Chapter 33
LIFE’S GONNA DETOUR
Daphne
Even with the perpetual crimp in my neck and shoulder from how I’ve slept the past three nights, I can’t stop smiling as we hit the road again, this time with me in the driver’s seat and Angelina Juliana Priestly, the twenty-five-pound brass polar bear, perched behind us in the middle of the back seat, strapped in atop a box to give her a clear view of the road.
We’re almost to the edge of town—so maybe three or four blocks down—when I stop again.
“Ten hours today, Daphne,” Oliver says.
He doesn’t sound exasperated or irritated though.
It’s odd.
Not the part where he’d tell me we have a schedule, but the part where he’s very patient about it.
And while I appreciate the patience, the man has something to learn here. “The fourteenth rule of road trips is that you always stop for little kids doing a lemonade stand.”
“Fourteenth? How many road trip rules are there?”
“As many as you want there to be.”
“Fuck rules,” he mutters.
He’s the last person on earth I ever would’ve expected to say something so simple and yet so very, very right, and it has me smiling even bigger as I climb out of the car, reaching across myself to rub absently at my neck and shoulder.
I have about seven hundred dollars stuffed in my bra, so even if—
Nope, Oliver’s getting out too.
There are two kids running the lemonade stand. The boy’s wearing the same grumpypants expression Oliver sported the first few days of our trip, and the girl is a lot younger, maybe six or seven, with a big gap where her front two teeth should be.
“Y’all want some lemonade and cookies?” she asks in a soft Southern accent.
“Heck, yeah,” I say. “How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“Each?”
She grins wider. “Yep!”
“No one’s gonna pay that much for lemonade and Oreos, Tilda,” her brother grumbles.
“Shut your big ol’ mouth, Sammy,” she replies. “Mama says you have to be nice.”
“Not nice to say shut your big ol’ mouth,” the preteen says.
“Two lemonades and four Oreos, please,” Oliver interrupts.
Tilda snorts an I told you so snort at her brother, who rolls his eyes.
I can’t stop smiling.
Donuts.
Angelina Juliana Priestly the polar bear.
And highway robbery lemonade and cookies, where my thus far extremely grumpy companion is totally stuffing five or six hundred-dollar bills into the payment cup.
Best. Day. Ever.
Maybe not the best day, but all things considered, it’s a very fine day.
“You trying to give us fake money?” the preteen says to Oliver.
“Are you for fuc—” He catches himself and clears his throat.
“We won a scratch-off lottery ticket and decided to take a road trip with the winnings and feel like rich people,” I tell Sammy as I take my lemonade from Tilda. “It’s fun. But don’t waste your money on lottery tickets. It’s much more reliable to get a real job and be responsible.”
“I’m fixin’ to put my money in my college fund,” Tilda announces.
“What do you want to go to college for?” I ask her.
“I’mma be a famous actor or a vetrineenian or a baker.”
“It’s veterinarian, Tilda,” Sammy mutters.
“You’re a fart face,” she replies.
“This lemonade is delicious,” I interrupt. “I hope it makes you a ton of money for your college fund.”
Oliver sips his lemonade, almost chokes, and then gives her the most forced smile I’ve ever seen. “So good,” he lies.
I haven’t tasted mine yet.
Neither kid notices that though.
Tilda hands me four Oreos. “Don’t share with him,” she whispers to me. “He makes weird faces, and weird faces don’t deserve cookies.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I whisper back. “Gotta run. We’re hoping to hit Dollywood tonight.”
Are we? I have no idea. I think we’re headed away from the Dollywood area, but who knows? I haven’t figured out where Oliver’s going yet.
“Oh my god, I love Dolly!” Tilda yells.
“Same, kiddo.”
Sammy rolls his eyes again.
Oliver gives me a look.
I grin at everyone, and then I grin wider at the trees and the grass and the sky and the flowers lining the walk to the small little house behind them because it’s quaint and perfect and I’m happy today.
In this moment.
Who knows what the next will bring, since I’m now headed back to the car.
“Do not drink that,” Oliver mutters to me as he buckles into the passenger seat again. “I think they got into their parents’ whiskey cabinet. And it’s not good whiskey.”
“Best road trip ever.”
“Probably shouldn’t eat the cookies either.”
I roll the window down as we leave town. The wind overpowers the radio so I can’t hear the symphonic pop, but it’s so freaking pretty today.
A little warm, but we won’t die.
Oliver makes me pull over in the next little town for us to dump the lemonade and stale Oreos in a trash can, and then we’re back on the road.
After a while, I roll my window back up. My hair’s probably imitating a cartoon villain’s favorite style, and the sugar high from breakfast is fading.
“So where are you dumping me tonight?” I ask Oliver. Might as well address it and get it over with.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him watch me for what feels like a moderate eternity. “Your friend taught you to cook?” he finally says.
“I can make a phenomenal mac ’n’ cheese out of a box and semi-homemade spaghetti, but the grill is where I truly excel. Well, the grill and oatmeal. I make a mean oatmeal.”
“You make…a mean…oatmeal.”
“Yes.”
“The world’s most boring food?”
“Don’t mock the world’s most versatile food.”
He’s totally mocking oatmeal. And me.
And honestly, I don’t know if it’s the world’s most versatile food. Bea sometimes puts it in cookies, and you can add practically anything to oatmeal to ramp up the flavor profile.
I shrug. “I’d show you, but despite being the world’s most versatile food, oatmeal doesn’t work for dinner, and our three days are up today, so…”
He sighs.
I know that sigh.
It’s the universal sigh of she’s going to make me ask her to stay longer.
If I were by myself, I’d do a happy butt wiggle.
But I restrain it while he grinds out the words. “I could use a little more help adjusting to the real world.”
“Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but you can learn to cook from the internet.”
“Cooking isn’t everything I need to figure out.”
“You did pretty good back there at the lemonade stand.”
“Every last person I’ve handed a hundred-dollar bill has treated me like it’s fake.”
“Not every last person.”
“I’m going to get arrested for suspicion of counterfeiting before I—before I’m done with what I need to do.”
Dammit.
He almost spilled the beans. Almost clued me in on what he’s doing.
But he caught himself.
“You know I’m using vacation time to be here?” I say.
“I can pay you for your—”
“I don’t want your money. For me. I still want what we agreed on earlier, but I don’t want it for me.”
“What do you want it for?”
“You are not yet inside that circle of trust.”
“How do I get there?”
“You tell me the truth—the whole, real truth—about what you’re doing on this trip.”
I swear I can hear him grinding his teeth over the violins and cellos and flutes on the radio.
“You can’t let me go because you still don’t trust me to not tell anyone I was with you and what car you’re driving and that there’s clearly something wrong,” I say. “If not wrong, then not normal. We both know it. So if you want me to continue to ride along with you, then you owe me the truth.”
“Says the woman who won’t tell me what she wants some number under a million for.”
“I’ll survive if you bail on our agreement, if only out of spite to prove that I don’t need it. I’ve thrived making a point the past four years. I can keep doing it. But also, I get to keep Angelina Juliana Priestly. No negotiating.”
“You get to keep who?”
“Angelina Juliana Priestly. The polar bear. Our road trip mascot.”
“You named the statue.”
“I named your car too. We’ve been riding in Mabel. Fits her, don’t you think?”
Oliver of yesterday would’ve snarled something at me.
This Oliver, however, simply sighs softly.
This trip has clearly been good for him.
Even with me along.
I brake as I spot a line of cars stopped ahead of me and realize I’m rubbing at my neck again.
“Why are they stopped?” Oliver asks. “We’ve hardly seen any traffic today.”
“Probably road construction. It’s pretty miraculous that we haven’t hit any yet. Peak road construction season.”
“Can’t you go around them?”
I do my best to not laugh at him.
I really, really do.
But honestly—go around them? Who wouldn’t chuckle a little at that? “Sure, Mr. Big Shot CEO. I’ll let them know you’re important so we can go around everyone else waiting in line.”
There it is.
The deep nasal inhale that says I’ve annoyed him now.
Which is probably better anyway.
There’s this line where I can be friends with Oliver, but I can’t find it.
I either hate him with everything inside me to the point that I start fantasizing about suffocating him with a pillow filled with all of the things about him that annoy me, or I can’t stop thinking about how good his ass looks in his jeans and how amazing he smells when he’s up close and what he must’ve done to hone all of his muscles for the past few years and how much I wouldn’t mind being the next person to bite his sharp hips.
There’s no we can be friends in between.
So hating him is basically my only option.
I owe my sister that much.
And myself, honestly. I don’t need anything else from my past sneaking back into my life.
“I meant there has to be a side road we can take,” he grumbles. “A detour around whatever this is.”
I poke at the GPS in the dash, moving the map, but don’t see any alternate options in the immediate vicinity. “Nothing close.”
“How long will we be stuck?”
“No telling. It’s usually no more than a few minutes in rural areas like this.”
Now he glances at his watch.
“Something big waiting tonight?” I ask him.
“I have a schedule.”
“For…?”
Silence.
Right.
I get to stay to teach him to cook—or at least spot which videos and recipes on the internet are likely to kill you and which ones might taste good—but he doesn’t trust me enough to know how long he’s on this trip.
“Does anyone in your life know what you’re doing?” I ask.
More silence.
I’m about to reach for the radio volume when he replies.
“One person.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Best friend.”
“They couldn’t go on a trip with you?”
I’m not surprised when he doesn’t answer.
Or when his knee starts bouncing.
He notices as well immediately.
I can tell because he clamps a hand down on his own leg to stop it.
The cars inch along.
I rub my shoulder a little more.
“If you plugged in the map app on your phone instead, we’d get better traffic updates.” I tap the screen in the dash. “This is out of date, or it would be showing traffic. A phone map app would tell us how long we’ll be stuck here. Or if there’s an alternate route without traffic.”
I don’t look at him, but I can feel him staring at me.
Because it was stupid of me to explain map apps to him?
After our experience at that first gas station, it’s a legitimate thing to wonder.
Somehow, he’s far more competent and in charge than he was while he was dating and engaged to Margot, but also a hot mess in several parts of his life.
Emphasis on mess.
Clearly.
Because I’m ignoring all of the hot parts except the part that goes in hot mess.
“I know how map apps work,” he mutters.
I pull my phone out of my bra, flip it open, and touch my favorite map app, then hand it to him. “Here. Put the address in here.”
He does it from memory.
From memory.
He’s clearly put a lot of time into thinking about this trip.
But some of the little details in his preparation are lacking, and that has me wondering how much is because of the ways his family might have sheltered him, or how much stress he was under at work that his brain couldn’t reach all the way to filling in some of the blanks on how road trips work.
Or if any of it has to do with that accident that had him not driving himself, even on the weekend or at vacation houses, basically for his entire adult existence.
The mechanical Australian dude’s voice that I set as my default for my map app announces that we’ll be in traffic for the next fifty minutes.
“Did he say fifty? Five zero? Or fifteen?” Oliver says.
“Five zero,” I confirm.
We inch along a little more, then stop.
I make the hand it over gesture, and he gives me back my phone. Three taps later, I’m wincing. “We can detour, but the detour road isn’t for another fifteen minutes, and it adds an hour to the trip.”
“How the fuck is that even possible?”
I don’t think he’s expecting an answer, but I give him one anyway. “Rural areas, my dude. There are fewer roads.”
He stares at me.
Then at my phone.
And then Oliver Cumberland, the man I would’ve called the most buttoned-up man on the entire planet, huffs, slides his shoes off, and reaches into the back seat for the last bag of Flaming Finger Lickies.