“Sounds boring.”
“That’s what everybody thinks. Now come on. Did you wash your face?”
“Yes.”
“With soap?”
They both looked at the bathroom counter where the hotel soap was stacked in a pile of three shiny paper squares. The girl groaned and stood up. “What are you, my dad or something?”
“That’s a good way to think of it. That’s exactly how I want you to think about it.”
They would have been on the east-west tollway, bright white farm-field daylight, when Lamb sped past the last county sign for Rock Island, Illinois. The girl sat beside him in her new yellow sweater, watching the road as if the reels of flat highway needling fast and straight ahead were the opening credits of some film she was either bound to watch or in which she had just willingly agreed to perform.
They’d left the hotel in the dark, didn’t stop for breakfast until a rest stop past Aurora. And because she was his lookout, his sidekick in the passenger seat, he bought her a syrupy hot chocolate from a machine and made a little wide-eyed show of adding extra packets of sugar. The lookout, he said, stirring the cocoa, has to keep her wits about her, has to be alert, must be the eyes and ears.
“Unless,” he said, starting the truck, “you want to turn around and go back home now?”
“Nope.”
“You’ll tell me when?”
“Okay, but I won’t want to.”
“I’m serious. You tell me when.”
“I will.”
Down the road they tapped their cups together at the hour when school would have started, and she wanted to toast again when she figured Sid and Jenny were being questioned for the first time.
“Were they so very awful?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“What was the worst thing they did.”
She turned and stared out the window. “What they said.”
“What did they say?”
“The worst?”
“The worst.”
“They pretended like no one else was in the room and had this really loud talk while we waited for the teacher. Sid said it was no surprise that I hooked up with you. And Jenny said I must be used to it since my stepdad makes little visits to my room every night. And, you know, everybody was looking at me.”
“Did you leave the room?”
“He’s not even my stepdad. They’re not even married.”
“You stayed. Did you cry?”
“No.”
He glanced at her. “Is it true about Jessie?”
“No. He takes me swimming in the morning and they make this big thing out of it.”
“I see.”
“I guess it doesn’t sound as bad as it really was.”
“No,” he said. “It sounds pretty bad.”
The girl turned to him. “Gary?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why didn’t you ever get married?”
“I suppose I never found the right girl.”
“Oh.”
“Did you ever have a boyfriend? Like Jenny and Sidney?”
She shrugged and looked out the window. “Not like that. Not serious.”
“What’s serious? Like you weren’t in love?”
“Not hooking up or anything.”
“Hooking up.”
“Like messing around.”
“You never?”
She rolled her eyes.
“What is that?” Lamb said. “Like it’s no big deal?”
She shrugged.
He slowed down. “I don’t like that, Tommie.” He steered the truck onto the shoulder and put it in park.
“What are we doing?”
“I’m going to tell you something really important,” he said. “Are you listening?” He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. He sorted them, and held up a penny. He turned it over in his hand. “What year were you born?”
“Nineteen ninety-six.”
“I was forty-four years old.”
“Whoa.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say whoa. Makes me feel like I should take you back home.”
She slid her hands beneath her bottom and tipped her head. “What were you doing back then?”
He stopped turning the penny and looked at her.
“I might tell you sometime,” he said, as if he were surprised to be saying it.
“Okay.”
“Do you know how much a stamp costs?”
“Like fifty cents?”
“In nineteen fifty-two, Tommie, a first-class stamp cost a man three cents.”
“Whoa.”
“In nineteen fifty-two, Tommie, the United States federal government spent about sixty-eight billion dollars. Total.” He looked at her. “That doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”
“Not really.”
“We need to do a better job learning about the world around us.”
“Don’t do that. Jessie does that.”
“Does what?”
“Says we when you mean me.”
He put his hands in his lap. “You’re right.”
She shrugged.
“Shrug it off. Get real good at shrugging. That girl? She’s a shrugger. Nothing gets to her.”
She looked at him sideways and rolled her eyes.
“It hurts my feelings that you shrug and roll your eyes. That you talk like you’re already grown up. That you don’t know about nineteen fifty-two. I’m trying to help you here, I’m trying to tell you something important.”
“Sorry.”
“Christ, the people your age. There isn’t a wild place left on the planet for you. There isn’t a code of decency or manners left for you to break. And what do you do? You shrug.” He took her hand and turned it over and pressed the penny into it. “Your piece of the year I was born. Don’t lose it. That might be all you get.”
She looked at the penny in her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“Someday,” he said, “we’ll rent a trailer. A silver one. Just like it was fifty years ago. And you’ll be seventeen and we’ll put you in a long skirt and tie your hair back with a dotted yellow scarf and drive across the country, from ice cream stand to ice cream stand. We’ll map it out just right, so that every city we hit is in the peak of springtime, cool wind and green puddles and white blossoms and all of that. Bright sun and rain shaking out of the trees and new birds and you and your yellow scarf.”
“Will you pick me up at school?”
“In the silver trailer.”
“Deal.”
“Listen, Tom. Can I ask you a serious question?”
“What.”
“Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t hooked up with a boy, have you?” Her skin went pink behind her freckles. “You maybe lied to Sid or Jenny and said you did, but you never really did, did you?” She shook her head. “Because it’s a very big deal,” he said. “The biggest deal. And listen. I want you to hear me. In case you’re having funny thoughts. I am not going to kiss you. It’s my way of honoring you. Do you understand? It’s my way of honoring nineteen fifty-two. And the little cabin out there. And the river.”
“That’s all real?”
“What do you mean?”
“The cabin and the river?”
“Isn’t that where we’re going?”
“I mean the shop with the pickle jar. The horse. That’s all pretend.”
“It’s all real, Tommie.”
“For real for real?”
“I’m not a liar.”
“Me either.”
“Good. I know you’re not. You sometimes talk silly, but you’re basically a pretty good girl, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I know,” he said. “Hey, where’s that penny?”
She opened her hand and he took the coin, put it on the end of his thumb, and pressed it to the center of her forehead.
“Ouch.”
“Ssh.” He pressed hard. “There,” he said, “the year I was born, printed right on your beautiful freckled forehead.”