I watched some more of Arizona slide by the window, and then she started talking about it again on her own.
“I don’t have to tell you how much I love my daughter. At least, I don’t think I do.”
“No, you don’t. I know it.”
“I suppose it shook my faith. You know. To see how something can come between a mother and a daughter like that. And it might be a little bit about how I almost lost Etta. I think at this point in my life there’s a piece of that in everything. Every feeling, everything I go through.”
“I can understand that,” I said.
And I really could, because, you know, we’ve all almost lost something. If we’re lucky. If we’re not so lucky then there’s no “almost” about it.
“Was she with another girl?” she asked, and for a minute I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Was who with another girl?”
But before she even answered, I figured out who she must mean.
“Gail,” she said. Kind of quiet, like Gail’s name was a bomb she had to be careful to set down real gently.
“Oh. That. Right. No. She was with Jason Miller, which is, like, so weird I can hardly process it in my brain.”
“Is he just a friend? I hope?”
“I have no idea.”
“Does she like boys, too?”
“I didn’t think so. But you never really know about somebody. People can always surprise you. But I’m kind of sitting here trying to decide that no, she doesn’t. You know, like trying really hard to believe she doesn’t, because I really don’t want what happened to be anything I can’t handle. Because I really don’t feel like I could handle that. It’s hard even just talking about it like we’re doing.”
I watched her wrinkle up her forehead before she answered.
“I’m sorry,” she said after some wrinkling. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m glad you brought it up. At least, I think I am. If you brought it up for the reason I think you brought it up, then I’m glad, even though I hate talking about it. But I think the reason you want to know is because you feel bad for me if it happened like that, because you know how hard it is to see your ex with somebody new. At least, I think you know.”
“Oh, I do.”
“I figured you must, because I figured everybody must. Except maybe the luckiest person in the whole world who I guess fell in love with their high school sweetheart or something and then they never broke up again and were still together when they died. I wonder how often that happens.”
“Not often,” she said.
I could hear the baby snoring in her car seat in the back, which meant it would be another long night of not being able to get her to sleep. I wondered if we would stop at a motel again or just keep driving.
“When Etta was gone,” she said, “I drove over to see my ex-husband. Because I felt like I had to tell him. And he was in bed in the middle of the day with some new woman he’s been seeing.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Yeah. Ouch. So I know.”
“Well, anyway, it was nice of you to care how bad my day was. And that’s one more thing we have in common—we both hate bumping into our exes. Except maybe the whole world has that in common, I don’t know.”
“It’ll do for something in common,” she said.
I thought that was a nice thing to say—a small nice thing, but still nice. Almost like she was trying or something.
We stopped at a motel, so that was the answer to that question. It wasn’t anything like the last motel. It was in a newer section of Barstow, and all on concrete, and it was a big box of a place that looked just like the big box of a place on either side of it. I wondered how she even chose it, since there were a bunch and they all looked alike and their signs all said they had vacancies, but I did see her staring at her phone while we were waiting at a stoplight, so maybe she figured out that this was the cheapest one.
We hauled all that stuff for the baby out of the trunk again and she hung all these different straps on my shoulders and took a few herself, and then she hauled the baby out of the car seat.
Etta was still pretty deep asleep from all the driving.
“I’ll take her if you want,” I said, because I could see Brooke was tired. Not even just tired in her body, although probably that, too, but more like all the way down to her spirit she just seemed exhausted.
“Maybe she’ll sleep straight through,” she said.
But I don’t even know why she said that, because we both knew it would never happen that way. Anybody who knows anything about babies would know it would never happen that way, because they don’t sleep all day and then all night. One or the other—and even that’s only if you’re really lucky—but definitely not both.
She handed the baby over, and I let her sleep on my shoulder, but then, as we were walking to the office, she started waking up.
I could see Brooke’s face in the light that was shining outside the office door, and I swear she looked like she was about to cry. Like it was all just too much for her. It kind of scared me, what with her being the grown-up and all.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You just get a good night’s sleep. I’ll stay up and take care of her.”
She stopped walking and looked at me for a long time. Like she’d never met me or something. Like she was trying to figure out who I was and how I could be the way I was being.
“Why would you do that? It’s not really fair to make her
