The Whore's Child

tell, without having to look up from the map, that she was studying me. “I didn’t have to bring you with me, you know,” she finally said.
    â€œAll I said was—”
    â€œI heard you,” she assured me. “Loud and clear.”
    This was not a long conversation, but it was long enough if one of the speakers was driving a car and staring the other speaker down instead of keeping her eyes on the road.
    A few minutes later we passed a sign welcoming us to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “There,” she said. “See?”
    Sure enough, Massachusetts was right where she said it would be, and we were now two complete states away from my father.
    After an hour or so, we stopped for gas, and my mother had the attendant, who wasn’t much older than I was, check the oil. I watched him. He opened the hood, stood there for several beats out of respect, then slammed it shut again.
    â€œIt’s cheaper to pump our own,” I said.
    â€œThat’s true, sweetie, but we can’t afford to break down.” She’d taken the map book from me and was running her index finger along our route.
    â€œCould you not call me that?” I said. I didn’t mind it in private, just in social situations like the present one, when a teenager with a real job was hovering at the periphery of our conversation.
    She didn’t look up. “What should I call you—Conan?”
    Which meant she’d found the comic books I’d hidden on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. “My name?” I suggested.
    â€œAll right, John Dern,” she said. “Here’s the plan. We’re getting off the interstate for a while. See some of this country, since we got to drive through the whole damn thing anyway.”
    Now I watched her. “I thought you said he wouldn’t come after us.”
    â€œHe won’t,” she assured me, watching the cars roar by up on the interstate. “He might report the car stolen, though. Technically it’s his.”
    â€œTechnically,” I repeated.
    â€œI think of it as half mine. Everything in marriage should be half and half, don’t you think?”
    â€œThat makes
me
half his,” I pointed out.
    â€œEverything except you, sweetie,” she said. “You hungry?” It was noon and we hadn’t even eaten breakfast. “There’s a Burger Doodle across the street if you’re starving.”
    Burger Doodle was her name for any fast food outlet, and she held them all in contempt. “Personally,” she said, “I’m too psyched for food. I’m gorging myself on freedom. I’m dining on air. Doesn’t the air taste different today, sweetie?”
    She was right. Where we were sitting, it tasted like diesel exhaust. When I offered no opinion, she started the car and put it in gear, then looked over at me. “Doesn’t the air taste different today,
John Dern
?”
    â€œI’m starved,” I said, though I wasn’t. The gasoline fumes were nauseating me. “We didn’t even have breakfast.”
    She sighed, staring across the road at the golden arches.
    She ordered me two cheeseburgers, fries and a large Coke. For herself, just coffee, but before long she took a French fry, then another. When I began to slow down, midway through the second burger, she pointed a long, drooping fry at me and said, “I hope you’re enjoying this. Because we’re not Burger Doodling all the damn way to California.”
    We made it, that first night, to Waterbury, Connecticut. My mother’s mood stayed buoyant the entire afternoon, as if she really was high on the pure oxygen of freedom. But she crashed shortly after we checked in and I think it was our room that did it. She’d opted for the smallest of several motels near the exit. “Independently owned and run,” she explained. “They’re always cleaner and cheaper and better than the chains.” It might’ve been cheaper, but the room also was tiny and dingy, and bands of lines scrolled down the television screen on every channel. When I came out of the bathroom, I caught her counting our money at the end of one of the beds, and based on the look on her face I guessed that we’d spent more than she’d planned to that first day.
    But there was a fancy-looking restaurant across the street, and she insisted on having dinner there to celebrate our first night of freedom. She