The Whore's Child

daughter a sedative. Perhaps I have caught my wife in transit between houses. I wait a few minutes and try my house again, wondering if I’ve forgotten our number.
    Whoever I’m dialing is not home. I go outside onto the terminal ramp and am about to ask a taxi driver how much it would cost to take me to Durham when Faye pulls up right in front of me, so I get in.
    â€œI got to thinking about it,” she says, “and realized you’d give him the car.”
    I just look at her, wondering if she might also have intuited that I just missed getting on a plane to Pittsburgh, that I had a lover fifteen long years ago who I want to tell things I can’t tell my wife.
    â€œYou think I don’t know you after thirty years?” she says, as if in answer to my unspoken question.
    â€œNot intimately,” I tell her.
    â€œHurry up and mend then,” she says.
    Night is coming and most of the trip back will be in the dark, but the car is warm and there will be no harm if I fall asleep. Faye knows how to get us home.

Joy Ride
    We left early in the cold gray morning before I was entirely awake. My mother draped the clothes I was supposed to wear over a chair. My job was to get into them. Her job was to do everything else—pack the suitcases, throw them into the trunk of the car, write my father a note. When she came back to check on me and found me sitting at the edge of the bed, one shoe on, one shoe off, staring into space, she barked “Move!” so loudly that I jumped. And when even this failed to jump-start me, she kept saying, over and over, “Go go go go go go,” which made me stare at her, stupid and a little frightened too. She came over to me then, getting down on her knees so we were face to face, and said, “Move, sweetie. We’ve got to move.”
    When I was finally dressed, I found her in the kitchen, trying to compose a note to my father, looking like she was in a one-shoe-on, one-shoe-off stage of composition. When she became aware of me standing there, she scratched one big word in capital letters on the tablet and held it up proudly. GOODBYE, it said. “That just about sums up the whole deal,” she said. “You got anything to add?” I shook my head. “You’ve still got sleep in your eyes, sweetie,” she said, then worked her thumbs expertly in the corners of my eyes as I tried to back away. I was twelve and fully competent, in my view, to do this myself. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go, before he comes home and finds us and the note both.”
    In the car she dropped a spiral notebook into my lap. When I opened it, I discovered it was a series of maps provided by the AAA Automobile Club. Each map covered a small area of roughly a hundred miles, and our route had been traced in yellow magic marker. When you turned the page, the next map picked up where the last left off, the yellow route highlighted across the new page. “You’re the navigator,” my mother said, turning the key in the ignition. I must have looked doubtful, because she added, “I can’t do this all by myself, sweetie.”
    â€œNext time you see one of these,” my mother said, indicating the harbor with her thumb, “it’ll be on the other side of the country, a whole different ocean.”
    We lived in Camden, on the coast of Maine, and our plan, according to the AAA map guide, was to drive to southern California and, as my mother put it, to lose my father and lose him good.
    â€œHow come we’re going through town?” it occurred to me to ask. Doing so meant passing my father’s hardware store. “What if he sees us?”
    â€œWhat if he does?” she said. “It’s not like he can see the suitcase in the trunk. He doesn’t have X-ray vision. Half the time he can’t see what’s right in front of him.” What was right in front of him, lately, was my mother, trying to pick a fight. Adjusting the rearview mirror so she could see herself, she ran her pinkie across her eyelid; her eyeliner was kind of heavy, and it made her eyes look Egyptian. There’d been other changes these last few months. She was growing her hair out, letting it go straight like the girls on TV. “As far as he’s concerned, I’m taking you to school.”
    We were sitting at the town’s only traffic light, and the hardware store was half a block up the street, a phalanx of