T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“Not even Jaroslavl?”

“Well, I don't know. Is that the place with twenty million people and Bergdorf's and Macy's and Tiffany's and the Diamond District?”

She was grinning. She shook her head. “I don't think so.”

“Grand Central. The Empire State Building? Le Cirque and Babbo and the Oyster Bar?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head till her hair swung free, side to side, “no, I don't think so.”

He loved this kind of banter, loved to see her like this, all the shrewd compacted energy of her wired to the moment, smiling, loose-limbed, beautiful. And content. Content, for once. He felt his cock stir. He wanted her in bed.

“Tell me about Bergdorf's,” she said.

The Mercedes hummed, the sun painted the highway before him on into the distance. He was aware of Bob Marley, faintly delineating his rage under the sweet fractured musicality of her voice as she shifted from one subject to the next, from Manhattan to drainage problems with the basements of old houses to the cat she wanted to get-a Bengal cat; had he ever heard of the breed? Just four generations out of the wild. A beautiful animal. Exquisite. And maybe she'd get two of them, a male and female, to breed them, and she'd send a kitten to Kaylee and maybe one to her brother in Toronto. FedEx. Did they FedEx live animals?

He felt the pulse of the music, nodded, touched her, kept his eyes on the road. And before he knew it they hit the turnoff for Tahoe.

He didn't realize Madison was awake until he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the etiolated little kernel of her face centered there. She was sitting up, perched on the edge of the seat, straining the limits of the seat belt-which he'd insisted on fastening while she was asleep. There was a red crease on one side of her face and her hair looked like something washed up out of the sea. For the moment she was recalibrating, wearing that dazed and disoriented look of children everywhere when they climb up out of the caverns of sleep, but he knew that it was just a matter of time before the whining started in. He was no child psychologist and he couldn't begin to imagine what it must have been like with the last jerk Natalia was attached to, but the kid seemed excessively needy, a complainer, a whiner. Not at all like Sukie. Sukie was a stalwart. Even as a baby she settled into herself, slept through the night, ate when she was fed and gurgled at the mobile over the crib for hours at a time. She walked early, talked early, knew how to entertain herself, and right from the start seemed to understand that adults sometimes needed a few minutes of peace in their lives. But not Madison. She wanted and wanted and wanted. Just like her mother.

Maybe ten seconds passed before she started in. “Mommy, I have to pee,” she announced, her voice reduced to its doleful essence. Of course she had to pee. He understood that, he was no monster, but he'd been hoping to make it as far as Rancho Cordova, to the hotel there, for lunch, and once he got going he didn't like to stop. And once they stopped she'd be hungry-and, perversely, and just this once, not for éclairs, because they were warm now and mushy-and they'd wind up eating some third-rate roadside crap and he could forget about the filet he'd had on his mind for the past half hour. He cranked the music a notch and watched the road as Natalia swung round in the seat.

“Can you hold it, honey?”

“No.”

“Dana-I mean “Bridger”-got you some” nice éclairs. You want an éclair?"

“I have to pee.”

He was staring straight ahead, absorbing Marley, but he could feel her turning her face to him. “We must stop. Next exit.”

Softly, because he didn't want to spoil the mood, he let out a curse.

“I know,” she said, “but what can we do-wet her pants?”

“Mom-“my”!”

He said nothing, but already he was flipping the turn signal, looking for the next exit, even as Natalia added, “And she will need to eat something.” To Madison: “You want eggs, honey? Scrambled eggs and sausage, your favorite? With ketchup? All the ketchup you want?”

There was no answer, no answer was immediately forthcoming, but the whining struck a new note of urgency and he gave it up, merging smoothly with the line of cars pulling off the highway and into the lot of Johnny Lee's Family Restaurant, Open 24 Hours. “Hey, Mister Cop / Ain't got no birth cerfiticate on me now.”

“So,” Natalia said, leaning into him with the sway of the car, her voice rich with satisfaction, as it always was when he did what she wanted him to, “we must forbear your filet mignon in Rancho Cordova-”

“Forgo.”

“Right, forgo. And instead we dine at the family restaurant. How is it you say? No big thing, yes?”

He took the exit ramp maybe a hair too fast and something-a toy-skittered across the dash, struck the window and caromed to the floor at his feet. He gave her a look-he was irritated, despite himself, but he wasn't going to show it. “No big thing,” he said, and he even managed a smile.

It was worse than he'd expected, one of those hokey theme places (wagon wheels on the wall, sepia photographs of prospectors and the hind ends of their mules, waitresses in cowgirl hats and outfits that could have been lifted out of the Dale Evans Museum). Natalia took the kid straight to the restroom while he put in their name with the hostess and then they had to wait fifteen minutes in line with an assortment of copper-haired old ladies and clowns with bolo ties and checked shirts while Madison squirmed and jerked at her mother's hand and fell to the floor and refused to get up because she was hungry, the non-stop chant of “When, Mommy, when are we going to get a table?” rising up out of the forest of old people's legs like the squall of some misplaced sylvan thing that was dying or about to be killed. The buoyancy he'd felt earlier, the high that was compounded in equal parts of relief at getting out of Shelter Bay Village before things went disastrously and irreparably wrong and the anticipation of kicking loose on the road, was gone now. Breakfast on the road was always the weakest link in the culinary chain, a kind of deprivation of the senses that reduced every possibility to a variant on eggs/sausage links/silver-dollar pancakes and maple-colored Karo syrup. It bored him. Made him angry. Even in a decent hotel, where you could get quiche, eggs Benedict, a crab-and-feta omelet, fresh-squeezed orange juice, the meal was still a bore. But this-he looked round him with a sudden cymbal-clang of hate-this was the worst.

“Martin?” the hostess called out, and the line stirred, heads swiveling round, feet shuffling impatiently, and for a moment he didn't realize she was summoning him till Natalia nudged him and he raised his hand like a third grader in the back of the classroom. By the time they were sliding into the booth with its butt-warmed benches and the red Formica tabletop strewn with the refuse of the previous party, he was feeling murderous.

“I want a sundae,” Madison announced, her face composed, eyes wide and unblinking and perfectly serious. “Like that girl.” She pointed to the next booth over, where a whole rat-pack of kids-six or seven of them-dug into various ice cream concoctions while their parents, two interchangeable couples with porcine faces and a lack of style that was nothing short of brutal, roared over their coffee and grease-spattered plates as if they'd been drunk for days.

“No sundae,” Natalia said automatically. “Eggs.”

Madison repeated her demand, her voice pinched higher.

“Shut it,” he hissed, leaning into the table, because you could only take so much shit in this life, one dried and cubed block of it stacked atop another till the whole thing came tumbling down, and he'd been under some pressure lately, he realized that. “And because he realized it, he was able to restrain himself from reaching out for her boneless little wrist and giving it the kind of squeeze that would have opened up a whole new world for her. But he didn't have to get physical-one look, the look he'd laid on Stuart Yan on the courthouse steps-was enough to silence her. It was a look he'd practiced, the don't-fuck-with-me look he'd worn for eleven and a half months at Greenhaven. ”You'll eat what you get."