadn’t shared about what). He weighed his mom’s suggestion for approximately half a second.
Thanks, but I don’t know that we’re “couples yoga” kind of people.
He’d started searching for things for him and Rachel to do in Nashville back at the hotel in Milwaukee but hadn’t found the right fit, so he picked it up again as he waited to see if his mom would write back. While he was driving, it’d occurred to him to try googling “Taylor Swift Nashville” and just see if anything interesting came up.
After a little scrolling through the most obvious results, he thought he’d found what he was looking for.
“All right,” Rachel said, returning to the table, “let’s get this show on the road. I’m about to show you how the person driving can still dominate the alphabet game.”
Her words were playful, but Will could still sense in her tone some of the tension from the car. He felt it too. But this seemed like an opportunity to show that he could be a steadying force for them both—the kind that could let her tackle a new job in California even with all the other changes in their life.
“That remains to be seen,” he said as he stood to carry their tray over to the trash. “Hey, what do you think of this for Nashville?” he asked, handing her his phone.
She read from the web page, her voice rising and expression brightening as she did. “‘Join us on our rooftop bar on the last Saturday of each month for Swift Saturdays. All Taylor. All eras.’” She looked up at him and let out an exaggerated gasp. “‘Costumes encouraged.’”
He laughed. Despair was no match for Taylor. “Is that a yes?”
“It’s not only a yes, it’s whatever the opposite of a hard pass is.”
“A hard yes?”
“We’ll keep workshopping it. In the meantime, I’ll figure out what we’re wearing.”
“To be clear, I’m committing to going, not to the costume part.”
Rachel gave his phone back to him. “We’ll see.”
“I’m serious, Rachel,” he said, basking in the success of his plan to make her feel better as they walked out the door into the sun and toward the car.
“Uh-huh.”
Successful or not, he really had no intention of wearing a costume, and he was about to repeat that when he was interrupted by his mom texting back about his rejection of couples’ yoga.
You don’t know what you’re missing. :) Where are you now?
Just leaving a Taco Bell in Escanaba, Michigan.
She emphasized his text. Back on the horse—good for you. Love you. Drive safe.
Love you too.
“My mom thinks we should do couples’ yoga for expectant moms,” Will said once he and Rachel were in the car with her now behind the wheel.
“Ha—what did you say?”
“I told her I thought it was a fantastic idea.”
“You’re either lying or need to get busy impregnating someone else.”
He put his hand to his chin like he was really mulling over women who might want to sleep with him.
“You know, it’s not polite to tease a pregnant lady,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to take the g in morning”—she pointed at the Taco Bell window—“as a penalty.”
“What?!” he exclaimed in faux indignation. “You already took the f in breakfast from the same sign! You can’t double-dip! What happened to playing by the ‘real rules handed down to us by the alphabet-game gods’?”
“‘Alphabet-game gods’?” she said, playing dumb. “Now you’re just making things up.”
They pulled out of the parking lot, their next stop a reasonably priced hotel on the beach in St. Ignace, which was right across the water from Mackinac Island. They had crossed from the central to the eastern time zone before they’d gotten to Escanaba—with Will silently hoping that the road sign proclaiming that transition contained the only z in the Upper Peninsula—and had a little over two hours to go. He still hadn’t broached the subject of the ferry ride to the island with Rachel. If all else failed, and she really didn’t want to get on the boat, there were beach chairs and a firepit plus a casino down the road, so he was confident they’d have things to do. He just couldn’t tell his mom they’d missed the Rick Springfield show at the casino by one weekend. She’d be devastated.
About 20 minutes into an audiobook, they had left Escanaba behind and passed through another town called Gladstone—Rachel racking up nine more letters to his six in the process—before seemingly going back off the grid. The prospect of Will getting that tattoo was becoming more real, and it was true she had knocked out the notoriously difficult-to-find j before they’d made the foreboding transition back to two-lane roads, but all hope wasn’t lost. She was on q now, and when he’d looked at the map while they were eating, he’d seen that Hiawatha National Forest was on their horizon. He figured all they had to do was make it there, and she’d be looking for that q forever.
What he didn’t count on was the rural roadside marijuana dispensary.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Will said, commenting on the sign before she did and knowing full well that, needing an h, he was powerless to do anything with it.
“What’s that?” Rachel said. “Oh yes, I believe I will take the q in Cannabis Queen.”
“Seriously, what are the odds? And more importantly, why is your turn signal on?”
“Bathroom. Pregnancy bladder, and who knows the next time we’ll see somewhere we can stop. Plus I want to get their opinion on where you should get your tattoo. I’m thinking butt cheek, but I’m open to suggestions.”
She eased the car into the gravel lot and parked in a spot right outside the door. The only sign that they weren’t alone was a dusty Ford Fusion with a parade of Grateful Dead bears on it a few spaces over. He looked around at the impenetrable tree line and thought back to a true-crime documentary he’d watched once where marijuana farmers living in remote locations had these huge stockpiles of weapons to protect their crop. And possibly to hunt Sasquatch.
Glancing at Rachel’s stomach, he pictured telling their child the world was a great, sensible place to live and to just ignore him as he researched options for them to relocate to Mars.
“Maybe I should go in with you,” Will said. He wasn’t crazy about her going alone, and that was a good mask to get him out of the car and away from the existential dread he experienced every time he remembered one of those marijuana farmers had been elected to Congress.
Seriously. Humans. What?
“Nah, I’ll just be a minute,” Rachel said as she unbuckled. “Besides, any place whose logo is the queen of hearts doing a bong rip has too much whimsy to be scary.”
She left him the keys, and he leaned over to roll down her window before doing the same with his. The weather since they’d left Chicago had continued to be on the cool side for summer, especially now that they were as far north as they were, but it still wouldn’t take long for the late-afternoon sun to make a closed-up car feel stuffy. Without cell service to distract him, he took a deep breath and listened to the sounds of the birds and tried to appreciate the view around him. They were inland enough that you couldn’t see Lake Michigan, but it was a beautiful landscape nonetheless. No wonder the queen looked so relaxed.
Well, that, and the weed.
Will found himself staring at the sign. He wouldn’t have called it a trigger because trigger implied trauma, and trauma was something horrible and gutting. It was just that word. Queen. It had this ability to take him back to one of the more indelible moments of his childhood, which was kind of a weird thing to be true for a kid from the States who grew up with little to no awareness of the royal family.
It was a Wednesday night near the end of second grade, and his dad had surprised him by telling him they were going to play hooky the next day so he could take Will to his first Cincinnati Reds baseball game.
It would be just the two of them. It was never just the two of them. Will had hardly slept that night because he’d been so excited.
They’d left first thing Thursday morning, and when they got to Cincinnati, his dad had announced, “Welcome to the Queen City!”
“Why do they call it that?” Will had asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think it’s for the queen of England?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why do they give cities nicknames anyway?”
“God, I don’t know, okay?” his dad had said, starting to lose his patience, his voice sounding like it had that night at the restaurant when they couldn’t sit in the bar. Even at eight years old, Will had been aware he’d been peppering him for the entire drive.
His cheeks had reddened. “Sorry, Dad.”
“It’s okay. Just, do you always have to ask so many damn questions? It’s obnoxious.”
Will had resolved then and there to not ask another question for the rest of the day. And he hadn’t. They’d watched the game, they’d eaten hot dogs, his dad had taught him how to keep score. They’d laughed together and cheered together and even booed together at a particularly terrible strike call. When they’d gotten home late that night, Will fast asleep in his booster seat, his dad had carried him to bed. It was the best day of Will’s young life.
Two weeks later, his dad was gone for good.
When that happened, Will’s mind had gone straight back to their day at the ballpark, the one and only extended father-son time they had ever spent together. Everything had gone so great. They’d had so much fun. Except for when he’d asked his dad why they called Cincinnati the Queen City. To an eight-year-old Will, the conclusion was inescapable: his dad had left because he’d asked too many questions. Because he was obnoxious.
On the verge of becoming a father himself, Will didn’t still believe that, of course. Not literally, anyway. Because deep down, he did still feel like he was what had driven his dad away, and that it had happened when he’d least expected things to go wrong. He knew he carried that with him. He knew it represented something horrible and gutting. He’d just never thought of it as trauma.
“Well, that was a delight,” Rachel said, getting back into the car.
“You sound sincere, in which case their restroom exceeded all my expectations.”
“Okay, so, confession.” She turned in the driver’s seat to face him, and it was then that he noticed she was holding a small brown paper bag. “I didn’t actually need to go to the bathroom. I stopped to buy edibles.”
“Can you take those when you’re pregnant?”
“No. Well, I don’t think so. Who knows. But they’re not for me. They’re for you.”