“Where did you get that jacket?” I asked. “You get a job as a crossing guard?”
“No,” he said blankly. “You know I wouldn’t want a job like that. I don’t like being around little kids.”
“It was a bad joke. Where did you get that?”
“One time, Dad let me go to Walmart to buy some map books, and I saw it on sale. He got it for me.”
“It’s bright,” I said.
“Are you ready to go?”
“We’re a little ahead of schedule,” I said.
“I think we should go.”
“Okay.” I grabbed my own, less fluorescent, sport coat and slipped it on.
We stepped out onto the porch and I locked the front door behind me. I thought Thomas might stand there a moment, to take it all in. There was a cool breeze, but the sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. But Thomas made a beeline for the Audi and yanked on the passenger door handle a couple of times.
“It’s locked,” he said.
“Give me a second.” I dug the remote from my pocket, aimed, and pressed. Thomas got in, put on his seat belt, and watched me impatiently as I came around the car, got in, did up my own belt, and keyed the ignition. The dashboard screen that allowed the driver to monitor dozens of the vehicle’s functions, including the GPS, came to life.
“Okay, how it works is-”
“I can figure it out,” Thomas said. He started turning knobs, touching the screen. “So if I want to enter in an address-”
“You see that thing there? You just-”
“I got it. You put in the city first, right?” I watched him type in “McLean.”
“What are you doing?” Dr. Grigorin’s office was in Promise Falls.
“I want to see what directions it gives for McLean, Virginia,” he said.
“Why the hell would we go to Virginia?” I asked. “That’s hundreds of miles away. The doctor’s ten minutes. Virginia would take us all day.”
“I don’t actually want to go there. I don’t have an appointment or anything. I wanted to see if it would give us the best route.” He studied the screen a moment longer, appeared to get frustrated, and said, “Fine, I’ll enter in the coordinates for the doctor’s office. It’s 2654 Pennington, suite 304.”
“You don’t have to enter the suite number. We’re not mailing her something. We’re driving there.”
Thomas stopped examining the system long enough to look at me. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
The question, coming from anyone else, would have been sarcastic, or confrontational. But Thomas’s tone suggested he was really asking.
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I’m sorry if I came across that way.”
“You think I dress stupid. I could tell. You were making fun of my coat. And now you think I’m too stupid to figure this out.”
“No-I mean, okay, the coat is a bit bright. But I don’t think you’re stupid. You seem to be able to intuit these things almost instantly. Go ahead. Put in the doctor’s address.”
He entered it, waited a couple of seconds for the nav system to figure things out.
“Proceed to the highlighted route,” the car’s computer said.
“That’s Maria,” I said, heading the car down the driveway.
“What?”
“That’s what I call the lady in my dashboard. Maria.”
“Oh,” Thomas said. “Why Maria?”
“I don’t know. She just strikes me as a Maria. Maybe she should be Gretchen or Heidi or something that sounds kind of German, but I like Maria.”
He was studying the screen as I drove down the road and pulled onto the highway. He never took his eyes off the digital map. “We’re just passing Miller’s Lane,” he said.
“You could look out the window and know that,” I said. “Let me ask you something.”
“About what?”
“About when you found Dad. You okay talking about that?”
“This red line,” he said, pointing. “Is that the route the car wants us to take?”
“That’s right. You mind my asking something about when you found Dad?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Either before or after you pushed the tractor off him, did you touch any of the controls on it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like turn off the key, or lift up the blades?”
“No. I don’t even know how to drive it. Dad never let me use it. This computer is wrong.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the navigational screen the whole time we’d been talking.
“So you didn’t touch anything,” I said. “On the tractor.”
“That’s right.”
“What about when the ambulance came, or the police. Did any of the paramedics touch it?”
“They only cared about Dad. And I never saw the police do anything with it, but I wasn’t always there. Maybe later they came.”
“But it hasn’t been moved all week,” I said. “It’s been sitting down by the creek this whole time.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Thomas asked.
“About what?”
“This thing is wrong.” He was still staring at the screen.
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“The route. It’s no good.”
“In three hundred yards, make a right turn.”
“Maria’s wrong,” Thomas said.
“She is?”
“She’s telling you the wrong way to go. There’s a faster way to go.”
“She does that sometimes. She tends to stick to the main roads. And some of the really new roads, she doesn’t even know they’re there. Don’t worry about it. Think of Maria as an adviser. You can choose to take her advice, or not.”
“Well, she shouldn’t be giving advice if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He started fiddling with the buttons. “How do you tell her she’s making a mistake?”
“I don’t know that-”
“In one hundred yards, make a right turn.”
“No!” Thomas shouted at the screen. “If we go the way she’s suggesting, she’ll take us down Saratoga Street. I don’t want to go down Saratoga Street.”
“What difference does it make?”
“I don’t want to go that way!” He was starting to sound frantic.
“Just tell me which way you want me to go,” I said. “We can tell Maria to take a hike.”
Thomas said he wanted to go downtown by way of Main, not Saratoga. I said okay, since it was about the same distance. I ignored Maria when, as we passed Saratoga, she implored me to turn around. When I kept driving in the same direction, she recalculated the route, but she kept wanting to send us back, eventually, to Saratoga Street.
“Shut up,” Thomas told her.
Maria said, “In three hundred yards, make a left turn.”
“I don’t believe this,” Thomas said. He was becoming increasingly agitated. “Make her stop. Make her stop talking.” He slapped his hand on top of the dashboard, the way my father used to deal with the TV years ago when the horizontal went wonky.
“Just cancel the route,” I said. “That button there.”
Thomas, who’d been so good at entering the data, became flustered when it came to undoing what he’d done.
“Make a right turn.”
