Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [110]
He opened the door and got in. It was a Dodge, not nearly as old as Dan’s car but almost as worn-looking, as if it had been used a great deal. The woman inside was plump and fortyish. Her eyes were swollen and tears had streaked her cheeks, but he trusted her anyhow; you’d think she was his mother, the way she scolded him. “Are you out of your mind? Do you want to get killed? Do you know the kind of perverts in this world? Make sure your door’s shut. Lock it, dammit; we’re not in downtown Sleepy Hollow. Fasten your seat belt. Hook up your shoulder harness.”
He was happy to obey. He adjusted some complicated kind of buckle while the woman, sniffling, ground the gears and shot back into traffic. “What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Luke.”
“Well, Luke, are you a total idiot? Does your mother know you’re hitching rides? Where are your parents in all of this?”
“Oh, ah, Baltimore,” he said. “I don’t guess you would be going there.”
“God, no, what would I want with Baltimore?”
“Well, where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” she told him.
“You don’t know?”
He looked at her. The tears were streaming down her cheeks again. “Um, maybe—” he said.
“Oh, relax. Never mind, I’ll take you on to Baltimore.”
“You will?”
“It’s better than circling the Beltway forever.”
“Golly, thanks,” he said.
“They’re letting infants out on their own these days.”
“I’m not an infant.”
“Don’t you read the papers? Sex crimes! Muggings! Murders! Things that make no sense.”
“So what? I’ve been traveling on my own a long time. Years,” he said. “Ever since I was born, almost.”
“For all you know,” she told him, “I could be holding you for ransom.”
This startled a laugh out of him. She glanced over and gave a sad smile. There was something reassuring about the comfortable mound of her stomach, the denim skirt riding up her stocky legs, the grayish-white tennis shoes. Periodically, she swabbed at the tip of her nose with her knuckles. He noticed that she wore a wedding ring, and had worn it for so long it looked embedded in her finger.
“Just two or three miles ahead, not a month ago,” she said, “a boy in a sports car stopped to pick up a girl and she smashed in his skull with a flashlight, rolled him down an embankment, and drove away in his sports car.”
“That proves it’s you doing something dangerous, not me,” he pointed out. (How easy it was to fall into the bantering, argumentative tone reserved for mothers!) “What did you pick me up for? I could be planning to kill you.”
“Oh, indeed,” she said, sniffling again. “You wouldn’t happen to have a Kleenex on you, by any chance?”
“No, sorry.”
“I’d never stop for just anyone,” she told him. “Only if they’re in danger—I mean young girls alone, or infants like you.”
“I am not an—”
“Yesterday it was a girl in short shorts, can you believe it? I told her; I said, ‘Honey, you’re inviting trouble, dressed like that.’ Day before, it was a twelve-year-old boy. He said he’d been robbed of his bus fare and had to get home as best he could. Day before that—”
“What, you drive here every day?”
“Most days.”
He looked out the window at the vans and oil tankers, interstate buses, cars with their overloaded luggage racks. “I had sort of thought this was a long-range highway,” he said.
“Oh, no. Heavens, no. No, I live right nearby,” she told him.
“Then what are you driving around for?”
Her chin crumpled in. “None of your business,” she said.
“Oh.”
“What it is, you see, I generally do this from two or three in the afternoon till suppertime. Sometimes I go to Annapolis, sometimes off in Virginia someplace. Sometimes just round and round the Beltway. It all depends,” she said. She tossed