“My thing?”
“You have a thing, right?”
“Of course I have a thing.” I’ve spent the long hours of the drive working out exactly what I’ll say to him. Like lines in a play. More pretend. Pretend to be Meg. Pretend to be suicidal. Pretend to be strong enough to do this.
“Okay, so that gives us”—he looks at the clock—“six hours.”
I nod. Six hours.
“What do you want to do in the meantime?”
Throw up. Run. Hide. “I don’t know. What is there to do here?”
“We could sit by the pool, but I stuck my hand in it last night and it was warm as piss.”
“Too bad I left my bathing suit at home.”
“We could hit one of those all-you-can-manage dollar- ninety-nine buffets.”
“I’ll bet you can manage a lot.”
“And I’d kill for an iced coffee. It’s, like, a thousand degrees. You’d think they’d ice something other than the beer. We can grab breakfast at a casino, and then gamble.”
“I’m gambling enough on this trip; plus, I have no extra money. What I really want is to zone out. Like, at a movie or something.”
“Okay. Buffet and movie. It’s a date.” He stops himself, even blushes a little. “Not a date, but, you know.”
“Yeah, Ben,” I say. “I know.”
x x x
We don’t find iced coffee, but we do find a buffet, at which Ben eats an absurdly huge amount of eggs, bacon, sausage, and various other meat products, as if trying to store up for the vegan life back home. I manage to get down half a waffle. After, we find a Cineplex in town, and watch one of those ridiculous movies about machines that turn human. It’s part three or four in a series we haven’t seen before, but it doesn’t matter. We groan at the terrible plot and share a tub of popcorn, and there are whole minutes when I forget what I’m doing today. By the time the film lets out, it’s almost three o’clock.
I go back to the motel to change. I’m not sure why, but I’ve brought one of my nicer outfits, which happens to be a skirt-and-top ensemble I wore to one of Meg’s many memorial services. Ben and I pay for another night at the Wagon Wheel, deciding, rather than leaving tonight, to get up at the butt-crack of dawn and power through the drive home, doing it in shifts, rock-and-roll-tour style.
At the front desk we get directions to Bradford’s apartment complex. It’s not that far from here, about a half mile away.
“Let’s walk,” I say. We have time, and I’m too nervous to sit around waiting, so we walk along the dusty streets until we find a sun-bleached stucco building surrounded by dead grass, with a cracked cement pool.
But we’re early. It’s only just five. “We probably shouldn’t hang out right here,” I say. So we walk back a ways toward a liquor store a few blocks away.
“What time do you want us to go in?” Ben asks.
“I should go at five thirty.”
“And what time should I go?”
“I kind of think I need to do this alone.”
Ben’s eyes narrow. “I kind of think you don’t.”