Ben looks at me. Looks back at the house. Looks back at me. Shakes his head.
“What?” I say.
“It’s weird.”
“What is?”
He glances back at the house, back at me. “He looks like you, but that could be my dad.”
I don’t say anything.
“Are you okay?” he asks after a bit.
I nod.
“Do you want to go in? Or come back later when they’ve maybe calmed down?”
When I was little, I liked to imagine my father as a businessman, an airplane pilot, a dentist, someone different. But he’s not different at all. He’s exactly what I knew he’d be. I shouldn’t be surprised. All along Tricia has called him the sperm donor. He was probably some one-night stand I was the accidental product of. There’s no fairy-tale reason why he never visited or answered my email or even sent me one lousy birthday card. I’ll bet he has no idea when my birthday is. Why would he? That would imply that my existence matters to him.
“Let’s go,” I tell Ben.
“Are you sure? He’s right there.”
“Let’s go.” My words snap. Ben doesn’t say anything else. He pulls a U and we go.
36
Once we’re back on the highway, it’s like someone has vacuumed the Cody out of me. Ben keeps giving me these worried looks, but I avoid them. I avoid him. I scrunch my sweater into a ball against the window, and eventually, I fall asleep.
When I wake up a few hours later, the cool mountain air of the Sierra Nevadas has been baked away by the hot dry Nevada desert. I can almost forget that the detour ever happened.
My head is hazy from the heat, and there’s a metallic taste in my mouth and the crusty remnants of what I suspect is drool on my lips. Ben is watching me, and even though I liked seeing him sleep, being on the opposite end of it, I feel exposed. “Where the hell are we?” I ask.
“Literally the middle of nowhere. We passed a place called Hawthorne a while back, but other than that, nothing. I haven’t even seen any cars on the road. On the plus side, you can speed like crazy out here.”
I glimpse the dashboard. Ben’s going ninety. The empty, straight road stretches ahead of us and shimmers with mirages, little oases of water in the desert that don’t really exist. No sooner do we reach one than it disappears into the asphalt and another appears on the horizon.
“At this rate, we should make Vegas by five and Laughlin by seven,” Ben says.
“Oh.”
“Are you okay?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?” I reach for a now-tepid bottle of Dr Pepper. “This is disgusting.”
“When you see a 7-Eleven, holler.” He sounds peeved, but then he looks at me and something softens. He opens his mouth to say something, but then seems to think again and stays quiet.
I sigh. “What?”
“It’s not you; it’s him.”
I’m still feeling kind of naked in front of him. So I snap back, “Is that a line you give to girls when you dump them? ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’”
Ben turns toward me, then back toward the road. “I might if it ever got to that point,” he says frostily. “I was talking about your dad.”