color, hair color, and birth date, printed and cropped it, then inserted it into the plastic sleeve in her wallet. With the slight clouding, the license looked perfect.
She scanned Ty’s high school group picture, and began to play with the images. In a few minutes she had separated Ty’s face from the others and superimposed it on the image of the California license. Then she typed in the name James Russell Forster. She put in a new eight-digit number in red and changed the birth date. Then she printed it and cut it to size.
She took off her clothes and washed them with Ty’s. While the clothes were in the dryer she took a hot bath. Before it got dark she found Ty’s mother’s nail kit and did her nails. In the last of the natural light she did her makeup and brushed her hair.
When she heard Ty’s car come up the driveway, she moved to the kitchen to wait for him. She heard the garage door open and the car glide in. Ty closed the garage door, then came to the kitchen door, opened it, and turned on the light. He was carrying a bag of food from El Taco Rancho.
“Welcome home, Ty.”
At first he was startled, but he recovered quickly. He stepped closer to her, looked at her hair, stared into her eyes. “Unbelievable.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s awesome. You look like my aunt.”
“Now I’m your aunt?”
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “You just look a little bit like her. Not like she looks now. It’s my aunt Darlene, my mother’s sister. You’re a lot younger, but I bet that’s what she looked like when she was young. She was supposed to be hot. My father says she was a piece of ass, but now she’s just a pain in the ass.” He walked around her in a circle. “I can’t get over this. You look so different. Your eyes and everything.”
“So it looks all right?”
“Yeah, it does. It’s a turn-on.”
“You’re a sixteen-year-old boy. Everything is a turn-on to you.”
“Everything about you is.” He set the bag of food on the counter and put his arms around her, so she had to kiss him. When his hands began to move from her waist, she grasped them and held on.
“I’ve got some other things to show you. Come on.” She pulled him to his bedroom, where she had the new birth certificate and driver’s license for James Russell Forster.
He picked them up and looked from one to the other. “Man, I can hardly believe this. It’s . . . like, perfect. Can you make me one that says I’m twenty-one?”
She laughed. “You mean so you can get into bars?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to use this one when we’re traveling.” She grinned. “But later I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I ask.” He went to his closet, opened the door, and took off his uniform shirt. As he pulled out a clean shirt, she saw something.
“Is that a gun?”
He reached into the corner of the closet and grasped it by the walnut foregrip and pulled it out. “Yeah. See? It was my father’s old one, the first one he ever had, when he was my age. It’s a thirty-ought-six.”
She touched the smooth wooden stock, the bolt, and the scope. “Have you ever fired it?”
“Hell, yes. A million times. I’m a great shot.”
“What have you shot at?”
“Deer, elk.”
“You kill deer?”
“We didn’t last year. My dad had to work weekends for practically the whole season, and I had football practice.”
“But you’ve used it?”
“Yeah. Now you’re going to tell me you hate me because I iced Bambi’s mom, aren’t you?”
She realized she must have had a lapse of concentration and let him see her disenchantment with hunting. She touched his arm. “There’s nothing about you I don’t like, Ty. You’re a special person.”
He put the rifle back in the closet, turned back to her, and said, “Shit. I forgot to bring in all the stuff I bought. It’s still in the trunk.” He hurried out of the room, then came back a few minutes later with three large shopping bags.
He reached into his pocket. “I had about sixty bucks left from buying that stuff.”
“Hold on to it. I need to give you more, so you can get some supplies tomorrow for the trip.”
He studied her. “Is that when we’re leaving?”
She shrugged. “The longer we wait, the safer it is. But I’d like to be out of here at least two days before your parents show up.” She frowned. “Why don’t they ever call you?”
“They do. They called me about five times while they were in Lake Havasu. I think they were feeling guilty. Or maybe they just wanted to be sure I was going to work. Since then I called them twice on my cell phone.”
She grinned. “You don’t want me to hear what you’re saying, huh? Do you call them ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’?”
“No,” he said. “I just don’t want any trouble. If they heard you talking or I sounded like somebody was with me, we’d be screwed.” He asked, “Where are we going? We haven’t talked about it at all.”
“I don’t know.”
“Where were you going before?”
“I didn’t know then, either. We need to get out of Flagstaff, out of this part of the country, where people expect to spot me. Beyond that, it doesn’t matter. Every place has something nice about it.”
“But we have to be heading somewhere.”
“I have an idea. After dinner, why don’t you go on the Internet and see if you can work out a route heading east, with maps and everything?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll map out a couple of ways, in case the first one is too dangerous.”
“Good idea.” Then she added, “Jim.”
“Thanks, Anne.”
After dinner she cleared the table and went into the living room to examine the clothes he had bought. She looked into the first bag with trepidation, but in it she found two pairs of pants—one black, which was perfect, and one brown, which was ugly—a pair of blue jeans, and a pair of Nike running shoes. The tags told her he had bought the sizes she had given him. She was relieved.
In another bag were six pairs of socks, six pairs of panties, and three bras, supposedly obtained for the price of two. She thought of Ty going into that section of the store to buy those things and it made her smile. He had bought himself a jacket, as though to assuage his embarrassment.
The third bag had a couple of T-shirts, one of which had a picture of a cat and said “Cat-fight Boxing”; the other said “Hotel Juicy.” The sweatshirt with them mercifully said nothing. There were three other tops, one a hideous pink, one sky blue, and the other the sort of green that people wore on St. Patrick’s Day. All of the tops were completely wrong for her, but with the exception of the green top, none of them stood out, and all seemed to be the right sizes. She had never been seen wearing anything like them before. The more she considered the clothes, the happier she was.
She noticed that Ty was standing in the doorway, looking at her anxiously, so she said, “Ty, this is just fabulous. You did a wonderful job, much better than I ever expected.” She put her arms around his neck and hugged him.
“Did I get the right sizes?”
“I haven’t tried them on yet, but the tags say you got what I asked for.”
“How about the suitcase?”
She took it out of the bag, unzipped it, and said, “It’s perfect. Thank you so much.” She busied herself removing all of the tags and pins, and throwing them in the trash with the plastic bags. Then she went into Ty’s parents’ bathroom to try on the clothes. She went through the process quickly, and found that everything would serve its purpose. Since she had been trying to hide, she had found little in the refrigerator, and nothing Ty had brought home from El Taco Rancho was more than marginally edible, so she had lost weight. She put on the black pants and the sky blue top, and went back to Ty’s bedroom.
