Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [90]
Mr. Beck reached out as if to pat me on the back, but wavered. I saved him by catching his hand where it hung in the air and shaking it.
“Are you sure you can’t tell us where Mandarin went?” he asked hopefully.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”
The ends of his mustache appeared to droop.
“Red Rover, Red Rover! Send Taffeta over!”
I looked out the window as my sister flung herself into the barricade of children. For a moment I thought she wouldn’t break through, but she did. Cheering, she grabbed the hand of another little girl, and together they ran and rejoined Taffeta’s side.
Maybe Mandarin had never completed a community service project. But she’d definitely left an impression on our town. Some of it good, some of it bad. All of it transcendent. I saw it now, watching the children laugh as they threw themselves at the other side in an attempt to burst through, break free. Nothing could be more Mandarin than that.
“But I can tell you why she left,” I said.
She had asked me to give her a head start before I told anyone. I didn’t know whether she feared somebody tracking her down, or whether she wanted to give her father a chance to fully absorb the note she said she’d taped to the refrigerator.
Or whether it was because she wanted to maintain her image just a few days longer, before everybody knew the real truth—that out of all the crazy places she could have run off to, of all the boys and girls and men with whom she could have gone, of all the infinite reasons to escape Washokey, Mandarin chose to find her mother.
“Look!” Momma exclaimed. “Pronghorns.”
She braked and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Right away, I spotted them: about a dozen russet antelopes with splotches of white on their chests. They strolled through the autumn-colored grasslands, seemingly undisturbed by our car. I tried not to think about the three new replacement trophies I’d seen at the Buffalo Grill, along with the two recovered from a riverbend a couple of miles north.
“There’s a baby, Grace! Look.”
Momma pointed at a tiny fawn balanced on spindly legs, staying close to his parent.
“When they sense a predator and there’s no time to run, they drop,” she said. “Did you know? They just lie there, perfectly still, blended in with the grass. You can even approach them, stand right over them. They don’t budge until their mother comes back.”
We’d only been on the road a few hours. But the change in Momma had begun as soon as we’d merged onto the interstate. Like in the photos in the manila envelope on my lap, somebody had amped up the saturation of her face, the hue and contrast of her eyes and hair.
“It’s strange,” she had said. “I’d forgotten what it’s like.”
She couldn’t keep quiet, which wasn’t unusual for Momma, especially since she’d started working on “that cookbook I always wanted to write.” But instead of nervous prattling, her words were colored by amazement.
“Do you remember that time outside of the reservation in Riverton, when we saw that band of Indians crossing the road? They were all wrapped up in blankets, on horses. You were pretty small, Grace. I know you don’t remember much from back then—”
“I remember,” I said.
Momma was quiet for a moment. “Oops,” she said. “We just went over the state line. The sign’s behind us. Now we’re in South Dakota.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
I shook my head in wonder. No malicious spirits had halted our departure. No force field or cosmic electric fence. Not even the whirl and whoop of an alarm, like I’d imagined the day I ditched school with Mandarin. No barricade of Wyomingites with linked arms, protecting the border Red Rover–style.
“We’re getting close now,” Momma said. “We’ll reach the monument in an hour and a half.”
“President heads.” Taffeta spoke up from