“What would you do?” I asked her.
“What would I do about what?”
She was bouncing the baby on her hip, and acting like her mind was a million miles away.
There was no line, so we stepped right up to the window. The place was open twenty-four hours a day, so even though it was pretty weird to want a hot dog for breakfast, you could get one if that’s what you wanted.
I ordered one with chili and cheese and tomatoes and onions, and she paid for it, and then we sat at one of the outside tables to wait. She was nervous, and looking around, and she still had the pepper spray tight in one hand. The benches were stone and really cold right through my pants.
“What would I do about what?” she asked again.
“What if Etta grew up and came out to you? What would you do?”
She answered without taking any time to think, and her face didn’t change at all. The question was nothing to her. Nowhere near the everything it was to me.
“Oh, hell, I don’t care,” she said. “So long as she’s happy. I don’t care how she’s happy.”
I knew then. I knew I was okay being with her, but . . . more than okay. Almost like I was home with her, in a weird way. I mean, it wasn’t as good as having a real home, because I couldn’t actually live in a thing like I’d found with her, but it still felt something like home, because it was a place where I could bring my whole self.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s try it. Let’s go back to Utah and see if she got used to the idea at all by now.”
I didn’t really think it would work, because I knew my mother better than that. I didn’t say yes because I thought I’d get to stay in our house in Utah with my little sisters. I said yes because it was a few more days I’d get to stay with Brooke, who would buy me meals, and let me be around her little daughter, and who wouldn’t care at all if Etta came out to her later when she was older.
Maybe she’d even get to know me too well to throw me back out on the street again.
“What changed your mind?” she asked me.
“Just sounds like a better few days than what I had planned.”
“What did you have planned?”
“Pretty much this,” I said.
And I put my arms out wide, like I was a tour guide showing her my world.
“Got it,” she said. “We’ll leave tomorrow. Hell, what am I waiting for? We’ll leave today.”
Chapter Seventeen
Brooke: Fool
I guess we’d been driving for about an hour when it hit me. I was a complete idiot. A total, unmitigated fool.
It was as though the truth had been there all along. Hanging over my head like a bunch of sandbags. Totally real. Totally present. But not touching me in any way. And then it all just let go and landed on me.
There was no way the truth could have been as simple as her story had made it out to be.
I mean, you ask a teenager, “What did you do?” And they say, “Nothing. Honest. I was perfect. I was just being myself, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to be. And then this totally unfair adult just punished me for something that nobody in their right mind would punish a kid for, and I was completely right and they were completely wrong, and it wasn’t my fault in any way.”
Now I ask you: What kind of fool believes a story like that?
I glanced at her in the rearview mirror and accepted the truth: that I would likely show up at her mother’s door and be faced with a reality quite different from the one I’d been sold.
But I wasn’t turning back. Mostly because I needed to feel I’d done my part for the girl. After everything she’d done for Etta and me, it wasn’t too much to ask. Especially when I had no job from which I was missing time. And I had the car for as long as I needed it because my mother refused to drive it until the paint situation was sorted out.
And maybe, just maybe . . . because there was a one percent of one percent chance she might be telling the truth. But that was a damn slim chance. Based on my experience with the world, the truth is never as simple as the answer you get when you ask one of the two parties to tell you their side of a thing.
Molly was riding in the back seat with Etta. As though I were their chauffeur. But I knew she didn’t mean it that way. She just wanted time with the baby and vice versa.
When I’d told my mom about the trip, she not only hadn’t argued with me over the use of her car, she’d seemed more than a little bit relieved. I guess we all needed time alone.
While I’d packed the trunk full of necessary items, nine-tenths of them for the baby, Molly had walked to a gas station restroom and cleaned herself, and washed her clothes out in the sink. She had showed up back at the car wearing sopping-wet clothes, but smelling decent. Her hair was still filthy.
I’d made a mental note to stop and buy her at least one change of clothes.
She caught my eye in the rearview mirror. Caught me staring at her. I could tell it made her feel a little defensive.
I looked away.
I watched the road over the ridiculous half-yellow hood of the Mercedes. I still hadn’t gotten used to that. In fact, by then
