Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“Y’all need to be nice to each other,” our mother said.

“We’re all we’ve got,” Elise said.

Whenever we fought, our mother reminded us that one day they’d be dead and it would just be the two of us. It made me wish they’d had more children.

Our father came back and handed me a key. We took turns using the bathroom, which was nicer than I’d expected. There was even a candle on the toilet.

Inside the store, I selected a package of strawberry coconut cakes. I liked them because they were so pink and round. I took them up to the counter where Elise and my mother were waiting with an assortment of snacks and drinks.

“You live out here all by yourself?” Elise asked the guy behind the counter. He was clean and neat, normal-seeming. Our mother took out her wallet and moved my sister aside.

“Uh-huh,” the man said.

“What do you do out here?” she asked.

“Work, hunt, fish,” he said without looking at her.

“Do you hunt turkey?” she asked. He nodded. “Quail?” He nodded. “Dove?” He nodded. “Pigeon?”

“No pigeon,” he said, scrunching up his face. He handed our mother the bag and walked to the back of the store.

“Where’s your shirt?” our father asked Elise when we were back in the car.

“It smelled bad,” she said.

“Your mother just washed them.”

“That was the day before and it’s like a hundred and eight degrees,” she said, adding that cleanliness was next to Godliness.

“Well, enjoy your day off,” he said, reminding her that he had paid twenty dollars for them.

“Each,” I said, digging my cakes out of the bag. I opened the plastic, slid the tray out.

“Let’s talk,” Elise said.

“Oh, now you want to talk. I’m sorry. I’m busy.”

“You’re not busy.”

“I don’t like to talk about the stuff you like to talk about.”

“What do I like to talk about?”

“Politics and stuff.”

“I wasn’t going to talk about politics,” she said. “Forget it.” She put her earbuds in. I looked at my cakes and thought of Gabe. Would he like me more if I was skinnier? I wanted him to touch me and feel bones beneath my skin. Boys liked it when you were starving, like you had starved yourself for them.

Our father hit something and a tire blew—flopping and bumping as he directed the car onto the shoulder. We got out and walked around it, the front passenger’s side tire nearly gone. Our mother took the manual out of the glove box and handed it to our father. Then she went to the trunk and took bottles of water out of the cooler, passed them around. I had to pee but I twisted off a cap and took a drink.

“Do we have Triple A?” Elise asked.

“It expired two months ago,” our mother said, placing the back of her hand on her forehead like she was taking her temperature.

“We don’t need Triple A,” our father said. He shielded his eyes and looked into the distance. Then he went to the trunk and started pulling things out, laying them on the pavement one by one like he had never seen any of it before. “Come on over here and help me,” he said.

“I have to use the bathroom,” I said.

“You have the worst bladder,” Elise said. “You have to pee every hour.”

“I drink a lot of liquids.”

“Go find a tree,” my mother said. In the sun, I could see just how thin her hair had gotten, how much of her scalp shone through.

“Worst. Bladder. Ever,” Elise said.

I looked around—there weren’t any trees—and then I realized that this was why the sky was so much bigger in Texas. In Alabama, pine trees lined the roads, skinny sickly pines pressed close together.

The few scrub bushes were pretty far away. I started walking toward them. The grass grew taller and taller and I thought about snakes, coiled and hissing, ready to strike. I wondered whether I could make bad stuff happen by imagining it. I knew at any moment I’d see a snake and it would bite me and I’d yell really loud and everyone would come running. It would be poisonous, of course, and they’d tell me I was going to be fine, that help was on its way, and I’d make them promise a million times and I’d believe them and then I’d die before I knew what was happening.

I stopped short of the bushes and squatted. Nothing lasts forever, I thought. But I’m here now. I am here right now and I am peeing in a field. I could have peed for longer but I jiggled and pulled up my shorts and began walking back, lifting my feet high and continuing the search for snakes.

“I have to go, too,” Elise said, “but I’m gonna hold it.”

I sat next to her on the side of the road and watched her tie her shirt into a knot so her stomach showed. My father didn’t ask me to help him. He was still arranging his tools on the pavement and had already managed to rip his pants even though he hadn’t done anything. I started thinking about his faults, which were many, and which he seemed totally unaware of. I wondered what my faults were, what people thought they were.

“Aren’t you getting gravel in your hands?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “You just worry about yourself.”

“Fine, be a bitch.”

“They’re slowing down,” Elise said, as a white pickup truck pulled onto the shoulder. “And they’re stopping. Now they’re getting out.”

I looked around—there were no other cars in sight.

Three men got out of the truck, an older man and two younger ones. The older man smiled the kind of smile that’s meant to make you feel comfortable, so it doesn’t. He was tall and clean-shaven, wearing jeans and cowboy boots. I was afraid but reminded myself that I’d be afraid of any men that pulled over to help us, so my fear wasn’t an indicator of anything. My fear was all out of whack because I was always afraid. My mother said I’d been an easy child: a quick delivery, I’d practically fallen out. I’d slept well and held out my arms to strangers, had begun to potty train myself at eleven months. I didn’t remember this easy child. Surely this was my truest self, this person I had been in the beginning.

“Y’all got some car trouble?” the older man asked. His belt buckle was a real, actual snake’s head. I elbowed Elise and she untied her shirt.

“It’s a snake,” I said.

“What is?”

“His belt buckle.”

“We had a blowout,” our father said, walking toward them with his hand outstretched.

“No problem,” the man said. “We got it.”

Our father protested mildly before thanking them and moving off to the side. He stood next to our mother and we were lined up like the characters in a Flannery O’Connor story I’d read in school. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” That was the only line I remembered. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” I didn’t know what it was about that sentence that stood out to me, why I remembered it.

As the men worked, Elise and I shared earbuds, listening to the same songs as beads of sweat welled up from improbable places on my body. Sweat ran down my sides, trickled down my legs and arms.

“I like this,” I said. “Who is it?”

“Katy Perry. You don’t know who Katy Perry is?”

“Yeah, I know her.”

“Name another song,” she said, staring at one of the younger guys. She scratched her shoulder and touched her hair, trying to get his attention.

The older man let out a hacking cough and I jumped, my heart speeding up; any unexpected noise could startle me. My mother said it was because I read Stephen King novels before bed. She always had simple explanations like this, which made it hard for me to consider her advice. My favorite was Duma Key . I also liked It and The Tommyknockers . The books frightened me but it didn’t make me not want to read them. This seemed to imply something defective in my character. It was like the other things I did to make my life harder—eating too much when I knew I’d get a stomachache, drinking water when I had to pee and there was nowhere to use the bathroom.