In her hotel, we made love for the last time. I slipped out in the middle of the night, after she’d fallen asleep, and back home, I got in bed next to Kate. Moniza and I stopped speaking after that, but of course, what she’d said stayed with me. I would smell her unique scent—whatever alchemy creates a person’s odor—without warning, the way the pasture behind my childhood home would suddenly become fragrant after a heavy rain.
After months on the road, schlepping our gear from campsite to campsite, unshowered, unshaved, unmoored, we finally met Kate’s family in Moab in early March. Her dad had rented a four-bedroom house for us, including Kate’s two half brothers, Myra and Wakezi. The last time we saw Earl, he’d been married to Myra and Wakezi’s mother, Macie, but she’d now become the third woman to walk out on him. Myra and Wakezi, both in the middle of tough teen years, were about as dissimilar to Kate as siblings could be. They grumbled about each hike we took into Arches or Canyonlands and spent every free second with their faces strapped in VR goggles, making indiscernible trigger pulls and karate chops, groping at other untethered fictions. Myra, the elder boy, was very heavy and had a spectacular case of acne, which simply coated his cheeks and forehead. Wakezi had a slightly better complexion but was even heavier and quieter. Both made no secret of their misery for the four days we spent in Utah. Kate did her best to engage them, but it was painful to watch how distant they were to her. She’d remained mostly locked out of their lives at the insistence of Macie until she left Earl. Her brothers hiked in flip-flops, heads down, trudging on until they were allowed to return to the car.
Now in his midsixties, Earl had aged in a bent, unhealthy way. He had the hooked nose and snarling mouth of a vulture, small eyes he always beaded further in suspicion. He wore his kinky hair in a long, stiff braid that jutted from the back of his head. He was also thinner than the last time I’d seen him, no longer simply lean, but spindly. Sonja once told me she didn’t understand why Kate wanted her father in her life. “He’s an unhappy man,” she’d said. Kate’s relationship with her father was a total black box to me. She put forth a mighty effort, but what Earl gave back was ephemeral, and then there were moments when Kate was nothing but a stranger to him. While packing sandwiches for our hike into Arches, Kate held hers up.
“I don’t eat turkey, Pop.”
Earl looked maximally confused. “You don’t?”
“I’ve been a vegan since I was born, dude. Remember? You and Sonja raised me that way?”
He stood with the butter knife dripping mustard. “Didn’t know,” he muttered.
Earl behaved like a man who’d been robbed. He’d been a handsome, hot-blooded activist in the nineties, at a time when it was no longer in vogue to be a radical. He’d been arrested, beaten (according to him), had written a memoir he’d never published, floated from job to job, woman to woman, falling out to falling out. He now lived in a tract house in Tucson and taught at a prison. He still wore his radical politics on his sleeve, but in my opinion, as a shield against his own fall into conformity. He was bitter because his daughter was everything he’d never managed to be.
One too many glasses of wine, and Earl’s issues came to a head at dinner on our last night. Myra begged to be released to his VR set within moments of sitting down, and he and Earl began to argue, loudly. Earl’s parenting method was to mostly ignore the boys until he found a hill, at random, to die on. It was painful and embarrassing for everyone.
“Go play the goddamn thing,” Early finally barked. “I don’t want to hear your whining anymore.”
And before he’d even finished the sentence, Myra was gone, his fork still rattling against the plate.
“Can I go too?” Wakezi asked.
“You’re not going to spend the last night with us, Keys?” I asked. He twisted his glass of orange soda. I’m not sure that he’d actually responded to anything I’d said all weekend. Earl waved him away too.
“This generation deserves to wake up one day with the planet burned and drowned,” he said.
“Eh, they’re teenagers,” said Kate. “They’re invested in doing everything their parents hate. If you started playing VR shooters and talking shit about ecosystem restoration, they’d join Greenpeace tomorrow.”
This at least got a smirk out of Earl.
“It’s been good seeing you guys,” I ventured. “Even if the boys didn’t quite get the outdoors gene, we’ve had fun.” One says things like this out loud to make them true.
“Where do you two go from here?”
“California,” I said. “To hike Mount Whitney.”
“And then you’ll be back to Washington cutting deals with the corporate plutocracy? Get your picture on a few more magazine covers before the deluge?”
I coughed as a bit of water went down the wrong pipe. Kate glared at her father.
“That’s hostile. Even for you.”
Earl pumped his eyebrows. “Doesn’t make it any less true, my child.”
Kate chewed her tongue and twisted her fork against the plate. I felt like joining Myra and Wakezi.
“I hit a nerve?” asked Earl.
“Here’s your chance, Dad.” Kate set down her fork and splayed her hands in a Bring it on gesture. “You want to lay out everything I’ve done wrong, every opportunity I’ve taken to sell out—please, go ahead.”
“No need to document your selling out. You were never anything but a product in the first place. A glossy, big-tittied mascot the normies could pin up while they watch the boxcars go by to Dachau.”
“Earl, man. C’mon,” I warned him.
“Shut the fuck up, you pale, spineless bitch. No one’s talking to you.”
“Dad!” Kate barked at him. “Cut it out. You’re not impressing anyone.”
Earl sniffed and took a dainty sip of his wine, his teeth now a deep purple. It dawned on me then that he’d already had several glasses that night. “You believed your own hype, girl. You figured you could bat your eyes and change the system. But you weren’t using the system, gal, the system was using you. A flashy little piece of greenwashed pussy—”
“That’s enough!” I snapped, but he kept going.
“And what’ve you got to show for it? No compromise from corporate power, not even an inch. Just another crackdown. Just another step along the way to nuclear-armed global fascism.” Then he laughed, slapped his knee. “And you built them a little vehicle to get there. And all anyone’ll remember about you, my child, is a fuck film in a hotel room. A fitting end for Supergirl herself. What a culture we live in.”
Kate threw her napkin down, stood, and walked out, Earl chuckling as she went. The only reason I didn’t follow was because I had to say something, and I searched for the most hurtful thing possible.
“You’re a shit father, and a shit man,” I said, struggling to get the words out. “Kate’s done more in ten years than you’ve done in your entire sad lifetime. You’re an embarrassment, Earl.”
Earl sighed. “Oh Matty, Matty, Matty. I’m gonna laugh when she finally leaves your rich, boring ass.”
We left Moab that night.
We drove through the canyons of the desert between crashing mountains. I closed my eyes and opened them to the berserk sky and a cruel and glorious land. When I asked Kate if she was okay, she waved it away. “That’s Dad. He wants to make everyone around him as miserable as he is. But still, he might’ve had a point.”
“He didn’t even remotely have a point, Kate. Don’t ever let him get to you.”
She looked at me, nothing but two fingers on the wheel at six. “I’ve only ever let one man get to me.” She snatched up my hand, kissed the back of it, then stuck my whole index finger in her mouth and practically swallowed it. We were both cracking up at how weird she was for miles to come.
What I wished I’d said to Earl was that Kate’s talent for connection was singular. In those years, it was impossible not to see the gravity of a room bend around her. She offered people an invitation. She didn’t judge and she didn’t badger, she simply found a seed within a person that she might tend, garden, and grow. And that person would often have already accepted her invitation without even realizing it—just because they’d leaned in to hear what this wild woman had to say.