Mary Miller: The Last Days of California

“Think of all the things those have touched,” Elise said.

I thought about the pile of them on the motel bedspread, right after I’d seen the pregnancy test, and spit them into my hand. One pink line and you’re okay. Two pink lines and your life is over. My sister was pregnant. I’d forget and then I’d remember and be shocked all over again. Not only had she had sex, but she had gotten pregnant. Months from now, we could be sitting here with a baby between us, its little baby hands and baby feet, its baby mouth trying to latch itself onto our breasts.

Our parents didn’t know, of course. Our parents were oblivious, Elise said, and quite possibly stupid, but I didn’t agree. I thought our mother might be psychic.

Elise picked up the bag of snacks and flung it at me. I tied it in a knot and closed my eyes. I hadn’t been sleeping well again. I wasn’t a good sleeper, my mother had said once, and I liked the way it sounded—as if sleeping was a talent, or a skill I had yet to learn. I’d wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream or because I had to pee and lay there for hours thinking about things that didn’t bother me at all during the day. Other times, I forgot I was a bad sleeper, but I hadn’t forgotten since we’d left Montgomery. The secret to a lot of things was to forget, but I was always remembering.

“Welcome to Texas,” our mother said.

“The great state of Texas,” said our father.

Elise showed me a picture of an RV on her phone. It said HAVE YOU HEARD THE AWESOME NEWS? THE END OF THE WORLD IS ALMOST HERE! “Listen to this,” she said. “‘Greta Burrows, an obese, middle-aged woman who spent the morning leaning out the window shouting on a bullhorn, picked up some Visine and a box of Kleenex at the local Rite Aid.’ I bet she also picked up some Cheetos. And probably some MUNCHIES, too.”

“Which leg of the tour is that?” I asked.

“Florida. Greta’s the one that left the door to her house open—not unlocked, but wide open . And she won’t say how many kids she has or if she has a husband because the only thing that matters is warning people.”

“That’s hardcore.”

“I know, right?”

“I should get y’all a bullhorn,” our father said.

“I’d use a bullhorn,” Elise said. She tried to roll down her window, but it was on child-lock, so she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted into the front seat: “Repent or die! The sun’ll turn red and drip blood! Your neighbors will perish in grizzly accidents!”

“Elise!” our mother said.

“They won’t be accidents,” our father said, “oh no, they won’t be accidents at all.”

Our father pulled off into a combination Pilot/McDonald’s truck plaza. He put the car in park and sorted through the maps on the side of his door. In a field next to the gas station, an oil derrick pumped lazily.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Change of plans—I know there’s one in here somewhere. Here we go.” He handed the map to our mother and put his elbow on the back of his seat, turned around to look at us. “I need to apologize,” he said. “I’ve been doing y’all a disservice. You can’t experience this great land of ours from the interstate. It’s all Taco Bells and Targets.”

Elise and I looked at each other. We didn’t feel we were being done any disservice. We liked Taco Bell and Target.

“From here on out, we’ll be taking the highway and eating at places called Restaurant,” he said. “I want you to experience the real America before it’s too late, the places where real people live and worship.” He didn’t care if it was going to cost us time. Time would soon be made irrelevant.

“Okay,” Elise said, “but I’m not staying in any fleabag motels with a bunch of drug addicts. I want to stay at Holiday Inns.”

“We haven’t stayed at a Holiday Inn yet ,” I said.

“We won’t be staying with drug addicts,” our mother said, taking the clip-on part of her sunglasses off. Cleaning her glasses was a nervous habit, like our father pausing to survey his surroundings, like my fake yawning.

“And I’m not going to any roadside zoos, either,” Elise said, looking at me because I’d wanted to see some Cajuns feeding alligators in Louisiana.

“What if there’s snakes?” I said. “You’d want to see snakes.”

“No, I wouldn’t. Why would I want to see snakes?”

“You used to have a snake.”

“It was a tiny little garden snake,” she said, “and I was like seven.”

“We aren’t going to any zoos,” our father said. “We don’t have the money for that kind of stuff.”

“I bet we could save some people,” I said.

“That’s the idea,” he said. “That’s the spirit!” I thought of our cousin, a blonde on his side with a haircut our mother had called a Mary Lou Retton. When I was eleven, I’d gone with him to pay for a motel room for this cousin. He’d been out of work again and we’d scraped together the money in loose change and small bills.

This woman was dead now. She had been beaten to death in a different motel room, in a different city. I remembered the name of it because it was odd—the Admiral Benbow in Jackson, Mississippi. I had no memory of her except from pictures and family reunion slide shows, though my mother said she’d babysat us when we were little, when she was just a high school girl.

Our father got out and slipped three quarters into the air machine.

Elise opened her door. “Oh my God,” she said. “It must be a hundred and ten out here.”

“Hundred and four inside the car,” our mother said. “And don’t let your father hear you say that.”

“It’s a figure of speech,” she said.

“ You don’t mind if we say ‘oh my God?’” I asked, and my mother said of course she minded, it was sacrilegious. Then she took out her phone and called one of her sisters, but I couldn’t tell which one—their voices all sounded alike: loud and slow with accents we had somehow escaped. She had three sisters and one brother and they were always calling each other, even though, except for my uncle in west Alabama, they lived within a few miles of each other in Montgomery. They liked to talk about who died and who had cancer and who was getting a divorce. They liked to be the first to know so they could call each other up and relay the bad news. But whoever was on the other end got another call and had to go.

Our father often questioned her loyalty—asked whether she was with us or with them. Since he wasn’t close to his own family, his loyalty was unquestionably to us. We weren’t sure if he disliked our mother’s family because they were Catholic or if he just couldn’t stand for her affections to be split.

I found a spot of something on my t-shirt, guacamole maybe, that scratched off in flakes. The black King Jesus Returns! t-shirts did a good job of hiding sweat stains and mustard, and it made me appreciate this required uniform. Our mother was wearing one, too, a large that hung loose and shapeless over her hips. Our father had on one of his no-iron Brooks Brothers shirts; today’s was green-and-white striped. His sister gave him gift cards at Christmas. She got them for putting a lot of stuff on her credit card.

“Will we still get to eat at McDonald’s?” I asked.

“Your father won’t give up McDonald’s,” our mother assured us.

“I like McDonald’s in the morning.”

“We know you do, Jess,” Elise said, “we know.” She fanned herself with a magazine. It had the swim-suited bodies of celebrities on the cover, their eyes blacked out with rectangular boxes. My parents didn’t like Elise’s music or clothes or the TV shows she watched or the magazines she read. They didn’t like most of her friends or any of her boyfriends. They used to have long discussions with her about God’s intentions for her life, and our father would tell her she was going to hell and she’d be there all alone—she’d be in hell all alone —but now they pretty much let her do what she wanted as long as she maintained appearances. As long as we were all in church every Wednesday and Sunday, sitting quietly in our nice clothes.