Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

We stood there for another ten minutes, waiting for someone to involve us again, to ask us questions, but no one did. We got back in our car. Elise was still crying. I cried so infrequently that other peoples’ tears surprised me, though they didn’t surprise me now; my lack of tears surprised me. Why didn’t I feel things the way others felt them? It wasn’t that I didn’t care about people. It was more like I couldn’t really believe they were real. I dug my fingernails into my palm, hard.

I’d read somewhere that not caring about people was a sign of mental illness, but I didn’t feel mentally ill.

“I have blood on me,” my father said, holding up his hands and turning them slowly. It reminded me of that scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox was disappearing because his parents hadn’t kissed so he wasn’t going to be born. He got out of the car and went inside. I looked at my own hands—they looked clean even though I had touched a bloody dead man. I had a dead man on me.

My father drove ten minutes in the wrong direction and no one said anything. I thought about the girl, whether she might be Chinese or Korean instead of Japanese. Why had I thought she was Japanese? I didn’t know anyone who was Japanese.

Finally, Elise pointed out a butcher shop we’d passed earlier.

“Where’s that map?” he asked.

My mother opened it, unfolding and unfolding until it filled the front seat. I looked at the back of her head, her thin hair fluffed up. I had her hair—fine and eager to fall out; we had to bend over and brush it upside down to make it look normal.

“We need to get on 90,” my mother said, while my father kept driving the way we’d come.

“Tell me where to turn,” he said.

“I think it’s this way.”

“Just tell me where to turn.”

“The GPS is in the console,” Elise said, but our father didn’t like being told what to do by a machine. He’d turn too early or too late and there was no one to blame it on.

“There,” our mother said, “now.”

He jerked the wheel and took the exit left.

“Are there any wet wipes up there?” I asked.

My mother tossed me a package that had been opened long ago. They were dry but I rubbed them on my hands, anyway.

“Let me see that map,” Elise said. Our mother passed it back and Elise spread it out, West Texas on my lap and East Texas on hers.

“I’m sad,” I said. I didn’t feel sad, but I thought saying it might help me feel it.

My mother turned and gave me a slight shake of her head.

“What?” I said. She didn’t say anything. “What?” I said again. I sighed and tracked the highway with my finger.

“‘Welcome to the great state of Texas,’” Elise read. “‘Whether you are a visitor or a resident, I hope you take advantage of the vast and varied travel opportunities Texas offers.’ Well, thank you. We certainly don’t plan on it.” She started Googling various towns along our route to see if there was anything worth seeing, though we knew we weren’t going to stop. We didn’t really want to stop. We only wanted to know what we were going to miss.

“We’ll come really close to Mexico,” I said. “Maybe we could cross the border.”

“There are drug wars going on,” our father said. He’d read a news story about a tourist town where the kids hadn’t been in school since February because the drug cartels were demanding half the teachers’ salaries so the teachers were refusing to teach. In response, the cartels were decapitating them and leaving their heads in the streets. I watched my mother to see if she’d put a hand on his arm or give him a look, but she didn’t.

Elise flipped the map over and we studied the picture of the governor and his wife. They were handsome in the usual way of politicians: stiff-haired with closed-mouth smiles. The wife was blond, with pale skin and glassy eyes; she looked like a doll. The governor looked a little more reasonable, but not by much. Elise folded the map the wrong way and unfolded and refolded until she got it right.

I took the egg out of my purse, still intact.

“Where’d you get that?” Elise asked.

“The gas station.”

“That’s really gross.”

“You think everything’s gross.”

“What is it? Did you get me one?” my father asked.

“It’s an egg. And no, I didn’t know you wanted one.” I offered it to him and he agreed without hesitation, so I passed it up and opened my Snickers. I tore off a hunk and held it out to Elise, who shook her head. I was never going to be skinny like her. She said all I had to do was starve for a month, six weeks tops, but I couldn’t do it. It might as well have been forever.

“Do you want some salt?” our mother asked, opening the glove box to search for a stray packet, but the egg was already gone. Elise was the only skinny one, and I was glad for it because I didn’t want our whole family to be overweight—it would seem like a fundamental flaw, like something we’d never overcome.

Our father zigzagged through a small town in order to stay on the right highway, but then it split, one marked business and the other marked truck. After taking the business highway into a bricked and empty downtown, we learned to follow the one for trucks.

The next town we came to was nicer. There were a lot of stores—not just tire stores and gas stations, but shops selling pottery and cupcakes and seafood. The Texas flag hung in front of each one. Our mother looked back and forth, reading the signs aloud: HUCKLEBERRY’S SEAFOOD, LIGHTFOOT FLOORING, THE PLAY PEN, GOLDEN GIRLZ SALON, HOME BAKED.

“Angel Funeral Home,” she continued. “The Jalapeno Tree. Save America Vote Republican. Lupe’s Cantina.”

“I bet Mexicans don’t eat at The Jalapeno Tree,” I said.

“I bet they don’t eat at Lupe’s Cantina, either,” Elise said.

“I bet Lupe doesn’t even exist ,” I said.

“The Palace Donuts didn’t make it,” our mother said, making the sorry clucking sound I hated. The sorry clucking sound that said she was happy the Palace Donuts hadn’t made it. I couldn’t figure her out. She seemed like a nice person, doing all of the nice things nice people did—visiting the sick and volunteering at church, sending flowers and thank-you notes, but when one of her best friends died, she hadn’t even seemed sad about it. I kept asking about the woman, even though I hadn’t liked her, a busybody who was always trying to draw junior high gossip out of me.

“Oh man, look at that,” my father said, slowing to a crawl for an old man pushing a lawnmower across the highway. The man stopped in the middle of the road to give us a dirty look before continuing. Our father got a kick out of that and Elise took a picture of him with her phone. Then she started taking pictures of other things: the backs of our parents’ heads, VFW posts, signs that read HISTORICAL MARKER I MILE, without ever indicating what it was they were marking.

At a stoplight, we pulled up behind a big shiny truck and my mother pointed out the bumper sticker—the state of Texas with a pistol across it: WE DON’T DIAL 911.

“Texas is scary,” Elise said.

“It’s all trucks and guns and meat,” I said.

“And football,” our father said. “They love football.”

“We’ve seen Friday Night Lights ,” I said.

“That sounds familiar,” Elise said, holding her phone in my face. I pushed her hand away and she took a picture of my legs. “I hate all those things.”

“You’re a cheerleader,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean I like football.”

“No, but you support football.”

“I support hot guys in tight pants banging into each other,” she said.