Peter noticed that she’d dropped the “we” in this situation, and tried not to feel hurt. “Well, we’ve got about another eight hours to go,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d want to get there at night.” It seemed to him that there would be few things more creepy than visiting your dead brother’s gravesite in the dark, but who was he to argue?
Emma gave a noncommittal grunt. “Let’s see how it goes, I guess.”
But even once lunchtime came and went, the silence between them remained, and so Peter kept driving. They passed several fast-food restaurants, rest stops advertising ice-cream shops, and family diners that blended in with the gray blankness of the highway. But Emma hadn’t said a word in what seemed like hours, and asking whether she wanted to stop for food seemed like a fairly dangerous endeavor.
He could understand why she was upset, maybe even a little bit angry, but he wanted her to hurry up and realize that in the midst of this whole mess he was still there for her, the only one who really understood her. Even if this wasn’t entirely true. Even if he was still more than a little bit mystified by her.
Even if things weren’t exactly going according to plan.
Around three o’clock his stomach began to make an embarrassing amount of noise, and Peter decided it was time to step up and do something about the deteriorating state of this road trip. Plagued by worry and trailed by doubt, Emma needed to take her mind off things, to hit the pause button and forget about the grim purpose of this strange pilgrimage and have a little fun. And though Peter was well aware that he was not exactly Mr. Good Times, he was nevertheless determined to give it a shot.
According to the road signs they were thirty miles outside Roanoke, and that seemed as good a place as any. Peter cleared his throat.
“We could maybe stay around here tonight.”
“It’s only three.”
“So?” he said. “There’s tons of stuff we could do.”
Emma raised her eyebrows. “Really?” she said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “In Roanoke, Virginia? What exactly did you have planned?”
“They have a famous transportation museum.”
“I’m not even going to ask why you know that,” she said. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough fun with transportation to last us a while?”
Peter patted the wheel of the car as if to soothe its feelings. “There’s also the famous star,” he said. “It’s eighty-eight and a half feet tall and looks like a giant Christmas decoration.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
“It uses seventeen thousand five hundred watts of power,” he said, ignoring her. “It was built in 1949.”
She was looking at him now with genuine astonishment.
He took this as encouragement. “It’s the second largest one in the world. El Paso went and built a bigger one.”
“Bastards,” she said, grinning for the first time in a while.
“Yeah, well, theirs lies flat. This one is propped up, so you can see it from down below. And there’s supposedly a park with a scenic overlook at the top.”
“Seriously, how do you know all this stuff?”
“I just do,” he said, feeling his face go hot all the way to the tips of his ears. Around the highway, beyond the pine trees that stood straight as flagpoles, clusters of mountains had begun to hitch themselves up from the land, sloping toward the sky like great whales, gray and rounded and hazy in the distance.
“You know,” Peter said, “there’s a campground, too.”
Emma looked over at him.
“We could maybe spend the night up there.”
“We don’t have tents or anything.”
“Well, it’s not like we were planning on staying in a four-star hotel, anyway,” he said. “We could just wing it.”
“Don’t tell me you know how to camp, too.”
Peter grinned. “I’ve read a couple of books about it.”
When they came across the right exit on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Peter swung the car off onto the spur, following the signs for the campground. They stopped at a sagging mini-mart set a few hundred yards back on a gravel drive. Two of the three gas pumps were out of order, and there was a sign out front advertising a sale on both ice and ammo. Inside, a guy about their age with too-white teeth and too-blond hair was stacking cans of soda behind the counter, and he flashed them a too-bright smile as they walked in.
“Let me know if y’all need any help with anything,” he said, mostly to Emma, his eyes following her intently as she veered off toward the food aisle. Peter glared at him before hurrying to catch up with her.
“What a creep, huh?” he said as Emma thrust a bag of marshmallows at him. She scanned the rows of canned foods until she found the beans, then the packages of hot dogs and graham crackers, orange soda and dog biscuits, handing them over one by one until all of it was balanced in Peter’s scrawny arms. He glanced over to see that the guy was now leaning against the counter, his eyes still focused on Emma as he chewed a piece of gum with the slow rhythm of a cow, his jaw working in methodical circles.
“He keeps watching you,” Peter whispered, nearly bumping into Emma when she stopped before a rack of cheap-looking clothing. “It’s weird.”
She picked up a blue sweatshirt with a big red star on the front that read roanoke, virginia: star city. “Maybe he likes me,” she joked, and Peter snorted, a feeble attempt to illustrate just how far this was from his own mind. Emma raised her eyebrows, and he felt the heat spread from his neck up into his face. He twisted the bag of marshmallows hard in his fist, feeling them lose their shape between his fingers.
She grabbed another sweatshirt from the rack and shoved it at him. “Here,” she said. “One for each of us.”
Peter could nearly picture the lone five-dollar bill still tucked in his wallet. “Don’t you think we should save our money for something we actually need?”
“It’s a present,” she said, marching up to the register where the attendant was waiting, his ridiculously white teeth bared in a leering grin. “For our birthdays.”
Peter dumped the pile of food onto the counter, adding a blue lighter to the pile, then slid his sweatshirt beside hers, surprised that she’d remembered. He watched the guy ring them up, half wishing—despite the sweatshirt’s scratchy material and shoddy lettering—that he could put it on right away, though he at least had the good sense to be embarrassed by the significance he knew he’d attach to it because Emma had picked it out.