The Whore's Child

got dressed up in high heels and a short skirt. Her eyes looked even more Egyptian. Twice she tried striking up a conversation with a man sitting alone at the next table reading a
Wall Street
Journal.
“I’ve been in friendlier towns,” she remarked to me, loud enough for him to overhear.
    â€œThis isn’t a town,” I said, twirling my spaghetti. “It’s an exit.”
    At the next table the businessman curled his lips.
    â€œWhat made me think you’d be good company on this trip?” my mother wondered aloud.
    After we walked back across the intersection, my mother felt our car was “too conspicuous” so she moved it around back.
    For some reason I awoke in the middle of the night thinking about the dog I’d stoned, the long odds of its turning right when I threw, how dazed and stupid the animal had been to conclude I was its friend. All of which scared me so bad I couldn’t stay in bed. From the window you could see the off-ramp and hear the traffic rumbling down the highway. Despite the hour, cars were streaming into the bright Mobil station across from our motel. Despite my mother’s assurance that my father wasn’t the sort of man who’d follow us, it occurred to me, there in the rank darkness of our grungy motel room, that maybe she’d misjudged him. After all, neither of them seemed to suspect what kind of boy I was, their own son. And my father never would’ve guessed my mother was the sort of woman who’d just up and go, leaving him a one-word explanation. So maybe he was a different man than she— or either of us—knew. He could be closer than we imagined. Maybe this man we didn’t know was right across the street, gassing up a borrowed car and getting ready to cruise the parking lots of all the motels. Maybe we were all in for some surprises.
    Over the next few days we fell into a routine that was more leisurely and less contentious. We stopped whenever AAA or a highway billboard alerted us to some interesting attraction nearby. My particular interest was caves, and we made wide detours to visit a number of these, including a great one in New York State where you took an elevator down into the cavern and then got a boat ride. My mother was taken with places where you could climb up and look out over where you’d been and were heading toward, where she could feel the wind of freedom in her hair. We stopped at every scenic overlook, and she told me about a rotating restaurant at the top of some thirty-story building in California where we’d have a three-hour dinner and see everything there was to see. One afternoon in Ohio we saw the top half of a festively decorated hot-air balloon through the trees, and my mother immediately decided we had to take a ride in it. But the next exit was miles down the highway, and then we got lost trying to backtrack. When we finally found it, we discovered it wasn’t a working hot-air balloon at all, just an advertising gimmick tied to a pole in the parking lot of a car dealership.
    After that first day, we avoided Burger Doodles in favor of truck stops almost exclusively at lunchtime. “Truckers do this for a living,” my mother explained. “They know all the best places.” So we parked between semis and ate huge, open-faced turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes or chicken-fried steak. I noticed that my mother enjoyed the way the men swiveled on their counter stools when we came in. “It’s a good thing I’ve got you with me, sweetie,” she said more than once as we studied our menus, feeling the warm stares and hearing the soft murmuring of road-weary men her age and older, and I thought there was just a shade of regret in her voice. Still, the fact that I
was
there made me feel tough and important, like a man who maybe could protect a woman, not just torment dogs and old people.
    Nights we splurged, as my mother put it, at the nicest restaurants we could find in the vicinity of the motel. Often we’d have the place to ourselves, our entrance interrupting some intimate conversation between the cocktail waitress and the bartender. When there was no one interesting to look at, we’d haul out the AAA book and search the maps for attractions. “There isn’t much real life this close to the highway,” my mother observed sadly, checking her white lipstick, another new touch, in the mirror of her compact. “The good