13. Thirteen
Sweat covers me like a second layer of skin, the first sign my body knows we are in a bad situation.
It doesn’t occur to me until this very moment we have only ever practiced driving the Avion on a flat island in Florida while much of the country was anything but. My ignorance of this has become perfectly clear as we barrel north on the highway toward New Mexico.
Over a fucking mountain.
Marin and I sit in the front seat, Finn napping in the back, when the engine starts to struggle.
A sign sayingEntering the Guadalupe Mountainsflashes by us as I grip the steering wheel for dear life and sweat drips into every crevice of my body.
Marin fidgets with the cassette deck in a way that makes my teeth grind.
“Shut it down, Marin!” I snap.
The music somehow makes it harder to see the road.
She rolls her eyes. “Yikes, Mom, take a chill pill.”
“Get your brother,” I demand.
I am literally pressing the gas pedal to the metal of the floor. We don’t gain any speed, but the arms on the dials stagger into the red zones.
Shit.
Shitshitshitshit.
Semi-trucks crawl by with lights flashing at reduced speeds while cars whiz by us. My anxiety ratchets up to a level I didn’t know possible in a mountain range I also didn’t know existed.
“Marin! Now!” I snap.
My hands start to shake around the steering wheel as all the blood slowly drains from my face.
Another eyeroll, then a flat call of, “Finn! Wake up. Penelope’s freaking out.”
We are about to drive off a cliff and die, but my teenage daughter can’t be bothered. I’d be angry if I weren’t terrified.
“Finn! We got a situation.” I shout. “Now!”
My now must relay that we are in some deep shit because Marin’s attitude drops in an instant.
She looks over at me, no doubt noticing my ramrod-straight spine and white knuckles.
“Okay, wait, what’s going on?” she asks as Finn crouches down behind her seat.
“Finn, we are in the mountains, and I don’t know what to do. We are barely moving, and the gauges are all… misfiring or something, I don’t know. And it’s hot as hell in here,” I stammer as I wipe my forehead. “Did Gabe tell us what to do? Or is there a button? Or…”
A semi buzzes by us, turning every muscle in my body to stone.
“Like, did he give us tips on how to not roll backward in the mountains or something?”
I try to ignore the cliff that’s inches from the passenger door.
He scoffs. “Mom, how would Uncle Gabe know how to drive in the mountains?”
Not helpful.
I take a shaky breath. “Okay, fine. Okay. Let’s just figure this out.”
The engine is loud, louder than I’ve heard it in the previous 2,000 miles. Loud enough to tell me we are not fine.
Far from it.
“This gauge says it’s hot, I guess. And do you hear how loud everything is?” I yell unintentionally.
On cue, the engine roars again like an angry lion, and the dry, jagged mountains mock me through every window like fangs.
His nose scrunches. “Maybe you should slow down?”
“Slow down?!” I snap as I grip my hands around the steering wheel. “I’m the slowest person on the road right now!”
“You should pull over. The gauge shows it’s hot. We could overheat. Marin, turn off the AC. We need to relieve some of the load on the engine.”
“Could we catch on fire?” Marin asks in a high-pitched voice as she fumbles with the dials of the AC.
“No fires. Finn, you’re right. They have pull-offs. I’ll take the next one.”
A sedan flies past us, and I hold my breath. In an act of divine intervention, a gravel pull-off appears.
I slow to a stop, and we pour out of the doors like wax from a lit candle.
Finn pops the hood calmly, aware I am clearly useless as I stand on the side of the road, sweating like a whore in church while my pulse pounds in my ears.
“Let’s just let it cool down and eat some lunch.”
He shrugs. Like this is no big deal. Like we didn’t just almost die.
“Lunch? Finn, we don’t even have cell service!” Marin holds her phone up high in the air. “What if we can’t get it fixed? We could be stranded out here forever.”
She’s the closest I’ve seen her to hysterical since we left.
“Relax, Mar, look at all these cars. Someone will help us. We just have to wait now for it to cool down,” he says, his words mangled from the mouthful of sandwich he’s already started chewing.
Thirty minutes later, with a cooled engine under the hood, we are back on the road, this time with Finn behind the wheel.
“No AC until we get through the mountains. Mom, you look like you went swimming.”
The turn signal ticks as he waits to pull out onto the highway, and he nods toward my sweat-soaked shirt.
“Turns out I don’t handle mountain driving well.” I laugh with relief as I roll my window down and let the warm air smack my face.
***
We spend the next four days making our way through southern New Mexico and into Arizona.
Our first night is spent outside of Carlsbad Caverns, where we watch the nightly exodus of the bats from the mouth of the cave. Hundreds of thousands of them pour out at dusk, silently flapping in unison like a black cloud into the desert around us. The park ranger who narrates the departure talks like a ventriloquist, barely moving his mouth, which is both a distraction and highlight of the evening.
“His mouth is creepier than the bats,” Finn whispers as the ranger drones on about something called white-nose disease.
I laugh.
There has been the slightest of shifts over our days on the road. Nothing happens overnight, of course, but as the minutes and miles tick by, the grief that has plagued me for so long lifts in degrees. It’s the kind of change someone would only notice if they knew where to look.
Closely.
By the time we make it to Arizona, I sleep without dread and laugh without guilt.
After we check Travis’ box of an O.K. Corral gunfight reenactment, Marin insists on having old-timey photos done, which we promptly hang on the fridge in the Avion. Finn dressed as a sheriff, Marin holding a shotgun, and me as my best western floozy are forever frozen in sepia tones.
Outside of Tucson, we stay in a nature preserve away from the lights of any city, with the huge saguaro cacti towering around us like giants.
Stoic and silent.
When the sun goes down behind them, it looks like the most iconic Western painting there ever was.
“They look like kind of lonely, don’t they?” Marin asks as we eat dinner that night.
“I guess if you lived in a desert for three hundred years, you’d see a lot of things come and go. I wouldn’t expect them to be anything but lonely.” I study the big weathered cactus next to the Avion. “If you live long enough, you’re bound to outlive a lot of what you love the most.”
I zip the ring on the chain around my neck as I look at the desert around us. It’s the kind of place that conjures sadness by simply just existing. Cracked earth, fiercely spiked cacti, and balls of dry branches scream the harsh truth that it’s a place of both survival and death.
A familiar reminder that the two always seem to go hand in hand.
***
“I bet Dad wouldn’t have put this on his list if he knew how awful it was going to be.”
We are somewhere north of Pheonix as Finn wipes a rag across a shallow cut on his shin.
My face puckers. He’s right. We’re panning for gold in some mostly dried-up creek bed, and it’s miserable. The sun is hot, the rocks are sharp, and the hour we’ve been out there has given us nothing.
“Do people ever find anything?” I ask the woman who calls herself a Gold Guide before I chug from my water bottle.
The sour woman’s voice is snippy, “Of course they do! You think I’m running a scam here?”
Her skinny body sits in a lawn chair under what I assume is the only tree in the state of Arizona and her beady eyes narrow.
“If gold was that easy to find, everyone would be rich!” she says, like I’m an idiot.
I just nod as she takes a drag from her cigarette and flips the page of her magazine.
It’s forty-five minutes later when Marin yells from somewhere up the creek.
She finds gold.
We leave that day with the smallest fraction of an ounce of gold flakes in a tiny plastic bag.
***
In bed that night, I finally respond to Ethan’s email. I don’t know why it’s taken so long—that’s a lie, I do. It’s taken so long because even though we are writing about work, there’s a personal undertone to how we talk that feels foreign. Wrong. Because he’s funny. Because he’s a man. Because he’s not Travis.
And yet, I write an email anyway.
Ethan,
There’s a lot to unpack here, but let me just say, more alarming than you letting your kids loose on alcohol, is you not knowing how to make a cocktail. When you own a restaurant.
I actually forwarded your email to American Restaurant magazine and I’m sure they will be writing a redaction for your piece based on your lack of qualifications.
My favorite drinks to make are the classics, and then I just barely tweak them to make them something special. Have you ever had a daiquiri? I’m sure just reading that you imagined something that’s frozen, slushy, and entirely too sweet. That’s not how the cocktail started. It originated in Cuba, actually, and the recipe is extremely basic and simple but so light and fresh. You should have one of your bartenders make one for you and tell me what you think.
What about you? What’s your favorite meal to cook? And do you have a simple version? I’m in a tiny kitchen situation at the moment, but I’d like to try it. Without the Maine ingredients, of course.
I pause, rereading, and realize I haven’t included a single thing about my dad’s request. I add:
Thanks again for all your help with ingredient sourcing. I’ve sent all the information to my dad, but knowing him, he’ll either have follow-up questions or completely abandon this idea.
Penelope