We keep gaining time. Yet even with an extra hour from the time change, the few miles to the KOA Kampground just outside Tucumcari seems to take forever. I’m feeling better, no longer shaking, but John hasn’t said an intelligible word since we got here. He’s yawning and talking to himself, his window of lucidity squandered by nincompoops.

Once we set up, John sits down at the table inside the van. I put a can of Pepsi and a bowl of chips in front of him, and he promptly falls asleep.

Happy for the time alone, I mix myself a highball of Vernors and Canadian Club in a green aluminum camp cup and head outside to the picnic table. I bring my cane and sit down carefully, with my back to the table so I can get up easily. I take that first sip and smile. In the distance, I hear these sounds: the scream of a child that alarms me at first, but then when it’s followed by the voice of a different child, I realize they are only playing; the nasal putter of a small airplane flying above the campground; the distant bah-dumm of a car passing over a seam in the road out on I-40.

The Vernors, even mixed with whiskey, is still so spicy and sharply carbonated that it makes me cough a bit. (As a young woman, I drank Boston Coolers at the Vernors factory down at the foot of Woodward Avenue, not far from the river. A scoop of Sanders vanilla floating in shimmery gingery pop—the first sip could actually make you sneeze.) I’m glad we brought a twelve-pack of Vernors from Detroit. You can’t always get it in other parts of the country. It’s a local specialty, you know.

It may be my imagination, but I already feel the effects of the C.C. A radiance spreads through my chest, a tingle, and I remember the second dose of anti-discomfort medicine I took today. I guess I’m turning into quite the—what’s the expression Oprah likes to use?—substance abuser.

I take another sip of my highball.

The campground, while not deserted, isn’t exactly crowded. A young couple approaches, pushing a stroller. I wave to them, but they ignore me. Neither parent looks over eighteen years of age. What they are doing camping with a baby, I don’t know.

“Hi!” I call out to them. “How old is your little one?”

At first I think they’re going to keep walking, but then the girl looks back at me, then over to the boy. He lowers his head into his shoulders like a tortoise. Finally, she turns to me and yells back.

“She’s seven months old, ma’am.”

“She’s darling,” I say, though I can’t really tell. Something about their shyness makes me bolder. Besides, I want to see a baby. After this day, I need to see a baby.

I speak up. “Come on over. Let me have a closer look. Come on, I won’t bite.”

They both shuffle toward me, heads down. A scrawnier set of parents I have never seen. They barely look weaned themselves.

“That’s better,” I say, once they’re in front of me. Up close, I see how young they are, sixteen or seventeen, tops. She’s gaunt and pale, with dun-colored hair and light hazel eyes, a leaf of a girl. Her beige top is cut short, exposing her tiny waist. Even there with a baby, she seems gawky, unaccustomed to her woman’s body. The boy’s face is tight and oblong, with a high forehead and thin brown hair that doesn’t have a bright future ahead of it. His T-shirt says OLD NAVY ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT, but that’s the only thing that’s athletic about him.

I see how worn their clothes are, how tired they look. Even the baby just lies there, violet lids half closed, tiny fingers raised and stirring like sea grass.

“Oh, she’s adorable,” I lie. “What’s her name?“

“Britney,” says the girl, making it sound like a question. That upward lilt in her voice reminds me of our granddaughter, Lydia.

“That’s a pretty name. What’s yours?”

“I’m Tiffany. That’s Jesse.”

The boy squints at me with the same dark eyes as the child. “Well, I’m Ella. It’s so nice to meet you. You’ve got a beautiful baby.”

“Really?” When Tiffany smiles, she looks about fourteen.

“Of course she is,” I say, wondering what people have been telling her. “Where are you two headed?”

“Ohio? His aunt and uncle are there.”

“Oh. Are you visiting?” I’m shameless, but I need to know.

“We’re gonna live there,” she says, eyes shifting downward. He squeezes her elbow, and she moves closer to him.

“Well, that sounds nice. You’ll like it around there. We’re from Michigan. Right here.” I hold my right hand up, palm forward, and point to just below the lowest knuckle of my thumb to show them where Detroit is. Suddenly, they both break into uncontrollable giggles.

It takes me a moment to catch on. “Oh. That’s what we do in Michigan when we want to show where a town is located.”

“Really?” says Tiffany, still laughing.

I nod. “Because it’s shaped like a hand.”

“It is?” she says, half smiling.

“Uh-huh. Do you two have a camper?”

“No. We got a tent,” she says, obviously not pleased about the situation.

“That must be hard with a baby,” I say.

Tiffany nods vigorously. Finally, the boy speaks: “We should go.”

“You just got here,” I say. “Would you like something to eat?” Jesse’s eyes widen ever so slightly, and I realize that I’ve asked the magic question. “How about a sandwich? I’m sure I’ve got something for the baby, too.”

They look at each other again, each waiting for the other to answer.

“Then it’s settled,” I say. “You sit down right here at the table and I’ll have some dinner ready in a jiffy.”

It doesn’t take much prodding to get them to sit down. Then I pop into the camper and give John a poke. “John, we’ve got company,” I say, snatching the bowl of chips off the table.

“Who’s here?” he says, sounding grumpy as hell.

I don’t know what to say, so I improvise. “It’s the kids. And they brought the baby!”

John gets up, walks out of the van, all smiles. “Hey there, you two!” he says to Tiffany and Jesse, who look befuddled, but grin anyway, caught up in the warmth of John’s bonhomie.

When he sees the baby, that’s all she wrote. “And who’s this little girl? Look at her. What a sweetie pie. Yes, she is.” Peekaboo is played. Noses are stolen and returned repeatedly. Some color comes to Tiffany’s and Jesse’s cheeks as they watch.

Sometimes we need a little social pressure to be at our best.

I make grilled ham and cheese sandwiches in the electric frying pan and heat up a couple of cans of chicken noodle soup. We crack a tub of potato salad from the fridge. I find an applesauce cup and cut up a ripe banana for the baby. An hour later, the kids are full, and little Britney smiles every time she lays eyes on John.

Tiffany and Jesse have never heard any of John’s stories before and tonight they’re happy to listen. I’m happy to take care of them all. Tonight, we all make believe that we are other people. We don’t talk about their problems or our problems. The kids hardly even talk. Though Tiffany happens to mention that back home in Tempe, Britney would always wake up and start crying in the middle of the night.

“Do you ever take her for a drive?” I say.

Tiffany scrunches her chalky face at me like I’m off my rocker. “Noooo.”

“That helps.”

“Really?”

I make an effort not to frown. “You’ve never heard that? It’s the movement that soothes them. You try it and see if it doesn’t help. It always worked on my kids, and I know my Cynthia used it on her little boy when he wouldn’t stop crying. That or she ran the vacuum cleaner.”

Tiffany’s pointy brows squeeze together. The crazy look again. “Whaaat?”

Despite all this lip I’m getting, it pleases me to give this poor girl a little grandmotherly advice. I don’t think she’s been getting a whole lot of it.

Then I wonder to myself: Does a feeling of movement soothe a new baby in the same way it soothes an old woman? It doesn’t seem like it should, but somehow this makes sense to me. New to the earth and not long for it somehow don’t seem so different these days.

Before they leave, I give the kids extra blankets. In the van, I make up a bag filled with canned goods, cookies, and things for their cooler. From my cupboard, I grab an old Tupperware container. I take off the lid, put in a wad of tens and twenties from my hiding place, burp the air out, seal it tight, and place it at the bottom of the bag.

 

The next morning we both have a hard time getting out of bed. After two very strong cups of instant Folgers each, we pack up and hit I-40. (No patience at the moment for flitting between freeway and old road.) For a long time, neither John nor I say anything. This is rare, for as you know, I’m usually prattling away, giving directions, asking John if he remembers things, trying to fill the air with words as if I can’t bear the silence, which isn’t far from the truth. But right now, the only sounds are the leaden howl of the Leisure Seeker’s V-8 and the frapp-frapp of untucked maps between our seats being whipped by the wind.

I don’t speak because I can’t stop looking at the sky, at its long yawning unending face. It is the biggest, brightest, bluest sky I’ve ever seen. It hurts to look at it, but I can’t stop. I scan its cloudless expanse, my eyes flicking here and there and here, shifting every which way, like those pictures I’ve seen on TV of the way our eyes move as we dream. My heart fluttering and catching, I search this aching span, waiting for it to tear itself open and reveal what I know is there: a roaring vacuum that sucks everything into it that’s not nailed down.

I think maybe someone had a little too much coffee this morning.

When I realize this, my eyes finally pause and rest in one place. That’s when I can’t help but be stunned, plain old whopperjawed, by the beauty of this sky. As for its size, well, the sheer immensity of it makes me feel so insignificant that I realize that all my problems will ultimately pass with nary a soul noticing. It’s then that I find calm.

I look over at John and see the coffee has got him juiced up and crazy as well. He has his flag hat pulled down low over his eyes, making his ears stick out like Dumbo. He’s loaded for bear, determined to get some miles under our belt. These long-ago ways of ours die hard. It’s good that we’re on the freeway. Anyway, it won’t be long before I-40 meets up with a good-sized stretch of 66 past Clines Corners.

I touch my finger to my upper lip and it feels damp. The discomfort is back, but it’s a new brutal-edged kind, a searing hot blade tempered on the entrails. The kind of discomfort that makes me want to talk to my children. I drop the guidebook that I’m holding, open the glove box, and start fumbling around for the cellular phone.

“John? Did you do something with the phone?”

Blandly, John looks at me. “I didn’t touch it.”

This happens all the time at home. John hides things. He can no longer be trusted to put things away where they belong. “Yes, you did. I left it in here in the glove box after I called the Auto Club. Where did you put it?”

He scowls at me. “I didn’t touch your goddamn phone.”

He’s getting mad, but I don’t care. I’m so goddamned tired of his bullshit. I pull everything from the glove box. No phone. I’m just about to start crying.

“Goddamn it, John!” I scream. “I know you did something with it. What did you do with it?”

“Shove it up your ass!” bellows John.

“You shove it up your ass, you senile old bastard. Where did you put it?”

Then I remember that on the shelf near the dash, by the cup holders, there’s a rectangular slot, a catchall compartment. I can’t see inside it, but I can reach down in there. I feel something that could be an antenna.

Bingo. It’s the cell phone.

“Why the hell did you hide it in there, John?”

“I told you, I didn’t put it there.”

That’s when I remember that I put it in there after the last time I used it. In fact, I put it in there specifically so John wouldn’t hide it somewhere.

“Idiot,” I mutter.

“Drop dead,” says John.

“Oh, stop being such a pistol. I’m talking about myself.”

I roll up the window and turn the phone on. It makes a series of musical tones that are there to distract you from the fact that you’re about to shoot microwaves into your brain. I think about taking a little blue pill, but I push the idea from my mind and instead punch in Cindy’s cell phone number, not sure if she’s got it turned on at work. But she answers immediately.

“Hi honey,” I say, so happy to hear my daughter’s voice that I can almost feel the pain recede.

“Mom?”

“Of course it’s your mother. Who did you think?”

“Mom. Where are you?” I ignore the exasperation in her voice. I hope I’m not getting her in trouble.

“Can you talk?”

“I’m on my break, Mom. Where are you?”

“We’re somewhere in New Mexico. It’s beautiful here. Honey, you should see the sky—”

Cindy cuts me off. “We’ve all been worried sick about you two. Thank God you’re all right. You have to come home, Mom.”

The last thing on earth I want to do is get in an argument with my daughter today. I’m just so happy to hear her voice. “Cynthia, there’s nothing to worry about. We’re both feeling great. Really, it’s been so much fun.”

She exhales loudly, as if she doesn’t believe me. I suppose I am laying it on a bit thick, but I’m trying to reassure her and maybe myself, too.

“You’ve got to come home.” Her voice is coarse, thick with emotion and cigarettes. I do wish she’d quit.

“Cindy, sweetie.”

“It’s just that you’re so sick. I’m just afraid—”

I don’t let her finish. I don’t need to hear her say this any more than she needs to say it. “Dear, what’s going to happen is going to happen. It’s all right. We all have to be all right with it, okay?”

“Damn it, Mom.” She’s cursing, but her voice is whispery now, deflated. “Kevin keeps wanting to call the police.”

“Well, you tell Kevin that that’s a bad idea. He’s just going to make things worse. He’s going to turn us into Bonnie and Clyde.”

It occurs to me that we’ve already pulled a gun on some people and threatened to kill them. It’s too late. We are Bonnie and Clyde.

She clears her throat. “How’s Dad?”

“Your father is fine. He’s full of beans. He still has his little spells, but he’s doing all right. His driving has been very good. You want to talk to him?”

Snuffle. “Okay.”

I’m a little worried about him driving and talking on a phone at the same time, but I need a break to compose myself. I hand the phone over to John. “Roll up your window for a minute so you can talk on the phone.”

“Who is this?” John says, as he cranks the window up.

“It’s your daughter, dummy,” I say. “It’s Cynthia.” I say her name so he remembers to say it to her.

“Hi, Chuckles,” John says. Where did he pull out that from? He hasn’t called her Chuckles since the third grade. It was her favorite candy.

John is smiling like all get-out, so pleased to talk to his daughter. I don’t know if he thinks he’s talking to a little girl or what, but what does it matter if he’s happy and Cindy feels better?

“We’ll be careful, kiddo,” John says. “Love you. We’ll see you soon.” He hands me the phone.

“Cindy?” I say.

“Yeah, Mom?” Her voice is brighter now. She sounds better, which makes me feel better.

“I love you, too.” The pain is coming back, but I don’t really care at the moment.

“Me, too.” Cindy lets out a ragged little wheeze. “Please be careful. Come home soon.”

I nod, then catch myself. “Give our love to Lydia and Joey. Tell your brother we called.”

“I will.” She breathes loudly into the phone and I can hear her voice break. “Bye, Mommy.”

I push the off button. My eyes are burning and I’m not sure if it’s the exhaust fumes filtering into the van, or the fact that my fifty-seven-year-old daughter, the one who has always been the tough, defiant child, the one who has sassed me since she was eight, just called me Mommy.

 

We are traveling through the foothills of the Rockies, surrounded by mountains. Suddenly, I need to talk now, I need to know that I am still here, still able to make a noise. I point at the mountains far to the north of us.

“See those mountains, John?”

“What?”

“Those mountains over in the distance.” John says nothing. He just yawns. Apparently I’m still here. I’m just boring.

“Those are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains,” I say.

John looks at me. “Crisco?” he says. “Like the shortening?”

“Cristo. It means Blood of Christ,” I say.

“Hmph,” says John, sneering. “Christ, my ass.”

So ends our talk. In case you haven’t guessed, John is not a religious man. I suppose you could call him an atheist. His parents never instilled in him any sense of religion or God, and that’s probably where it started, but it was going off to war in his teens that made him a full-fledged heathen. He used to say that watching the head of the person standing next to you disappear doesn’t make you much feel like there’s a god.

When he came home from the war, John was different. He was no longer the boy from the neighborhood who pestered me like a gnat, asking me out all the time. I must have turned him down a dozen times. He was always saying that he was going to marry me. I’d laugh in his face, not in a mean way, but it was still laughing. He was younger than the boys I was dating, and I wasn’t attracted.

Eventually, I became engaged to another boy, but something happened to him during the war. You’re probably thinking I’m going to say he was killed, but you’d be wrong. The SOB dumped me. Yes, threw me over during the war. I was the only person I know that this happened to. I knew girls getting married, engaged, pregnant, you name it. I knew girls whose boyfriends, fiancés, husbands were killed or missing in action, but I was the only one I knew who got the old heave-ho by their GI Joe. Charlie met someone else while stationed in Texas, some round-heeled Armenian broad. He wound up marrying her, after knocking her up.

But John made it back. I guess the most attractive thing about him then, aside from the fact that he had gotten bigger and quieter, was that he seemed no longer interested in me. He had written often during the first year he was away, telling me how much he looked forward to seeing me again, how much he missed home. (Decades later, he showed me photographs he had taken during the war, and I remember being struck by how young everyone was. They looked like high school boys, posing with no shirts on, holding heavy-looking guns, displaying Japanese flags that they had recovered from the bodies of soldiers that they had killed. All those boys, acting brave and cocky. I remember John pointing out in the photos who died and who had made it back.)

As for his letters, I only answered once or twice. It wasn’t personal, I just wasn’t much of a letter writer. I was always kind of self-conscious about my writing skills. And I was still engaged to Charlie, anyway. As these things tend to happen, John stopped writing right around the same time Charlie dropped me.

When the war ended and I heard that John was home, I expected to hear from him. I could’ve used an ego boost, a little cheering up, but he never came by. It had been a bad time for my family. We lost my brother Tim at the Battle of the Bulge. We didn’t know how it happened or anything else, just that he was dead. That’s how they did things then. A goddamned telegram.

Then a month or so after V-J Day, John just appeared at the doorstep of my family’s house. He had seen the gold star up on our door and knew it was for Timmy. He wanted to stop by to pay his respects to my mother. We got to talking and I could tell he was still interested in me, though he was fighting it off.

Later he told me that he had promised himself that he wasn’t going to come see me, but when he saw the star, he knew he had to. We sat there in the front room of the old house and talked about Timmy, whom he had barely known.

When I asked John about what happened to him, he told me that he had been wounded on the island of Leyte in the Pacific, how the bullet entered the back of his ankle, how it wasn’t that bad, but it was enough to send him home because it would take so long to heal. He told me how while he was in the hospital, all the guys in his unit had gone down in a plane crash over the Pacific. When I told him how lucky he was, he called it his “million-dollar bullet hole.”

There was a quiet moment, then he said, “Why didn’t you write to me?”

“I was engaged to Charlie,” I said, afraid he would ask me that. “It didn’t seem right.”

“How is Charlie?”

I remember lowering my eyes to the faded floral print of the parlor rug, then finally up at him. “He’s living in Texas with his new wife.”

John looked at me and grinned. “Yeah, I know.”

That little shit knew all along that Charlie had dropped me. Anyway, we started seeing each other and that time it took.

 

I lean over and put my hand on John’s knee. He turns and looks at me. He smiles, but his eyes tell me that he is not all there at the moment.

Clines Corners is yet another tourist trap. We pull into the big trading post and I decide to look around a little. We could stand to pick up a few provisions and this place is as good as any.

Inside, there’s a restaurant along with the store, about the fortieth Route 66 Diner we’ve seen so far, all with the same old stuff—gas station signs, gas pumps, pictures of James Dean and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe with pink and neon and chrome and, of course, Route 66 signs. I have to say, this decor is getting a little tiresome. It’s like visiting the same place over and over.

I buy some cold Pepsis and a bag of Combos for John, while he fills up the tank. The man at the cash register hands me my change. Through the window behind him, I see John finishing up, getting back into the van. I remember that I didn’t take the keys this time. I cram the money in my purse, grab the bag, then hustle on out there fast as my cane can support me, before John takes off.

“John!” I yell to him. He doesn’t hear, but when I finally get to the van, he’s waiting nice as you please. I, on the other hand, am exhausted and panting.

“You all right?” he says.

I glower at him over my glasses. “Fine,” I wheeze.

Back on 66, it’s much quieter. The landscape is strange, both green and brown, a shaggy blend of desert and forest, as if it can’t quite make up its mind what it wants to be. Nipping at the Pepsi, I start to feel a little better. When I go to put my change into my wallet, I notice someone has written something on one of the singles, on the border just above George Washington’s head:

god please get me a woman

I flip over the other side and it says:

give me relief

“Look at this,” I say to John.

John takes the bill, reads both sides, and frowns. “He’s barking up the wrong tree.”

“Smartass,” I say. Maybe he’s in better shape than I think today.

 

We drive the old route toward Albuquerque, which has become Scenic Road 333 instead of Ro>We drive the old route toward Albuquerque, wute 66. It is a gnarled, narrow road that lowers us into Tijeras Canyon, pulls us out, and then lowers us again. The walls of the canyon rise from the road, ridged and crenellated, covered with a burnt layer of brush. Everything looks weathered, shriveled, half-dead. It reminds me that we’re only a couple hundred miles from Alamogordo, where they tested the first A-bomb. It looks like it.

I know only too well about the effects of radiation, the barrenness it causes, all the good it’s supposed to do while it destroys. I have watched too many friends and relations wither and die, not from their disease, but from this alleged cure for their disease. That’s why I told Dr. Tom and all the rest of them that there no way they were going to use that stuff on me. The kids were all gung ho about aggressive treatment, but I told them: no radiation, no chemo, no nothing. The doctors seemed actually relieved. They don’t like using most of that stuff on old people, anyway. Of course, they don’t want you to go out and enjoy yourself, either. They just want you to rot in some hospital somewhere, while they do their tests on you and do everything humanly possible to keep you alive and uncomfortable for as long as possible; then when they feel like they’ve done everything they can, they send you home to die. I suppose they think that’s the best place to die. It probably is, for most people.

I decide we need some distraction. “John, let’s drive around Albuquerque a little bit, see what’s here. What do you say?”

“All right with me.”

We follow the business loop into the old section of town, where we have a gander at the Pueblo architecture, the old KiMo and El Rey movie theaters, and some crazy murals that look like they were painted by someone with a large supply of discomfort medication. Oh, and you better believe that there’s another Route 66 Diner. Gee, maybe there’s posters of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean in there.

We climb Nine Mile Hill and in my rearview mirror, I watch Albuquerque diminish. We take the Old Town Bridge over the Rio Grande. The water below is dark and filthy. Down the road, I see a loose-planked white house with a Polack blue roof. On the side of the house, in block letters, it says:

L-A TRUCKERS CHURCH
ALLELUJA HE IS RISEN
SMOKE FREE BINGO
TUES 6:30

Good to know, I think.

 

We find a decent campground near a town called Grants. I’m happy to be settled in for the night, happy that our part of the campground is deserted. I’ve had enough of humanity to last me for a while.

John is suddenly perky, so he sets up the canopy and even drags a picnic table over for me to cook on. Once he turns the place into a proper campsite, I start to relax. It’s a lovely afternoon, the air cooling down nicely.

Afterward, John plops down into one of our old aluminum lawn chairs with the frayed green-and-white webbing. (We bought them at the same time we got the Leisure Seeker thirty years ago, so I keep wondering when he’s going to bust right through one of them.) He’s reading that Louis L’Amour book again, though I haven’t seen him turn a page yet. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him holding it upside down sometime.

I set up the electric pan out on the picnic table and start frying bologna. I’m not really in the mood for it and I guarantee you that I shouldn’t be eating it, but I went through our little fridge and noticed that it was starting to turn. I’d hate for it to go bad, so it’s going to be dinner.

I split the edges of the slices so they don’t curl much, but once I put them on the frying pan, I don’t pay as much attention as I should and the pieces blacken on one side before I remember to flip them. I flop them onto some paper towel to drain the grease. Then I put them between slices of stale Wonder bread, slather on mustard, and serve it with the remains of an old bag of chips and some tepid pickles. All I can say for this meal is that it is quite thoroughly stale. Well done, Ella.

Yet when we sit down at the table, John is thrilled. He gobbles up his sandwich in a matter of minutes, then the other half of mine. I mix myself a manhattan, park myself next to him, take his hand, and we watch the sun set without saying a word.

 

Once it’s dark, the campground gets so damn quiet, I don’t know what to do with myself. At the table, John has dozed off next to me. “John, wake up,” I say. “You’re not going to be able to sleep tonight.”

He lifts his head, stares crossly at me. “What?”

“Come on. We’re going to watch slides.”

“It’s too late.” He starts to doze again.

I poke him in the shoulder. “Come on. It’s just past eight. If we go to bed now, we’ll be up at three in the morning. Get out the projector.”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“I’ll show you. Put it on the picnic table and then we’ll have ice cream.”

“All right.” He lumbers up from the bench.

Food. It always works.

 

Tonight the pictures that we project on the side of our trailer are of our children, whom I miss so much, whom I’ve missed since they started leaving our home decades ago. Although we never exactly intended to do it, we have a tray of slides culled from other trays, a mishmash, entirely of the kids. It allows us to watch our children grow up in the space of about ten minutes, though not necessarily in the correct order. It’s like the Greatest Hits of the Robinas.

We see our children swimming at a beach, with birthday cake smeared on their faces, lying thrilled in piles of fallen leaves, standing stiffly in front of mantels with prom dates, sitting on docks at sunset, staring up at the stone white faces of Mount Rushmore, on the knees of florid Santa Clauses, hugging Mickey Mouse, coming home sunburned and peeling from their very own first vacations without us.

“That’s a cute one of Cindy!” John says, shoveling the last spoonful of melted ice cream into his mouth. “She’s a little doll.” It’s a slide of her dressed as a hula girl when she was about twelve. The picture, reddened with age, has made her look older than she really was at the time.

Another shot is of Kevin, barely four, on the same Halloween. He’s dressed as a little Indian, with his face painted and a feathered headdress. It’s strange to see this here in New Mexico, not far from the Indian reservation.

“Kevin and I got that costume over at Checker’s,” says John.

I look over at John, amazed. I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering. Checker Drugs was a place in our old neighborhood where we went for bread and milk and the occasional vanilla phosphate. I just don’t understand why he’s able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather—all the things so unimportant that they should be immediately forgotten.

Yet they aren’t. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie’s feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around an aluminum pot the moment before all the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be?

You want to think there’s a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we’re here, but there really isn’t any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don’t know where else to look. Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I’ll be damned if I know.

The next slide is Kevin at the Autorama, holding a small trophy and a model car that he had entered in a contest. He won third place. I’m sure he still remembers this day. All I remember is being relieved when we left.

I touch the projector button and the next slide is nothing. There is no next slide, only the very bright light that occurs when the tray slot is empty. I look over at John and he’s back in his lawn chair, slumped over asleep. I say his name, but he snorts and goes right back to sleep. He won’t be able to move tomorrow. He’ll bitch about how sore he is, and then he’ll bitch about it again five minutes later.

I hear a noise down the road. It’s probably just a little critter, but I start to get scared. Maybe it’s a coyote or a wolf. I remember that we are in the campground pretty much by ourselves, that I haven’t seen a manager or another person for hours. I decide to get my purse out of the van. I wouldn’t mind having that gun nearby. I start to get up, when I hear a noise again—a scrabbling in what is probably a trash can.

“John, wake up!” I yell, determined to head for the van. I grab my cane and try to lift myself up from the picnic table bench, but I’ve been sitting for too long. My legs are stiff and I can barely feel them. I have to dangle them from the bench to get the blood stirring again. Meanwhile, the fan from the projector is still whirring away, the light blazing. You’re not supposed to leave the light on for this long without slides, but I’m not going to turn it off and be left in the dark.

“John!”

“Who is it?” says John, rattled.

“It’s Ella,” I say. “There’s a noise up the way.” I try my legs and can feel them a little now. I raise myself again, using both hands on the bench of the picnic table. I leave my cane just standing there. I manage to lift myself, but as I reach for my cane, my legs simply fold beneath me. I go down slowly, my knees hit the ground, then my hands, then I topple over onto my side into the hard dirt. I’ve scraped my hands, my knees are on fire, and my one leg is bent back slightly. I pray it’s not broken.

“John!” I yell to him. “I fell!”

“What?”

I’m trying hard not to panic. “I’m on the ground! I fell, John! Help me up!”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” John says, as if annoyed. But before I know it, I see the shadow of him above me.

“Take my hand. Take my hand.”

“John, you can’t lift me up. I weigh too much. You’ll fall, too.”

“Yes, I can. Just take my hand.”

So I take John’s hand while he holds on to the picnic table and tries to lift me. He gets me about a foot up from the ground, so I’m able to straighten out my leg before his grip on the table gives out and he comes tumbling forward. Oh God no, I think, as his thick, lumbering form towers toward me. I cannot believe this is happening.

“Ahhhhk,” yells John. “I—”

I fall back again, but now with John on top of me. This time, it’s not a slow, soft fall. It hurts much worse with John’s weight on me. Stones bite into my rear end, my head hits the dirt, my insides hurt. I feel the entire mass of his body on me. I can’t breathe. I feel more discomfort than I can even describe. Tears push themselves from the corners of my eyes. The first words out of my mouth ache my lungs. “God damn it.”

John just lies there without doing anything. I can’t move with him on top of me. “John, get off me!” I manage to say, almost breathless.

“I think I hurt my arm,” he says.

“I don’t care. You can’t keep lying on top of me. Get off.” He stays like a dead weight at first, then I feel his legs start to stir. “John, you’re crushing me. Get off.”

Finally, John sniffs, takes a long, rusty breath, manages to lift himself up and roll over next to me. His arm seems to be all right.

Now at least, I can breathe again. I look over at him. His eyes are crazy and scared. Lord, this is a big mess we’re in now, I’m afraid.

My leg feels okay now. It hurts, but I don’t think it’s broken.

“John. Are you all right?”

He looks at me as if trying to recognize me, then finally he says, “What are you doing down here?”

“John. I fell, remember? You tried to help me up and you fell. We’re camping. We’re in New Mexico.”

“Mexico?”

“New Mexico. You fell asleep while we were watching slides. Now we’re stuck on the ground.”

“Oh, shit,” he says.

Even he realizes that we’re in trouble. I start to scoot toward the van, still thinking about my purse. Stones dig into my hands as I lift myself from the ground just enough to move inch by inch. I can’t believe how filthy I’m getting. My slacks are going to be ruined. But I guess that won’t matter if I can’t ever get up from the ground.

After a foot or two, I’m not so sure the purse is going to help any. I could shoot the gun until someone shows up, but there’s no guarantee that will happen. Besides, I’m afraid to shoot the gun in the air. Back in Detroit, people are always shooting guns into the sky on New Year’s Eve and someone always gets hurt. A bullet crashing through the roof, hitting some poor child lying in bed or someone sitting in their living room watching Dick Clark.

Of course, the cell phone is in the van being recharged. I’m so damned efficient. I look over at the picnic table and wonder if I can pull myself up. When I lift my arms, they hurt so bad I don’t even bother trying. John is sitting on the ground, talking to himself.

I hiss at him. “John, I need you to be okay right now. Come on. Let’s try to get over to the van. Can you move very well?”

He takes a long, pained breath. “I don’t know.”

“Can you get up? Try using the picnic table.”

John slides himself over to the table. I watch him wince as he wraps his arms around the seat of the table. He’s usually much more agile than me, but the fall took it out of him.

“I can’t lift myself,” he says.

“Put your back to the bench, maybe you can lift yourself that way.”

John does what I say. “Now put pressure against the table and try to lift yourself with your hands. Now see if you can get some traction with your feet.”

“Damn it,” says John, almost getting his elbow up onto the bench. Then he collapses back into the dirt.

I am picturing how it could be done in my head, but we’re both shook up and scared and dirty and tired. I want to cry, but it won’t do any good. We’ll still be here on the ground when I’m done bawling.

John hurts his back trying to do it again. I decide that it’s my turn. I know I won’t be able to lift myself up onto the picnic table, but I look over at the steps that flip out from the Leisure Seeker when you open the side door. It’s about fifteen feet from where I am, so I steel myself for the long rough scoot over there.

“What are you doing?” says John.

“I’m going to get over to the door of the van, see if I can get in that way.”

John grunts. But I can’t tell if it’s a “That’s a good idea” grunt or a “You’re out of your mind” grunt.

It takes me a good fifteen minutes to get halfway there. I lift, I scoot. I lift, I scoot. I am literally moving an inch at a time. The ground is hard here, so very hard, so many stones and pebbles biting into my hands and fanny. I’m sweating pretty bad now and it doesn’t take long before it’s in my eyes. This is the problem with having almost no hair—sweat goes straight down into your eyes. As I stop and wipe under my glasses with my filthy hands, I remember something from a guidebook, how we are in what the Mexicans called the “bad country.” All the rock formations caused by black lava, with tinges of red that was supposed to be the blood of an awful monster slain by some gods of war. I don’t know why I remember these things, but I can’t help it.

The bad country indeed. I’m afraid the black earth is already tinged with the blood of this fat old broad. It’s certainly getting no softer as I shrimp my way to the van. I’m numb from all this scraping, but for once I’m glad I’ve got this big rump to protect myself from the ground. This would hurt a lot more if I were one of those bony, rail-thin, smoked-for-a-hundred-years old crones. But then, if I was one of them, I could probably stand up.

John has given up and laid his head against the bench of the picnic table.

“John, why don’t you start heading over here yourself? If I can get up a little bit, maybe you can help.”

He lifts his head up from the bench, nods, then lays it back down, lulled to sleep by the whirr of the projector. I’m on my own.

Something happens when you’re stuck on the ground in the near-dark, scared to death, not sure if you’re ever going to stand up again, wondering what kind of shape you’ll be in when they find you here in the morning. This is what happens: time stretches, pulls and folds itself over, then stretches itself again like Turkish Taffy that’s been in your pocket all day. Right now, I have no idea if we’ve been on the ground for two hours or twenty minutes.

I keep scooting, nothing else to do. John is asleep by the bench. He will wake up wondering what he’s doing on the ground. He will blame me for it, I’m sure of it. I get blamed just because I’m the only person around to blame. That’s what will happen. He will awaken in a foul mood, thinking I’ve pushed him to the ground. He will yell at me.

Ow. Ow. Ow. I keep scooting. I hear that damn coyote again. If he comes here, thinking he’s got an easy meal, he will be wrong. He will find what he thinks is a big fat buffet, but he won’t think that for long. He will find a fight. I fought two men yesterday, so I’m not afraid of a coyote. I will kill him with my hands.

This is not where we are supposed to die.

After three breathers, cutting my hand on a piece of glass, crushing a large bug that I first think is a scorpion, but turns out to be a cicada or something, I’m finally at the steps of the van. They are small aluminum flip-down steps, very narrow, much too narrow for my wide beam, but I know they are sturdy because they are what we use to step into the van. Best of all, they are only a couple of inches from the dirt.

I back myself up to the lowest step, feel it with my wrists, which are mostly numb by this time. I take a hard breath and lift. I’m shaking, but I manage to raise myself onto the step. The narrow sides dig deep into my fanny, but at least I’m able to stay put. My tailbone feels secure on the step. It’s such a relief just to be above the ground, I want to rest for about a half hour, but I don’t. I grip the sides of the tiny steps and try to pull myself up again. This time, I can push ever so slightly with my heels as well. I make it up to the second step, but my butt does not feel as secure as it did on the first step. I shift my hands up farther, above the second step, and kick hard into the dirt with my heels. I’m so exhausted by this time, the tears are pouring from my eyes, but if I don’t do this, we’re going to be on the ground all night. I don’t know if we can survive that.

I push hard and make it to the third step. I’m sitting on my hands now and it hurts. I pull one hand out, then the other, taking care not to lose my balance. I’m shaking so badly now, I don’t know what to do.

“John!” I yell to him, as loudly as I can. I realize that I have not been yelling loudly enough, for fear of waking others. There’s no one around. If there was, they could help us.

“John! Goddamn it!” I scream this time and it rouses him slightly. I see the head rise from the bench, then fall back down.

I search the ground around me. There are stones in the dirt, like the kind that have made my snail’s journey so hard on my hands. I pick up three of the marble-sized rocks along with a handful of dust. My hands are so filthy now, I don’t even care anymore. I chuck a stone at John and miss. I throw another one and miss again. I throw another, much harder, and this one hits home. John gets it in the side of the noggin. I’m ashamed to say that I’m rather pleased. There is a click as it connects, at least partly, with the earpiece of his glasses.

“Ow!” says John. “What the hell?”

“John! Get over here and help me get up these steps.” Why am I doing this? It will take him at least a half hour to get over here. I just don’t see why I have to do this by myself. I throw another rock at John and it hits him in the leg.

“Aah! Quit it! Quit hitting me.” John rises slightly, clutching at the picnic table bench. Quickly, I grab more stones and keep tossing them at him.

“Would you stop it? You’re hurting me.”

I don’t say a damned thing. I keep throwing rocks at my husband. It’s angering him just enough for him to forget how feeble he is. He drags himself to his knees. I land a quarter-sized rock right in his ribs. He yowls and grabs at the top of the picnic table, lifts himself up all the way, groaning. I didn’t think we would do it this way, but this will do.

“Get your ass over here and help me up,” I say to him.

“Go to hell.”

“John, please. I dragged myself all the way here just so I could get you up.”

“I’m going to bed,” he says, rubbing his eye with a filthy finger.

“You can’t get in the van until you help me up.”

I watch him make his way toward me. He shifts and veers a little bit, probably unsteady from being on the ground for so long. But as he approaches me, his gait is better, his stride stronger, the way it usually is. Tonight was just a bad night for him. I just needed to wake him up and annoy him enough for adrenaline to take over.

He unplugs the extension cord at the van outlet and the projector clicks off. John steps back toward the door. Something in his eyes changes as he towers over me.

“You’re all dirty,” he says, looking at me no longer with anger, but with tenderness.

“Help me up, John,” I say.

John grabs one of the large metal handles he installed years ago on both sides of the door, leans forward and I reach out for him to pull me up, but instead, he bends down farther. He kneels at my feet and starts to tie my shoe. I have a hard time tying my shoes and often he has to do it for me. It’s hardly what I’m concerned with at the moment, but I’m not going to stop him if he feels the need.

John ties a sloppy but secure bow on my dirty SAS orthopedic.

“Thank you, John,” I say to my husband.

He smiles. “Hell, honey, you do all kinds of things for me.”

John leans forward and kisses me on the lips. I can feel the cracks in them, the dry skin, but they feel fine just the same. I put my hand on his bristly face. Then he grabs my arm at the elbow and pulls me from the steps.

I’m up. We’re not dead yet. My legs are throbbing, but they are steady enough to support me as I turn and grab the handle on the other side of the door with both hands. I pull my foot up onto the first tiny step, then the other foot. After a moment, I make it up to the next step.

“Wait a second,” says John. He starts brushing the dirt off my backside.

“We’re going to be out here all night if you try to sweep off my entire rear end,” I say, too tired to even laugh.

“Hush,” he says, patting, rubbing away.

So I hush and let him brush me off. Before long, I start to feel more relaxed. My legs stop quivering. My breathing returns to normal. I did not expect a brush-down to soothe me so, but it does. John’s touch hasn’t changed through the years, still gentle, though his hands are toughened, stiffened, knobbed, and spotted with age, like everything else on our bodies. I experience a twinge of desire for him, through all the discomfort, through all the fear, through all the fatigue. I stand there on the steps, clutching the grip with both hands. I close my eyes.

 

We don’t wake up until 1:35 in the afternoon the next day. It’s then, when I open my eyes, that I feel as if I’ve gone ten rounds with Rocky Graziano. There are tears in my eyes before I even open them. It’s discomfort, certainly, but also the other thing, the knowing. And the discomfort only brings you closer to that.

Before we went to sleep, I took all my meds, including two little blue pills, then gave John three extra-strength Tylenol and a Valium. I locked the door from the inside. There were no late-night visits to the bathroom, no disturbances, no episodes with John. Exhaustion trumps all disease. For the moment, the body minds only its most immediate need. The rest are left to sit in the corner, unaccustomed to the lack of attention.

I can’t decide if we should try to keep moving today or stay put to rest. I think of Kevin, always the cautious one, saying to me, “Mom, if you feel tired or shaky, take it easy. That’s when accidents occur. Everything always happens at once.” He’s right, too. Even when you’re at your usual level of misery, you can maintain a certain stability. You’re operating from a familiar place. But when you’re extra scared or fatigued or discomfortable, some other bad thing is bound to happen. The past two days confirm this theory: a flat tire, a stickup, and a bad fall. The Morton Salt girl had it right. When it rains, it damn well pours.

Yet part of me needs to carry on, to trudge forward and shake hands with our grubby destiny. Though I know that it is not to be trusted, that destiny, with his loud plaid polyester suit, his halitosis, his cubic zirconium pinkie ring. Soon enough, we will stumble into his realm where he will heartily slap us on our backs with a meaty dampish paw, smile at us with nicotine teeth and promise us—this fate here? That’s the best one on the lot.

Inertia makes the decision for me. I fall back into a semi-conscious state. Around 3:30, John has an accident in bed. This is the first time that this has happened. The warmth seeps toward me, snaps my eyes open. At least it gets us out of bed. My first instinct is to yell at him, but I know it was an accident. Besides, I’m too tired to get mad. I do have to get those sheets off the bed. After I head for the bathroom myself.

When I come out, John has stripped down and is trying to tug a pair of different pants over his pissy drawers. There’s other stuff on the drawers, too, but I’ll spare you a description.

“John, you have to change your underwear.”

“Ah, shut up,” he says to me.

He can’t pull up the pants because he’s sore from last night. “Go into the bathroom and wash up. You stink.”

“No, I don’t. I’m fine.” He keeps tugging.

This not washing has been a problem for some time. I’m fed up with it. “All right then. Let me help you,” I say. “Here, just step out of them.”

He stops struggling with the pants. “Why?”

“It’ll be easier. We’ll get you set right up.”

John lets the pants fall to the floor and steps out of them. I reach over to our little junk drawer and pull out the pair of scissors he uses to trim the bread bag ends. Since I’m behind him, he can’t see me snip through the waistband of his shorts. By the time he realizes what I’m doing, I’m down to the hem. I let them fall on the floor.

“Goddamn it. What the hell are you doing?”

“I’ll have a new pair for you in a minute.” I scuttle over to our cardboard clothes chest as fast as my throbbing legs can carry me and snatch a pair of fresh shorts. Then I grab a bar of soap and run two washcloths under warm water. Meanwhile, John is trying to pull the pants on over his bare ass.

“Just a second,” I say. “Sit down. Then we can get the pants on.” He parks his butt on our table with his thing just staring up at me. I rub soap onto one of the washcloths and hand it to him. “Here. Wash yourself off.”

He grumbles, but he does it. It’s nowhere near a good job, but it helps. While he does that, I strip the bed. The mattress is vinyl covered, so it just needs to be wiped down. Then I take the washcloth, the crusty shorts, the old pants, and the sheets and put them in a garbage bag to be thrown away. Time to start shedding things.

John is just barely able to get the clean shorts up over his knees and over his rump. I take the other washcloth and wipe down his face and neck. Soon, he starts to enjoy his French bath, telling me how good it feels. He always hates the idea of a bath, but once you get him clean, he feels a lot better. I spray him head to toe with Right Guard, then we wrestle on clean Sansabelts and a loud Hawaiian shirt that he picks out. By then, his mood is changed.

“I feel great.”

“I’m so glad,” I say, settling onto one of the benches along our table. “Because I’m exhausted.”

“Let’s get going,” says John.

I watch as he trims the bread wrapper with the scissors that I just used to cut off his filthy skivvies. I’m too tired to stop him. “Let me get cleaned up, then we’ll talk it over.”

An hour and a half later, after counting my bruises, rinsing my abrasions, my own French bath, various ablutions, and a few close calls (the advantage of our tiny RV bathroom: you couldn’t fall if you wanted to—not enough room), I’m also ready. The problem is, I don’t know what I’m ready for. By the time we take our meds (plus a little blue for me) with a small meal of oatmeal, dried fruit, toast, and tea, it’s 5:07 in the afternoon.

“Come on, let’s go,” says John, searching for his keys.

I look out the back door and see indentations in the dirt where we were rolling around last night. “Yes,” I say. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Good riddance to this bad country.

 

“What day is it?” John asks me after miles of silence and empty road.

“For God’s sake,” I say, peeved. At home, John is constantly asking what day it is and it drives me crazy. The kids buy him calendars for his birthday, so he’ll stop asking them when they come over. But calendars don’t help. How can you tell what day it is when you don’t what month it is? Or what year?

“It’s, it’s—” As I stammer, I realize that I have absolutely no idea what day it is either. “It’s Sunday,” I say, because it feels like a Sunday to me.

“Oh,” says John, satisfied.

“John, for right now, why don’t we just see if we can make it to the Continental Divide?”

“Sure, okay.”

He doesn’t care. I think he’s just happy to be driving. Actually, so am I. There are still a few hours of daylight left. We’ll just see where we end up.

“Let’s just take us a Sunday drive, John. What do you say?”

John nods.

 

We make it to the Continental Divide in nothing flat. All my life I have heard of it, but never really knew what it was. Simply put, it is the highest point of all Route 66 and the point at which rainfall divides. From this point, rainwater to the east drains into the Atlantic, water to the west drains into the Pacific. I read this all aloud to John, who grumbles as if he’s known it and already forgotten it five or six times over.

The sun is lowering now, getting in our eyes. I pull out my jumbo sunglasses, though I believe it is not that long till sunset. I suppose common sense would dictate that we stop for the night, but I don’t think either of us wants to, especially after only driving such a short time.

I stuff the guidebook in the fabric pocket of the door for safekeeping. “Okay, John, now let’s see if we can make it to Gallup.”

“Okay.”

We should stop for the night, but I don’t want to. After yesterday’s goings-on, I figure we can do anything we want. All bets are off. Right now, I just want to watch the red sandstone cliffs shift, change colors, and grow more vivid as the sun liquefies. The vastness of the mesas, the stillness of all this stone soothes my wretched body, makes me feel part of the earth. The angling light reveals the character of the rock, how every inch is mottled and etched with time. I look at my arm, run my fingers across the million tiny folds that cover my skin like endless lines of faded calligraphy. There’s something written in both places, but I can’t read either.

Along the road, there are a few trading posts, some still open, even at this time of day, but most long out of business. I spy an old Whiting Brothers Gas Station, its sign collapsing into the dust. The windows are all busted out and there’s a giant bush growing where the pumps once stood. Those Whiting boys had dozens of gas stations in the West decades ago; now they’re all gone or looking like this one.

I roll down the window, enjoying the caress of the air as it grows soft and cool, mellowing the day’s swelter. I have always loved the feel of wind in my face, but love even more the sound of it rushing past my ears, blocking all else, creating a blur of noise.

Next to me, John seems content, not at all disoriented by the movement of the sun. He is focused on the road, occasionally checking the side-view mirror, not saying anything until after he takes a swig of flat Pepsi from a quarter-filled bottle he finds in his cup holder.

“Boy, am I sore today,” he says, our night in the dirt completely forgotten.

“Yeah, me, too,” I say. “Must be the weather.”

 

It is near dark by the time we reach Gallup, but you can hardly tell from all the neon. For a mile or two, with all the motels and signs, it feels like Las Vegas when we visited it in the ’60s, before all the casinos were crowded together, when there was still space between them, a sense of desert. Tonight, the neon signs glow warm and shimmery in the cobalt night:

 

BLUE SPRUCE LODGE

Lariat Lodge

ARROWHEAD LODGE

RANCH KITCHEN

MOTEL El Rancho

 

The last is a beautiful old hotel where lots of movie stars stayed, everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Hepburn and Tracy. Errol Flynn rode his horse into the bar. I’ve heard that it’s a classy old joint, but we won’t be stopping there tonight.

Before long, Gallup becomes a city. As we follow the old alignment, it takes us past a beautiful old theater called the El Morro. The marquee is dark tonight.

“How are your eyes holding out, John?”

“They’re okay.”

Just then, a little hopped-up Japanese car zips up next to us. It’s bright yellow with loud, high-pitched exhaust pipes and a big air spoiler on the back. I look over at the driver to see who’s making all the racket. I’m surprised to see a teenage girl there. After a moment, she gooses it and whinnies on past. On her back window, there’s a sticker:

NO FEAR

I think, good girl.