“Kenny! Your mother is here!”
He hadn’t heard the car.
In the kitchen, he was caught short by a sight he had never seen in the near decade of his life; his dad was awake and sitting at the table with his morning coffee. His mother, his real mom, was sitting at the table as well, a cup of coffee of her own. His stepmother was on her feet, leaning against the counter, sipping coffee, too. The three caretakers of his world had never been in the same room at the same time.
“There’s the Kenny Bear!” Kenny’s mom was beaming. She looked like a secretary in a TV show—professionally dressed, wearing heels, her trim black hair neat, her makeup showing red lips that left marks on her coffee cup. She stood and hugged him with perfumed arms, kissing the top of his head. “Go get your bag and we’ll hit the road.”
Kenny had no idea about any bag, but his stepmother had put some clothes into one of her daughter’s small pink suitcases. He was packed. His father stood up and frazzled Kenny’s hair. “I gotta shower,” he said. “Go check out your mother’s hot wheels.”
“You got me Hot Wheels?” Kenny asked, thinking that his birthday present was going to be some miniature cars made of die-cast metal.
But no. In the driveway was an actual sports car, red, a two-seater, with wire wheels. The top was up and already littered with eucalyptus fallings. The only sports cars he’d ever seen were on television, driven by detectives and young doctors.
“Is this yours, Mom?”
“A friend let me borrow it.”
Kenny was looking through the driver’s side window. “Can I sit in it?”
“Go ahead.”
Kenny figured out how to open the door and sat behind the wheel. The dials and switches of the car looked like they came from a jet plane. The wood paneling was like furniture. The seats smelled like leather baseball mitts. The red circle in the middle of the steering wheel said FIAT. After his mother put the pink suitcase in the car’s trunk, she asked for Kenny’s help putting the top down.
“We’ll let the wind blow through our hair until we get to the highway, okay?” She undid the latches of the top and Kenny helped fold it back, bending the clear plastic window in on itself. His mother fired up the engine, which sounded like a dragon clearing its throat, then she backed out of the driveway—she had taken off her heels to work the pedals and put on a pair of sunglasses, the kind worn by snow skiers. Mother, son, and Fiat roared away from the house, down Webster Road, the gum tree shadows making the sunlight strobe in Kenny’s eyes, the wind sounding in his ears and whipping his hair from back to front. The car was the coolest, most boss ride Kenny had ever seen. He was the happiest he had been since he was a little kid.
The attendant at the Shell station in Iron Bend was all over the car, giving it and the woman driving it his keen attention. He filled the tank, wiped the windshield, checked the oil, and marveled at the “dago motor.” Kenny was offered a free soda pop from the vending machine. While he was pulling a bottle of root beer (always his choice) from the cold box, the man was helping his mother put the top back up and close the latches. The man was smiling and chatting, asking questions about if his mother was headed north or south and if she planned on coming back to Iron Bend soon. When they were back in the car and on the highway (heading south), she told her son the Shell man had “cow-eyes” and she laughed.
“Find us some music, honey,” she said, pointing to the tiny radio in the wooden dashboard. “Turn that knob, then that one for a station.”
Like a radio operator on a bomber, Kenny moved the red line of the dial along the numbers. The local radio station had a commercial for Stan Nathan’s Shoes for the Family, a store in town. Static and voices came and went until Kenny located the beam from a station that came in loud and clear. A man was singing about raindrops on his head. Kenny’s mom knew the words and sang along as she dug around in her purse at the same time she steered. She found a little leather case with a clasp on it, which she unsnapped to reveal the tips of cigarettes. They were long cigarettes, longer than those his father smoked. She had one in her lips, the red lipstick already staining the white filter, when she pushed a button on the dash. In a few seconds the button popped and she pulled the whole thing out. There was a glowing red coil on the end of the button, so hot she used it to light her long cigarette. She put the hot button back in its hole, then switched hands on the wheel to open a small, triangular window. As soon as there was a whistling crack, the smoke from her long cigarette was sucked out the window like a magic trick.
“Tell me about school, sweetie,” she said. “You like school?”
Kenny told her that St. Philip Neri wasn’t like St. Joseph, the only other school he had gone to, back in Sacramento. St. Philip Neri was small, not many kids went there, and some of the nuns didn’t dress like nuns. As he savored his bottle of root beer with short, airy sips, he told his mom about the bus rides to school, how the uniforms were red plaid instead of blue plaid and they had some days when they didn’t have to wear them, and that a kid in his class named Munson made models like he did and lived in a house with a pool, but not an inground pool like at the city park, but a circular aboveground pool. From just the one question, Kenny talked all the way from Iron Bend to the Butte City cutoff as his mother smoked. When the one radio station faded, Kenny found another, then another. His mom let him signal to the truck drivers they passed to blow their air horns. He would pump his fist up and down, and, if the drivers saw him, more often than not they would send out a toot. Once, Kenny saw a truck driver looking at them in his sideview mirror and got a blast on the horn without having to pump for it. The driver blew a kiss that was probably meant for his mom, not for Kenny.
They stopped for lunch in Maxwell at a diner called Kathy’s Kountry Kafe, a place for travelers and, in season, duck hunters. The Fiat was the only sports car in the parking lot. The waitress seemed to love chatting with Kenny’s mom—they talked like old friends or sisters. Kenny noticed that the waitress had very red lips, too. When she asked what to bring for the young man, he asked for a hamburger.
“Oh no, honey,” his mother said. “Hamburgers are for anytime. At a restaurant we should order from the menu.”
“Why not, Mom? Dad doesn’t care. And Nancy lets us.” Nancy was Kenny’s stepmother.
“What say we make this a special rule,” his mother said. “Just for you and me.” This seemed like an odd rule to suddenly impose. Kenny had never been told what to order or what he could not have. “I think you’ll like the hot turkey sandwich,” his mother said. “We’ll split it.”
Kenny thought she meant a sandwich that was going to be steaming hot and was not sure he was going to like it. “Can I have a milkshake?”
“Yep.” She smiled. “I’m flexible!”
Truth be told, Kenny liked the open-faced sandwich that was swimming in brown gravy and was not too hot at all. The white bread that sucked up all the gravy was just as good as the turkey meat, and mashed potatoes were his favorite food of all time. His mom had an igloo-shaped scoop of cottage cheese on tomato slices but cut up a few bites of the hot turkey for herself. His vanilla milkshake came in the freezing steel cup it was made in and twice filled up a fancy glass. He poured it himself, tapping the steel against the glass to help it along. This was so much milkshake, Kenny couldn’t finish it.