Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [40]
He would go home, mad. He would sit in his chair, think, I’m going to let them both have it this time. I shiver, pull my feet out of the water. They shouldn’t sleep too long. Only enough to be able to drive again. We can sleep in Mexico for a thousand hours.
I get up, take a walk around the parking lot. There is a restaurant across the highway. I’ll have cereal. Maybe some eggs if they’re cheap. I’ll walk around the building slow fifteen times. If they’re not up, I’ll go make some noise in there.
On my tenth time around, a man comes out of the office and asks if can he help me. “Oh, no,” I say. “I’m just getting some exercise.”
He nods, looks at me like maybe I am crazy. But then he just goes back inside the office. I follow him. “Do you need any help?” I ask.
“Pardon me?”
“Is there anything I can help you with?”
He waits, opens his mouth, closes it. Then, “What unit are you in?”
“Seven,” I say. “A green one.”
“I think you’d better go back there,” he says.
Well, now I have messed up twice. He could get suspicious. I could wreck everything. I will go back inside, sit quiet until they get up. I can play checkers in my head.
I open the door and Diane rolls over again. “Close it!” she whispers, hard. I close it and she gets up, points to the bathroom. I go in and she follows me. “What the hell are you doing?” she says. “We’ve been up all night! You need to be quiet.”
I nod, look away from her at my soap. That was from when everything was going fine.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m not tired.”
She sighs, looks away, then back at me. “I’ll give you some money,” she says. “You can get something to eat. There’s a restaurant across the highway.”
“I know,” I say. And I want to add all the other things I know are here: many varieties of weeds. Wildflowers, purple and pink and yellow. All the same kind of yellowish rock. One horny toad, at least. It takes forty steps to walk along the front and the back of the building, ten to get past the side. I guess I know there is a restaurant across the highway. I guess I don’t need Diane to tell me.
She goes out of the bathroom, comes back with her purse, hands me a fiver. “Be careful crossing,” she says.
“Do you want anything?” I ask.
“Yes. Sleep.”
“Okay.”
I go outside, sit by our door. I don’t want to eat alone. I’ll wait until I’m too hungry to be scared of it. And then I’ll eat slow. For now, I’ll just watch whatever happens. Or doesn’t.
We are on the road again, and I am sitting in the back of the truck. There’s some privacy here. Nobody is la-de-dah minding you. I can’t wait for this day to be over because it is nothing but bad. I ate a candy bar for breakfast, because I sure wasn’t going to sit in that restaurant alone. All the tables full of people sitting together, kids playing with their straws and talking a mile a minute, adults drinking coffee and smiling at them, Aren’t you cute? The hostess dressed in her puffy sleeves and little hat asking me, “Can I help you?” her eyes squinty with suspicion. Well, I just said no thank you, and went over to the vending machine. I got some change and bought a Nestle’s Crunch. I ate it by the pool and then I sat outside the motel room until they were ready to go. Dickie came out first, smiling and sleepy, and I was not in the mood to try to come up with something, so I didn’t say anything. He and Diane went to get coffee and I said, “Oh, no, I just ate,” and then I had to wait some more. I might as well have been Chinese-tortured. I made the bed in the motel room. I opened the drapes all the way. I dusted the tabletops with some toilet paper. And then they came back, Diane put the suitcases in the truck, and Dickie spread the map across the hood. Here was the dangerous part, with all of us thinking, Can he find us?
And now we have passed through Beeville on our way to Corpus Christi. The ocean is there, I know. Diane wants