I didn’t want to explain all that to her, so I just got out and looked around in there and found nothing. I heard her lock the doors after I got out and then unlock them when I was ready to get back in again.
“This is weird,” I said, and got into the back seat with the baby again.
“What’s weird about it?”
“Driving around in a Mercedes to pick up recycling,” I said, because I knew by then that it was a Mercedes, because I had eyes in my head. “I mean, who does that? And also, what’s wrong with the paint on this car? Why would you have it like this? Don’t people stare at you wherever you go?”
She wasn’t driving to the next corner—she was just sitting there behind the wheel, listening to me complain about her car.
“This is the one that got carjacked,” she said. “It’s my mother’s car. The guy who stole it took it to a chop shop and they started to repaint it. And then I guess they got interrupted by the police. My mother just got it back. She’s in this fight with her insurance company to try to get them to cover repainting it.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what more to say about a thing like that.
I was staring through the windshield at the hood of the car, and the way the solid-yellow paint faded into this sort of mist of tiny drops, the way paint does when you’re spraying and haven’t had a chance to go back over it with the sprayer again. And at the same time I was wondering why she wasn’t talking and also wasn’t driving.
“You need to put on your seat belt,” she said after a while.
“That’ll take all day! Every time I get out I have to take it off, and then every time I get in again I have to put it on, and we’re stopping at just about every corner. It’ll take forever!”
“It’s still faster than walking,” she said.
I couldn’t argue with that, even though I wished I could have because it all sounded like a lot of trouble. Also I guess I wasn’t used to having somebody looking over my shoulder while I picked through the trash, especially not some regular clean person with a nice house. I guess I was wishing I could just do this on my own like every other day.
While I was thinking all this, she still wasn’t driving.
“I had a thought,” she said.
I could just tell by the way she said it that this was going to be the heart of the thing—like all my wondering about why she was here again was about to be answered by this thought.
“Okay . . . ,” I said. But I said it like it wasn’t really very okay, because I had no idea if it was okay until I heard it.
“I was thinking maybe I could drive you home. But I don’t mean to where you’ve been staying. And I don’t mean the foster place. I mean actually home.”
I burst out laughing, and it made the baby laugh, too, and bounce her hands up and down against the padded bar that held her into her car seat.
“What’s so funny?” the Brooke lady asked, and she sounded a little hurt or offended that I was laughing at her idea—or maybe both.
“You think the only thing keeping me from going home is that I don’t have a ride?”
“No. I don’t think that. I know there was trouble between you and your mother. I don’t know what kind of trouble, because you won’t tell me. And I guess that’s okay. Because what business is it of mine, really? But I just know she’s your mother. And I know how much I love my daughter. And I just think there’s a chance it’s something that can be worked out.”
I didn’t answer, because I was thinking about what she’d just said, and for a minute I was wondering if she was right. It was a dangerous thought and I knew it, because I knew my mother and she didn’t. But you know how sometimes a person will tell you how they look at something, and it’s totally different from how you see it, but their view of things starts to seem just as right as yours, and then you don’t know which to believe? It was like that.
“Where’s home?” she asked me, because I still wasn’t saying anything.
“Utah.”
“Oh,” she said, and I could tell she was disappointed. “I was hoping you’d say something closer, like Orange County or Sacramento.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I said, “because you don’t have to do it.”
“No, I’ll still do it,” she said.
Then she started driving again, driving me to all my regular trash bins in that wild blue-and-yellow half-repainted Mercedes-Benz.
It was just such a weird thing and I didn’t know what to say about it. So we drove around and stopped at every trash bin, and I put on and took off my seat belt every time, and I just kept avoiding saying yes or no to her idea, because I had no idea what to say.
“I came out to her,” I said.
It was maybe half an hour later when I told her the thing I didn’t want to tell her. I’d found a big paper grocery sack in one of the garbage bins and I had it in the back with me, half full of bottles
