Chapter Nine
Bleary-eyed and still half asleep, Nora made her way out to the Lincoln.
She popped the trunk, tossed her overnight bag inside with a thud, and slid her backpack across the wide leather front seat.
She couldn’t believe she had to spend another entire day in this car with her mother.
Right now, Kelley and the girls were probably lying out and getting a suntan, gossiping about the hot boys at the lake.
A few rogue popcorn kernels from the night before clung to the upholstery. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, along with her jealousy, before climbing in, letting the door slam shut behind her.
The motel’s breakfast had been delicious. She’d opted for a stack of hotcakes doused in syrup, and her mother had a meager meal of toast and a poached egg.
A few miles down the road, her mom pulled into a gas station—one of those sun-bleached, two-pump places with a rusted Coke machine out front and oil-stained concrete beneath the tires.
“I’m going to try the pay phone here.” Leanne rolled down the window to signal the attendant. “The one back at the motel was occupied.”
“Occupied?”
Her mom hadn’t mentioned anything about that last night.
“Dad’s going to be worried.” Nora glanced at the station’s clock tower, its hands frozen at 8:32. Broken. Of course. “We were supposed to call him.”
Leanne nodded. “I’ll call him now. There was a drunk guy passed out in the booth last night. I didn’t feel like dragging him out. He was…not exactly polite.”
“What did he say?”
“It’s not what he said. It’s what he did. The middle finger.” Her mother’s tone was full of indignation, as if she’d never been flipped the bird before.
Nora snorted, unable to help herself. “Classic.”
Leanne waved to the young attendant, who’d just appeared wiping greasy fingers on his smudged jumpsuit. “Fill it up, please.”
Then her mother crossed the lot toward the phone booth, her skirt fluttering slightly in the breeze, perfectly manicured fingers steadying the purse on her shoulder.
Nora watched her enter the booth, the glass door squeaking closed behind her.
Then she twisted around in her seat and rummaged through her backpack for her copy of The Godfather.
They’d only made it through less than an eighth of the book on yesterday’s drive before her eyes started to cross, and the words blurred into one long, masculine monologue of power and blood.
But the one line she couldn’t forget was about Sonny’s giant… penis.
Was it possible for a penis to be that big? She and Kelley had spent a considerable time discussing that question. What she wouldn’t give right now to call Kelley from the pay phone and tell her that road trips weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
Nora unearthed the book and settled into the leather seat again. The gas station attendant leaned against the open window on the driver’s side.
“Where you two headed?” he asked, chewing on a toothpick.
“California,” Nora replied, not really in the mood to elaborate.
She was too busy trying to find her place in The Godfather. At this point, the pages were a minefield of creases—evidence of all the times she’d read it, reread it, and folded down corners like breadcrumbs. Figuring out which turned-down page was the one she needed at the moment was tricky.
Some literary purists considered dog-earing a cardinal sin, but Nora didn’t care. Preserving books wasn’t why she read them. She read them to live inside the pages, no matter how battered.
Having found the page, Nora glanced toward the pay phone. Her mother was still inside, one hand pressed to her temple and a pinched look on her face that was visible even from this distance.
Nora sighed.
She spent a lot of time not looking at her parents.
Not really. Their marriage had always felt like background noise, but the background noise to a suspense movie, not Mayberry.
Nora experienced their relationship via tension humming through the walls, snatches of clipped conversations, and the way her mother poured wine increasingly often after dinner.
Sometimes, Nora wished she had a sibling—someone to roll her eyes with across the room or to whom she could say, Did you hear that too?
But she didn’t.
And it wasn’t like she would tell her friends that her parents’ marriage seemed less than happy. That was “family business.”
The sharp crack of the pay phone receiver slamming into its cradle across the parking lot made her jump. Leanne shoved the door closed and marched toward the Lincoln, her mouth set in a firm line as though she were late for a meeting that she didn’t want to attend.
Nora sat up a little straighter. “How’s Dad?” she asked, worried she was about to hear something she didn’t want to know.
Leanne pulled open the door and exhaled loudly. “Couldn’t get the phone to work. Every time I picked it up, the operator would ask, ‘How can I direct your call?’ But no matter what I said, she kept repeating herself like my end was muted.”
She slid into the driver’s seat, shaking her head, her lips pressed into the thin line. “I even tried unscrewing the mouthpiece. Nothing. Like it was jammed.”
“So…you didn’t talk to him?” Nora tried to keep the irritation out of her voice, but it felt like her mother wasn’t trying hard enough. First the guy last night, and now the phone not working?
Leanne shook her head, and for a moment there was a sheer look of panic on her face that had Nora’s heart skipping a beat. “I’ll try later—maybe when we stop to eat at a diner.”
Nora nodded, keeping her opinion to herself.
The gas station attendant finished filling up the car. “All done, ma’am.” He gave her the total, and Leanne handed him some folded bills from her purse.
“You didn’t happen to see an older woman drive through here a few days ago? She would have had a hairless dog with her.”
The gas station attendant laughed, then stopped when he stared at Leanne’s serious expression. “No, ma’am. So sorry. Never heard of a hairless dog…” he trailed off as he walked away counting the bills.
Leanne’s lip quivered, but she sucked in a breath and tucked a loose tendril of hair behind her ear.
“I’m hoping these pay phone mishaps are not a trend.
Your father’s going to be worried sick,” she said as she turned the key in the ignition and the engine came back to life.
“And if I don’t hear something soon about your grandmother… ”
Nora nodded, her fingers sliding over the book still on her lap. “We’re going to find Grandma. No news is good news, remember? And Dad has our itinerary. If he’s worried, maybe he’ll leave a message at our next hotel.” She shrugged.
“Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.” Leanne adjusted the rearview mirror, smoothed a hand over her hair gone slightly wild from the wind, and then pulled the car back onto the road.
She tapped The Godfather on the seat beside Nora as they merged, joltingly, back onto the highway, the morning sun flaring through the windshield. Nora reached for her sunglasses she’d tossed onto the dash before they were crushed forever under someone else’s wheels.
“Want me to drive?”
Her mother shook her head. “Shall we continue with the Mafia underworld? Maybe hearing about crime will stop me from committing one.”
Nora laughed, surprising herself. “That frustrated, huh?”
“Nothing a little crime fiction can’t fix.”
Nora began to read, falling back into the story’s cadence—Don Corleone, criminal justice, loyalty, and blood.
She could feel her mother watching her out of the corner of her eye.
Normally she’d roll her eyes and ask her mother what she was staring at, but this time, she wasn’t as irritated as she’d expected to be. That was a real shock.
She realized in a flash of insight that, though they’d only been on the road for about twenty-four hours, something felt…
different. Not entirely comfortable, not yet.
And she was still irritated she was missing out on her summer with her friends.
But she’d expected more arguing. Instead, it felt easier.
Like the edges between them had started to soften.
She stopped reading, staring out the window at a row of farmland rushing by. And suddenly, a pang hit her in the chest—sharp and unexpected.
In a few months, she wouldn’t be riding in a car with her mother. She’d be in a dorm room. Eating in a dining hall. Figuring out where to do her laundry and how to navigate a campus that still wasn’t quite sure what to do with its first class of female undergrads.
For the last eighteen years, it had mostly been the two of them. Sure, she’d gone to sleepovers, had weekends away, and a whole week at the lake after graduation. But she’d always come home again. Even when she was annoyed with her mother’s existence.
She closed the book and set it in her lap.
“Mom,” she said softly, “can I ask you something?”
Leanne glanced at her, hands at three and nine o’clock on the wheel. There was a flicker of concern at the corners of her eyes. “Of course.”
Nora hesitated. “Did you know it was the last time you were going home? When you left?”
Leanne let out a small laugh, taken aback by the question. “I just went home a few days ago.”
“No, I mean—” Nora looked out the window again, trying to find the right words. “I mean when you left home. To live somewhere else. Did you know it was the last time? That you might visit but you wouldn’t be living there anymore?”
Leanne was quiet. She bit her lip, then nodded slowly. “Yes. I think I did. I’d known for a while. That it was time.”
She glanced sideways at Nora. “Are you…?”
But she didn’t finish the question.
Nora shrugged, her voice quieter now as she voiced what had been on her mind for weeks. “Just thinking I might want to come home before Thanksgiving. For a weekend or something.”
Leanne’s hand tightened slightly on the wheel, making Nora’s stomach imitate the movement.
“You can come home anytime you want, Nora,” she said. Her voice was steady but soft, and instantly Nora’s muscles relaxed.
Leanne’s voice held the weight of her earnest expression. “Our house is your house. Always.”
Nora nodded, looking back down at the book in her lap. But she didn’t open it. She was suddenly filled with emotion. No matter how much they’d butted heads the last year, her mother still wanted her to come home.
She just sat with her mother’s words.
Absorbing them along with the sunlight, the silence, and the soft vibrations of the engine.
She wanted to remember the feeling of her mother beside her, just driving.