“I’m sorry,” I said to Molly. “I’m not mad at you. Well, I’m a little mad at you. But not mostly.”
I heard her let out a long, slow breath. Relief.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I thought you were pulling over to tell me to get out of the car. Who are you mad at mostly?”
“Your mother.”
“Oh. So you did talk to her.”
“Yes.”
“So we’re both going back to LA.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I figured.”
I looked up again. Through the windshield. Watched the cars stream along the I-15.
“I can’t say you didn’t warn me,” I said.
“What did she say?”
“Something about the devil. Quite a bit about the devil, actually.”
“Yup. That’s my mom. Did she tell you I could come home if I didn’t bring the devil with me? I meant to warn you about that, but then I got all scared and all the thoughts dropped out of my head. But she said it, right?”
“She absolutely did say that.”
“You know what that means?”
“I didn’t at first. But as we were talking I figured it out.”
“And you know I can’t do that, right? I mean, literally can’t?”
“Of course you can’t. Nobody can. You can’t change who you are. It was wrong of her to ask you to try. Now come on. Let’s go home.”
I shifted into drive again and pulled carefully into the traffic lane. Headed for the on-ramp.
“Easy for you to say,” Molly said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you have a home to go to. I have to go back to that crate on the street.”
“No, you don’t. No way. I’m not dumping you back there.”
“So where do I go?”
“I have no idea. But I’ll figure it out. I’ll come up with something. I don’t know. I’ll talk to your social worker. Or find some kind of program or some kind of group home or . . . I don’t know, Molly. I can’t think right now. I’m too upset. I need more time to think. All I know right now is that I’m not throwing you back out on the street. Bad enough that happened to you once in your life. It’s not going to happen with me.”
Another long breath out of her.
“Thanks,” she said. And left it at that.
Then we were all quiet for a time. I accelerated to seventy on the interstate, and we drove southwest, toward home, for many miles without talking.
“I ran into Gail,” she said. Just out of nowhere. Her voice sounded grave and dispirited.
“At the coffee place?”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s why you didn’t stay there for me to pick you up.”
“Right.”
“So we both had a really terrible day.”
“You can say that again,” she said.
Chapter Twenty
Molly: Ouch
We were on our way back through that little corner of Arizona, the one you might miss if you blinked, and I was feeling like I shouldn’t talk to her because it seemed like she was falling apart at the seams. Kind of driving and falling apart at the same time, but she was still doing a pretty good job of driving anyway. I mean, she wasn’t scaring me. The bad stuff was mostly a thing that looked like it was happening on the inside of her.
I wasn’t exactly what you might call on top of the world myself, but I swear she looked worse than I felt, and I wasn’t even sure I knew why.
While I wasn’t talking to her, I was thinking about what she’d said about getting me someplace to live, but I didn’t figure it would work out that way.
Nothing against her personally, but it reminded me of Bodhi when we started getting to be friends. The way he said to me, “Come on, Molly, we’ll go someplace better, and don’t worry about anything because you’ll always have me looking after you.”
It’s not that he turned out to be a liar, because he wasn’t, and it’s not like he ever really betrayed me on purpose. More like he just couldn’t do everything he said he could—like he just sort of overestimated his own power to work things out and made a bunch of promises too big to fill. I figured it would be like that with Brooke, too.
I looked over at her, and I was surprised to see her looking back—like we each snuck a look to size the other up, and at exactly the same time, and then we both got caught.
Then she had to look back at the road again, because . . . well, you know. She was driving.
“I feel like I shouldn’t talk to you,” I said to her a little later.
“Why not?”
“You seem so upset.”
“I don’t know that talking to me would make it any worse.”
I squirmed around a little in my seat and then I said, “I guess what I mean is, I feel like I shouldn’t ask you about it. About why you’re so upset. Or maybe I’m just afraid to ask about it, because I have this crazy idea that it’s sort of a nice thing for me, like a compliment to me. You know, like you actually care that my mom was bad to me or something, but now that I’ve gone and said all that out loud I’m worried you’ll tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not entirely wrong,” she said, and then she brushed her hair back off her forehead with this big sweep of her hand, like her fingers were a comb. “But you have to understand that there’s some of my own situation mixed into it.”
I didn’t know which part of her own situation, and I didn’t want to ask, but I knew she was telling the truth, because anytime a person gets that upset about somebody else’s situation, it’s a little bit their own situation, too. That’s one of those things that other people don’t always seem to notice, but I think you can pick up on stuff like that if you’re even halfway paying attention. Or anyway, that’s what I always figured and it seemed to work
