Yet there was something about her, struggling to choke down her eggs, that reminded him of someone. She’s like me, he thought. She’s polite and nice, she does her best, and people don’t hear her, don’t pay attention.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
She was in the habit of thinking before she answered him. He realized this was partly because she was weighing everything she said, intent on pleasing him. That was good.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Well, how old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“That’s too young for a boyfriend.” He knew that he had attempted to go with girls her age, or not much older, but there was fifteen and then there was fifteen. She was the first kind.
“There was a boy, at this camp I went to last summer, and we were kind of boyfriend and girlfriend, but it doesn’t really count at camp because you don’t make plans.”
“What do you mean?” He honestly didn’t have a clue what she meant, and he hoped her answer might shed some light on one of the many things that baffled him when it came to women.
“Well, at camp, there’s a schedule. No one can invite you to go anywhere—to a movie, or the mall, or even a McDonald’s. So you sit on the bus together, or swim together, and you hold hands”—she blushed at this. Maybe he was wrong, maybe she had done more than he realized. “It’s not a date, and it ends when camp ends. He called me, once, but we didn’t really have anything to talk about. I wrote him letters, and he never wrote back.”
“Yeah, I see your point.” He didn’t, not really, but he didn’t have anything to contribute, so he wanted to move on. “Look, what would you do, if I just got up right now, paid the check, went out to my truck, and started driving?”
Again, she did not answer right away.
“Elizabeth?”
“I guess I’d ask the people if I could use their phone, make a collect call, and I’d call my parents, tell them where I was.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Sort of. Not exactly. But the people here, they would tell me, right?”
He looked around. “Lower your voice,” he said. “I’m serious.”
She flinched. It was amazing how easily he could control her. He liked it.
“I’d call my parents collect,” she whispered, “and then I’d wait for them to come get me.”
“What’s my truck look like?”
“Red.”
“Make? Model?”
She needed a second to understand that question, then shook her head. “I haven’t noticed.”
“License plate?”
“I haven’t paid attention.”
She was a shitty liar. “Elizabeth.”
She hung her head, whispered the plate numbers.
“Look,” he said, “I have to keep you with me.”
“I wouldn’t tell,” she said. “If that’s what you need me to do, I’ll do it.”
“No, you would tell. Because you think it’s the right thing, and I can see that you’re the kind of person who tries to do the right thing. Like me. The thing is—I didn’t really do anything. It’s just that, no one’s going to believe that. This girl, she tried to get out of my truck while it was moving, she fell and hit her head.”
It sounded plausible to him, now that he had said it. It absolutely could have happened just as he said, and who would believe him? It was so unfair.
“But no one’s going to believe that, right?” He saw that Elizabeth didn’t believe it. Her face was interesting that way. Some people would call her an open book, but Walter didn’t think that expression was quite apt. An open book, glimpsed, was only words on a page, and you couldn’t make out the whole story. Her face was like…fish in an aquarium, all her thoughts and feelings on display, but moving kind of lazily, not in a rush to get anywhere.
“I didn’t mean any harm,” he tried, and this had the virtue of truth, or was at least more in the neighborhood of truth, but he could see she was still dubious. “I’ve made some mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes. People just don’t listen, you know? Girls. They don’t listen. They’re in too much of a hurry, all the time.”
“We read this book, Of Mice and Men, in seventh-grade G-and-T English,” she began.
“G and T?”
“Oh, um, gifted and talented. But it’s my only G-and-T class.” She was embarrassed to be caught bragging. She hadn’t realized she was bragging at first, but now she was owning up to it. That was important. “Anyway, there’s a man in it, he doesn’t mean any harm, but he’s really strong, and when his hand gets tangled in this girl’s hair, he’s just trying to calm her down, but he breaks her neck.”
“And what happened to this guy?”
A long pause. “Well, he was simple. What people call retarded, sometimes, although my parents don’t like that word.”
“It’s just a word.”
She shot him a look, as if on the verge of contradicting him, then changed her mind. “That’s true. It’s just a word.” He liked that, the way she repeated after him. “He couldn’t understand the things he did. He never meant to harm anyone or anything. Once, he petted a puppy to death.”
“People who hurt dogs are the lowest of the low.”
“But he wasn’t trying to hurt the dog. He was just petting it. He didn’t know how strong he was. That was his problem.”
“What happened to him?”
He could see her considering a lie, then rejecting it. “His friend killed him. He was too pure for this world. That’s what my teacher said. He was forever a child, but in a man’s body, and he couldn’t live in this world.”
He was taken with that phrase. Forever a child, in a man’s body. It touched on something he felt about himself. Not being a child, of course. He was the opposite of simple. He was complicated. That was his problem, most likely. He was too complicated, too thoughtful, too full of ideas to have the life that people expected him to have. He should have been born somewhere intense, interesting, not in a little town where people didn’t have get-up-and-get. Dallas, for example, which struck him as a place that rewarded ambition and masculinity. All the men on that television show, even the wimpy ones, were men’s men, big and strong. Maybe they should go to Dallas.
And it would have to be “they,” at least for a while. He couldn’t let her go, but he also couldn’t do anything more definitive, not yet. That was the downside of spending too much time with someone, especially someone whose fears and dreams swam across her face. It was like naming the Thanksgiving turkey. Not that a name had ever kept him from petitioning for the drumstick, come the day.
“Do you know more stories?” he asked her. “Like the one you just told, only maybe happier?”
“Well, the same guy who wrote that, he drove around the country with his poodle, Charley. I mean, for real.”
“And what happened?”
“Lots of things.”
“You can tell me while I’m driving.”
He let her use the bathroom, having checked ahead of time that it was a one-seater without a window to the outside, and there was a cigarette machine in the hallway, so he didn’t look odd, waiting there, pulling on the various handles, fishing for change. Once, when he was thirteen, he had found seventy-five cents in the pay phone at his father’s gas station, and that had seemed miraculous to him. A waitress—not the redhead, but an older woman—glanced back at him, curious, and he said, just thought of it out of the blue: “Her first, um, time, you know? With her ladies’ issues? And our mama’s dead and she’s freaking out.”