Amy & Roger's Epic Detour (13 page)

“Ah,” I murmured, not sure what else to say. Amy! probably would have known exactly what questions to ask. She would have been sympathetic and kind, inviting Roger to talk about his feelings without reservation. She probably would not have sat silently next to him, looking out the window, afraid to ask him anything in case he returned the favor.

“Utah,” Roger said, pointing out the window at the sign. We slowed, and I leaned over and looked at it.
WELCOME TO UTAH
! it read. And then in smaller letters underneath that,
MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME ZONE
.

As we drove past it, I thought about the imaginary line we’d just crossed, and how even though I was two states out of California, nothing felt any different. Not that I’d really been expecting it to.

“So!” said Roger, turning to look at me. “You’re falling down on your job here. I need to be kept awake. Ask me questions. Recite poetry. Whatever you’ve got.”

“Is it a person?” I asked, yawning, six rounds of Twenty Questions later.

“Yes,” Roger said. “Nineteen. Stay with me, Curry!”

I smiled at that, and it happened automatically, surprising me enough that I stopped immediately. “Are they alive?” I asked.

“No. Eighteen.”

“Are they male?”

“Yes. Seventeen.”

I looked at Roger, who no longer seemed in danger of falling asleep at the wheel. I had learned the hard way that history majors had a distinct advantage when playing games like Twenty Questions. But I was beginning to get a sense of the kind of answer he was continually choosing. “Is he an explorer?”

Roger glanced over at me, one eyebrow raised, looking maybe a little impressed. “Yes. Sixteen.”

He’d already chosen Drake, Livingstone, and Sir Edmund Hillary. I took a guess and hoped it was right, as I wasn’t sure how many more explorers I knew. “Is it Vasco da Gama?”

He sighed, but seemed happy. “Got it in five,” he said. “Well done. Your turn.”

“What’s with the explorers?” I asked, figuring that four in a row had to be something of a theme, not just a strategy to keep beating me.

Roger shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. He ran his hand through his hair, and it stood up in little tufts all over his head. I had an impulse to reach over and smooth it down. But it was an impulse I immediately squashed. “I’ve always been interested in them. Since I was a kid. I loved the idea that people could discover things. That you could be the person to see something first. Or see something that nobody else had been able to.”

“Is that why you’re a history major?”

He smiled without looking at me. “Probably. I started reading history like an instruction manual when I was a kid, trying to figure out what all these explorers did so that I could do it too. I used to be convinced that I was going to find something really important.”

“But everything’s been found by now,” I said. I turned to face him a little more, pulling out my seat belt to give it some slack and leaning back against my window.

“Well, technically,” he said, not seeming bothered by this. “But I think there are lots of things still to be discovered. You just have to be paying attention.” I pulled one knee up and rested my chin on it, thinking about this. “God, I’ve been talking a lot,” he said with a laugh. “Your turn. Tell me something about you.”

That was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do, now or ever. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t discovered anything.”

“Yet,” Roger said emphatically, and I felt myself smiling again. But I looked over at him, with his substitute math teacher glasses and hopeful expression, and my smile faded. He hadn’t learned yet that things didn’t work out just because you wanted them to.

“Right,” I said, reaching over and turning up the music, a song about a fake empire that, on the second listen, I’d found I really liked.

“But I’m serious,” he said. “Tell me something about you. What is your … biggest regret?”

I hadn’t been expecting that question, but I knew immediately what the answer was, and I closed my eyes against it. The morning in March, carrying my flip-flops, my feet covered in grass clippings. The one thing I really, really didn’t want to think about.

I opened my eyes and looked at him. “No idea.”

Yesterday, when you were young …
—The Weepies

M
ARCH
8—
THREE MONTHS EARLIER

“So then what happened?” Julia asked breathlessly.

“Stop it,” I said, laughing into the phone. I was sitting on the front steps of the house, talking to her while my father mowed the lawn. My mother and I were always teasing him about the lawn. He tended to be kind of a slob with everything else, but about the lawn, he was beyond fastidious. It never looked like it needed mowing, mostly because he spent every Saturday morning doing just that. “There’s an art to it,” he always insisted. “I’d like to see you try!”

As I watched, he pivoted the mower at a sharp 90-degree angle to get the corner of the lawn. “There’s really nothing to tell,” I said, turning my attention back to Julia.

“Yeah, right,” she said, and I could hear she was laughing too, which always made me happy, as Julia was usually a little too composed, always considering her words before she said them. “I need details, Amy.”

I could feel myself smile. I’d had a date—and a pretty epic make-out session—with Michael the night before. And Julia was always the first person I told about these things. Somehow, if I didn’t talk to her about it, it didn’t seem real. “It was good,” I said, and could hear her sigh loudly over the phone, all the way from Florida.

“Details!” she said again.

“My
dad
is out here,” I said into the phone, lowering my volume. “I can’t talk about this now.”

“Tell Julia I say hi,” my father called, as he pivoted the mower again.

“Put your back into it!” I called to him, and he smiled as he headed in the other direction, for an overgrown patch invisible to everyone but him.

“Come on,” Julia said. “Give me the scoop. Things are going well with you and the college boy?”

I looked over to check that my father was out of earshot. “Yes,” I said, settling back against the step, preparing for one of our marathon conversations. “Okay. So last night he picked me up at eight.”

“And what did you wear?” she prompted.

“Amy,” my mother said, in the doorway behind me. I lowered the phone and looked at her. She seemed stressed, and usually Saturday was the one day she took off from that.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Have you seen your brother?”

I could feel my pulse begin to race a little bit at that, as I tried in an instant to figure out what the right answer would be. Charlie hadn’t sent me an alibi text, so I was in the dark as to what he’d told Mom and Dad he was doing, and what he’d actually ended up doing. “No,” I said, finally.

“He’s not upstairs,” my mother said. She frowned, staring out at the cul-de-sac. “I’m going to check again,” she said, heading back inside.

“Sorry,” I said to Julia. “Charlie drama.”

“How is he?” Julia asked. Julia had had a huge crush on Charlie back in middle school, but it has faded out during high school, when he headed down a very different path than we did.

“About the same,” I said. This was to say, not very well. I knew Julia would understand what I meant. I looked back to the house and realized I should probably do some recon, to try and get in front of this before it got worse. “I should go.”

“Okay,” Julia said. “But call me later? Promise?”

“Of course,” I said. I hung up with her and pulled the door open, taking just a moment to look back at my father, in his element, puttering along behind the mower, whistling to himself.

A love-struck Romeo sings a streetsuss serenade.

—Dire Straits

I sat on the edge of the king-size bed, trying not to disturb the rose petals scattered on it, waiting for Roger to come out of the bathroom and trying to figure out how, exactly, this had happened. Again.

It had taken longer than we’d thought it would to reach Delta, the first town in Utah on Highway 50. By that point I was truly concerned about Roger, who had been driving for the better part of a day. Most of the motels we passed had the
NO
in their vacancy signs illuminated, and I had begun to worry what would happen if we couldn’t find somewhere to stay in Delta. On the map, it looked like the next town was probably another hour away, and I had a feeling Roger just wasn’t going to be up for that.

We’d finally pulled into the Beehive Inn to see what the situation was. As it looked a little nicer than the roadside motels, it wasn’t advertising its occupancy in neon on its sign. We’d gotten out of the car, and as I walked to the entrance, I felt the tightness in my leg muscles, and how much my butt was aching from sitting for that long. I could feel myself getting nervous as we stepped through the automatic glass doors and into the lobby, which seemed jarringly bright after the night’s drive. I’d never tried to check in by myself at a hotel before. Was I even allowed to? Did you have to be eighteen? Was that why my mother had made reservations for us—because I wouldn’t be able to do it alone?

My heart was pounding as I reached the front desk. The hotel itself seemed nice, if a little aggressively homey, with quilts covering every available surface. Before I could look around too much, though, we were greeted by a frazzled-looking desk clerk.

“Are you the Udells?” he asked, looking from me to Roger.

“What?” I asked, thrown, as this wasn’t a question I’d been expecting. And Roger, who was literally swaying on his feet at this point, didn’t seem in a state of mind to answer it.

“I’ve been saving our last room for you,” he said, frowning at me and typing on his computer. “Even though I got that message that you were canceling the reservation. I’ve been holding it open, since you booked in advance.”

“And that’s the last room available tonight?” I asked, looking over at Roger, whose eyes were drifting shut, then snapping open again.

“Yes,” the clerk said a little testily.

“Right,” I said, thinking fast. If these Udells had canceled, they most likely weren’t coming. And it was three thirty in the morning, and Roger clearly needed to crash as soon as possible. “That’s us,” I said smiling brightly. “The Udells.” That seemed to wake Roger up a little, and he blinked at me, surprised.

“Finally,” the clerk muttered. “All right. Names?” he asked, fingers poised over his keyboard.

“Oh,” I said, “Well. That’s … Edmund. And I’m Hillary.” Roger glanced over at me, a little more sharply, and I tried to shrug as subtly as possible.

I think the clerk began to doubt us when I wasn’t able to tell him the zip code of Salt Lake City, and when Roger, who’d joined in the conversation by this point, explained that we didn’t have a cell number to give, because those things were just fads. But I think at that point the clerk just wanted us to go. I paid in cash from my mother’s sock-drawer fund, so that the Udells, whoever they were, wouldn’t be charged. Then he’d handed us a key—not a key card, but a real old-fashioned brass key, with a small heart charm dangling from it.

“Enjoy your stay,” he said, with an odd smile and a raised eyebrow. I thanked him, and Roger and I headed off to find the room.

Which turned out to be the Honeymoon Suite.

I stared at the plaque with its curly writing for a moment, hoping that it was a joke. But it wasn’t—the key fit into the lock, and it explained the clerk’s leer and the heart charm. I pushed open the door and stepped inside, and could feel myself blushing as I took in the room. The white quilt of the king-size bed was covered in rose petals, and to the side of the bed was a bottle of champagne bobbing in a bucket of water. This seemed weird until I realized it had probably been ice a few hours ago. Roger closed the door behind us and I looked up at him, hoping my face wasn’t the same color as my hair.

“So …,” I started, incredibly embarrassed, and not even sure what I
could
say about this. “Um …”