Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [3]
“The green weenie,” I agreed.
“Can’t you get out of it?”
“Not without being an old lady about it.”
Nobody wants to be an old lady. Connors understood that.
“Then let Odd do most of the driving.”
“Okay.”
“You ride in the back seat and try to get some sleep. You need your sleep.”
“I will. I do.”
“Why don’t you just quit? The hell with it. We don’t need the money.”
“Twenty-two months, and I’m outta there. Listen, angel, I don’t have anything at home for your dinner.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of myself.”
He was a good husband and I had no complaints. I was the best wife I could be and he didn’t complain either, though the silences were getting longer.
“See you in about…let’s say, fifteen hours,” I said.
He came out from behind the counter for a hug and a kiss.
All my life I have been aware, more than most people, of the possibility of sweeping changes during unexpected moments, and yet, like everyone else, I go on assuming things will occur more or less as they were supposed to occur. See you tomorrow, plumber on Tuesday, eight and a half percent interest, cloudy and mild, Woodlife the deck in August, early retirement in twenty-two more months…. What fools we are, ain’t?
3.
My old man had to take a yearly vacation. It was forced on him by my mother, who would not go along but believed it important for him to get away from the store once a year, for at least a week, though if he were to be gone for a week, the drive had better be three and a half days each way, because he never lasted longer than the drive itself. When I reached the age of sixteen and got my driver’s license, I went with him.
He would sit next to me with a sixer of Bud, tune in the baseball game, and let me drive him all the way to Toronto or Atlanta or Rapid City, South Dakota. He had no love for those particular cities, no sights he wanted to see. Their only appeal was that they seemed far enough away to constitute a vacation, far enough away from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where we lived. The old man and I would reach Toronto or Atlanta or Rapid City, and we would stay the night in some eight-dollar motel. He would caution me not to walk around the room in my bare feet, because we did not know who occupied the room before us. We would have dinner, supper we called it, in some restaurant recommended by the desk clerk. Early the next morning, often before daybreak, we would start the long drive back to Pennsylvania, having seen nothing but the road, the motels, the restaurants.The old man could claim a vacation and my mother would leave him alone about it.
On the road, this is the story I told Odd, about me and my old man and our road trips. He got half a kick out of it, cracked half a smile.
“Were you a tomboy back then?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Relax. It’s just the way I picture it.”
“It was my transistion period. A year or two before, I played shortstop on the boys’ team. I played center in vacant lot football, and it was only years later it dawned on me that I won that position so the guy playing quarterback could cop feels. I did some street fighting too, and held my own.”
“Your father still alive?”
“No, they’re both gone.”
“You had a good childhood, though, sounds like.”
“Yeah, there was usually a lot of yelling but no one ever got hit. I was the only child, but nobody doted on me. Just the opposite. They made sure I was tough.”
“There was never any yelling in my house,” said Odd. “There was hardly any talking. I wasn’t real sure I even belonged there.”
“I had the same feeling! Felt out of place. In the family, in the town, da frick. Maybe it’s that way with all kids.”
“Could be. Like Spokane, I kept wondering why in the hell we had to live here, but nobody else seemed to think about it.”
“How come you didn’t just leave, when you came of age?”
“Good question. It’s not like I never thought about it.”
“Still not too late. You’d qualify in most