In the morning, she leaves Nate’s bedroll and gets back to sleep next to Franny before Franny wakes up.
They are walking on the freeway the next day, the three of them. They are together now, although they haven’t discussed it, and Jane is relieved. People are just that much less likely to mess with a man. Overhead, three jets pass going south, visible only by their contrails. At least there are jets. American jets, she hopes.
They stop for a moment while Nate goes around a bridge abutment to pee.
“Mom,” Franny says. “Do you think that someone has wrecked Pete’s place?”
“I don’t know,” Jane says.
“What do you think happened to Pete?”
Jane is caught off guard. They left without ever explicitly discussing Pete, and Jane just thought that Franny, like her, assumed Pete was dead.
“I mean,” Franny continues, “if they didn’t have gas, maybe he got stuck somewhere. Or he might have gotten hurt and ended up in the hospital. Even if the hospital wasn’t taking regular people, like, they’d take cops. Because they think of cops as one of their own.” Franny is in her adult-to-adult mode, explaining the world to her mother. “They stick together. Cops and firemen and nurses.”
Jane isn’t sure she knows what Franny is talking about. Normally she’d tell Franny as much. But this isn’t a conversation she knows how to have. Nate comes around the abutment, adjusting himself a bit, and it is understood that the subject is closed.
“Okay,” he says. “How far to Wallyworld?” Fanny giggles.
Water is their biggest problem. It’s hard to find, and
when they do find it, either from a pond or, very rarely, from a place where it hasn’t all been looted, it’s heavy. Thank God Nate is pretty good at making a fire. He has six disposable lighters that he got from a gas station, and when they find a pond, they boil it. Somewhere Jane thinks she heard that they should boil it for eighteen minutes. Basically they just boil the heck out of it. Pond water tastes terrible, but they are always thirsty. Franny whines. Jane is afraid that Nate will get tired of it and leave, but apparently as long as she crawls over to his bedroll every night, he’s not going to.
Jane waits until she can tell Franny is asleep. It’s a difficult wait. They are usually so tired it is all she can do to keep from nodding off. But she is afraid to lose Nate.
At first she liked that at night he never made a move on her. She always initiates. It made things easier all around. But now he does this thing where she crawls over and he’s pretending to be asleep. Or is asleep, the bastard, because he doesn’t have to stay awake. She puts her hand on his chest, and then down his pants, getting him hard and ready. She unzips his shorts, and still he doesn’t do anything. She grinds on him for a while, and only then does he pull his shorts and underwear down and let her ride him until he comes. Then she climbs off him. Sometimes he might say, “Thanks, Babe.” Mostly he says nothing and she crawls back next to Franny feeling as if she just paid the rent. She has never given anyone sex for money. She keeps telling herself that this night she won’t do it. See what he does. Hell, if he leaves them, he leaves them. But then she lies there, waiting for Franny to go to sleep.
Sometimes she knows Franny is awake when she crawls back. Franny never says anything, and unless the moon is up, it is usually too dark to see if her eyes are open. It is just one more weird thing, no weirder than walking up the highway, or getting off the highway in some small town and bartering with some old guy to take what is probably useless U.S. currency for well water. No weirder than no school. No weirder than no baths, no clothes, no nothing.
Jane decides she’s not going to do it the next night. But she knows she will lie there, anxious, and probably crawl over to Nate.
They are walking, one morning, while the sky is still blue and darkening near the horizon. By midday the sky will be white and the heat will be flattening. Franny asks Nate, “Have you ever been in love?”
“God, Franny,” Jane says.
Nate laughs. “Maybe. Have you?”
Franny looks irritable. “I’m in eighth grade,” she says. “And I’m not one of those girls with boobs, so I’m thinking, no.”
Jane wants her to shut up, but Nate says, “What kind of guy would you fall in love with?”
Franny looks a little sideways at him and then looks straight ahead. She has the most perfect skin, even after all this time in the sun. Skin like that is wasted on kids. Her look says, “Someone like you, stupid.” “I don’t know,” Franny says. “Someone who knows how to do things. You know, when you need them.”
“What kind of things?” Nate asks. He’s really interested. Well, fuck, there’s not a lot interesting on a freeway except other people walking and abandoned cars. They are passing a Sienna with a flat tire and all its doors open.
Franny gestures toward it. “Like fix a car. And I’d like him to be cute, too.” Matter of fact. Serious as a church.
Nate laughs. “Competent and cute.”
“Yeah,” Franny says. “Competent and cute.”
“Maybe you should be the one who knows how to fix a car,” Jane says.
“But I don’t,” Franny points out reasonably. “I mean maybe, someday, I could learn. But right now, I don’t.”
“Maybe you’ll meet someone in Canada,” Nate says. “Canadian guys are supposed to be able to do things like fix a car or fish or hunt moose.”
“Canadian guys are different than American guys?” Franny asks.
“Yeah,” Nate says. “You know, all flannel shirts and Canadian beer and stuff.”
“You wear a flannel shirt.”
“I’d really like a Canadian beer about now,” Nate says. “But I’m not Canadian.”
Off the road to the right is a gas station/convenience store. They almost always check them. There’s not much likelihood of finding anything in the place, because the wire fence that borders the highway has been trampled here so people can get over it, which suggests that the place has long since been looted. But you never know what someone might have left behind. Nate lopes off across the high grass.
“Mom,” Franny says, “carry my backpack, okay?” She shrugs it off and runs. Amazing that she has the energy to run. Jane picks up Franny’s backpack, irritated, and follows. Nate and Franny disappear into the darkness inside.
She follows them in. “Franny, I’m not hauling your pack anymore.”
There are some guys already in the place, and there is something about them, hard and well fed, that signals they are different. Or maybe it is just the instincts of a prey animal in the presence of predators.
“So what’s in that pack?” one of them asks. He’s sitting on the counter at the cash register window, smoking a cigarette. She hasn’t had a cigarette in weeks. Her whole body simultaneously leans toward the cigarette and yet magnifies everything in the room. A room full of men, all of them staring.
She just keeps acting like nothing is wrong, because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Dirty blankets, mostly,” she says. “I have to carry most of the crap.”
One of the men is wearing a grimy hoodie. Hispanic yard workers do that sometimes. It must help in the sun. These men are all Anglos, and there are fewer of them than she first thought. Five. Two of them are sitting on the floor, their backs against an empty dead ice cream cooler, their legs stretched out in front of them. Everyone on the road is dirty, but they are dirty and hard. Physical. A couple of them grin, feral flickers passing between them like glances. There is understanding in the room, shared purpose. She has the sense that she cannot let on that she senses anything, because the only thing holding them off is the pretense that everything is normal. “Not that we really need blankets in this weather,” she says. “I would kill for a functioning Holiday Inn.”