Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

Her phone dinged. She read the message and smiled as she typed her response. As soon as she set it down, it dinged again. I searched the room and located the handsome soldier. He was by far the best-looking soldier in the room, tall and tan and broad-shouldered. He could pick me up, no problem.

“Dan’s so cute,” she said, showing me the picture he’d sent her. He was giving the camera an exaggerated sad face—bottom lip turned out, head tilted—so he must have done something wrong. “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

“I guess. His eyes are kind of bloodshot.” I thought of the two of them watching TV together on the couch, how they created a space in which no one was welcome. I didn’t like Dan. He was always turning words around, calling Facebook “the book of faces” and stuff like that. Elise looked out the window and I stared at the delicate veins on her temple, blue and winding like rivers on a map. They were the only thing about her that wasn’t pretty.

Our father brought our food on plastic plates with little dividers. “Which is which?”

“Mine’s the one without pork,” Elise said.

He set them down, giving her the pork plate, and bowed his head.

“We can pray by ourselves, Dad,” she said. She glanced up at him and went back to her phone. He probably hated having daughters—we didn’t fish or hunt and we were having sex with boys, or would eventually have sex with them. I kicked her under the table and my father put his hand on my back. It went up and down a few times and he walked back to his table.

“You’re a jerk,” I said. I swapped our plates and picked up a greasy bottle of barbeque sauce, squeezed some onto a clean spot. “I’m going to throw your phone across the room.”

“Just leave me alone for a minute,” she said. “I haven’t talked to Dan in days.”

“More like twelve hours.” I bowed my head and then looked to see if she was following my lead; she wasn’t. I took a bite of potato salad. The tallest, most handsome army man would not be swayed by Elise’s beauty. He would brush my hair and be careful untangling the knots. He’d hoist me onto his shoulders at parades so I could catch all the beads.

I got out my phone and looked at it—no one ever texted me. I thought about texting Shannon, but there was nothing to say, so I turned the sound off so I wouldn’t have to hear it not ringing and beeping. Shannon was my best friend, though she complained constantly and blamed others for everything. She’d tell me about all of the things she did for people and how they took advantage, insisting I wasn’t one of these takers, that I was one of the few exceptions, but this conversation typically occurred after I’d borrowed her clothes or spent the night at her house two weekends in a row. I took another bite of potato salad and shook some salt onto the pile. I took another bite and another until it was gone and moved onto the baked beans. When the beans were done, I started in on my sandwich. I was starving and knew it wasn’t food I wanted, but it had somehow become my focus.

“I wonder if these beans were cooked with bacon,” Elise said, and her phone dinged again.

“The other day I was eating egg-drop soup and there were all these tiny little bits of ham in it,” I said. “You’re probably eating meat all the time and don’t even know it. Seaweed salad, too—there’s fish in it. ‘Contains fish,’ it says on the package, when you buy it at the grocery store.”

She ignored me and continued typing.

“Your texting and Googling are distracting me from the purpose of this trip,” I said. “I don’t even know how you live in the world.” I had heard someone say this once— I don’t even know how you live in the world . I liked the way it sounded. I took another bite of my sandwich. A piece of pork fell in my lap, barely missing the napkin.

She set her phone down. “You know why we’re really here, don’t you?”

“No—why are we really here?”

“Because Dad lost his job again,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“No, really, I don’t, or I’d tell you,” she said.

“I thought it was going fine.”

“We always think that,” she said. “He always makes us think that.”

We were quiet for a minute. “At least mom has a job,” I said. “She’ll never get fired.”

“Sure, mom has a job.”

Our mother taught third grade, had taught third grade when I was in third grade, the year my life had taken a bad turn. All of a sudden, you were either popular or unpopular, and boys liked you or they didn’t, a decision they made as a group. Before this, there had just been the kids we’d all stayed away from: the masturbators and scissor thieves and glue eaters, anyone who brought a separate container of mayonnaise in their lunch bag.

She sighed and balled up her napkin on her plate. She was like girls on TV—all they did was spin the spaghetti round and round their forks. I looked at my legs pressed against the yellow plastic, pale and wide. I placed a hand on one thigh and imagined slicing the fat away, how thin I would want them if I could just cut it off. They wouldn’t have to be as skinny as Elise’s.

“We shouldn’t judge him,” I said.

“Why not?”

My army man stood to leave—smiling and shaking hands. He grabbed a stocky guy by the elbow as he shook, the other hand clapping the guy’s back.

“He had a hard life,” I said. “We didn’t have to live his life.”

“So what?” she said.

“So we should have some compassion.”

“Stop,” she said.

“ You stop.” I took my plate to the trashcan and then went to the bathroom, which was cowboy-themed, the toilet paper unspooling from a piece of twine. When I came out, a man was standing there. He asked me if the bathroom was clean and in proper working order and I said that it was, and this pleased him. After that I wandered around the store, weaving in and out of aisles considering things I didn’t want—motor oil and coffee filters and saltines, packages of Imodium A-D and Motrin. My army man was gone forever. I’d never sit on his shoulders at a parade, high up, safe from everyone and everything.

Soon after we got back on the road, the sky turned green and the lightning began, splitting the sky in half. I hadn’t seen lightning like that in a long time, maybe ever, though I’d once seen a tornado spinning off in the distance when my father and I went to pick up Elise from cheerleading practice. As soon as the funnel was gone, it was like something out of a dream.

The wind blew the car from side to side. It blew trash out of the beds of pickups, bags and boxes my father weaved around in case there was anything inside them. A few fat drops hit the windshield, and then there was the quiet moment while we waited for the downpour to begin.

The rain came all at once, battering the car. Our father slowed to a crawl and put on his hazards as eighteen-wheelers hurtled past. The windows fogged and he yelled at our mother to fix them so she fiddled with the temperature control: blasts of hot air followed by blasts of cold. I took off my seatbelt and scooted forward, my head between their shoulders—I couldn’t make out anything except the brake lights of the car in front of us and the occasional glimpse of white line.

My father pulled onto the shoulder and put the car in park.

“We could get rear-ended here,” my mother said, as the vehicles whooshing by rattled our doors.

“This shoulder’s big,” he said. It was a big shoulder, much bigger than the ones in Alabama. Cars passed on them, used them as extended turn lanes. There was a whole protocol to this big shoulder we hadn’t figured out yet.