When I wake up a few hours later, the cool mountain air of the Sierra Nevadas has been baked away by the hot dry Nevada desert. I can almost forget that the detour ever happened.
My head is hazy from the heat, and there’s a metallic taste in my mouth and the crusty remnants of what I suspect is drool on my lips. Ben is watching me, and even though I liked seeing him sleep, being on the opposite end of it, I feel exposed. “Where the hell are we?” I ask.
“Literally the middle of nowhere. We passed a place called Hawthorne a while back, but other than that, nothing. I haven’t even seen any cars on the road. On the plus side, you can speed like crazy out here.”
I glimpse the dashboard. Ben’s going ninety. The empty, straight road stretches ahead of us and shimmers with mirages, little oases of water in the desert that don’t really exist. No sooner do we reach one than it disappears into the asphalt and another appears on the horizon.
“At this rate, we should make Vegas by five and Laughlin by seven,” Ben says.
“Oh.”
“Are you okay?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?” I reach for a now-tepid bottle of Dr Pepper. “This is disgusting.”
“When you see a 7-Eleven, holler.” He sounds peeved, but then he looks at me and something softens. He opens his mouth to say something, but then seems to think again and stays quiet.
I sigh. “What?”
“It’s not you; it’s him.”
I’m still feeling kind of naked in front of him. So I snap back, “Is that a line you give to girls when you dump them? ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’”
Ben turns toward me, then back toward the road. “I might if it ever got to that point,” he says frostily. “I was talking about your dad.”
I don’t answer. I don’t want to talk about my dad, or whatever that man back there was.
“He’s a fuckwad,” Ben continues. “And it has fuck-all to do with you.”
I still don’t say anything.
“I mean, maybe I don’t know anything about what you’re going through, but it’s something my mom always told me about my dad. That it wasn’t me. It was him. And I never believed her. I always thought she was humoring me. Because it had to be my fault. But seeing that asshole, and you, maybe I’m starting to reconsider.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Ben’s eyes are glued to the road, as if he has to concentrate very hard on the flat, straight highway. “When your dad is an asshole from the get-go—and it doesn’t get more from the get-go than denying your existence—it’s not because you did anything wrong. It’s because he did.” His words spill out in a rush. Then he adds, “And maybe it’s none of my business, but I’ve been wanting to say that to you for, like, the last two hundred and eighty-seven miles.”
I look at Ben now. And again I wonder how it is that we can feel so many of the same things and be so utterly different.
“You thought it was your fault, with your dad?” I ask him.
Ben doesn’t say anything, just nods.
“Why?”
He sighs. “I was a sensitive kid. A crybaby. Always running to Mommy. He hated that. Told me to toughen up. So I tried. I tried to man up. Be like him.” He grimaces. “But he still couldn’t stand the sight of me.”
I don’t know what to say. So I just tell Ben that I’m sorry.
He lets go of the wheel for a second, raises his hands in the air, like, What you gonna do?
I have to resist the urge to touch Ben on the cheek. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, having a dad whose idea of manhood was how Ben described it. Spending your life emulating that and trying to escape it all at once. I think of Tricia. About her being gone so much, and about her endless string of three-month flings. About refusing to put me in touch with my father. About how she basically abdicated her job, let the Garcias take over parenting me. I’ve always resented her for this, but now I’m wondering if maybe I should be thanking her.
x x x
Traffic picks up around Vegas and then, suddenly, we’re in a huge city and it’s disorienting and strange, and then an hour later, we’re back in the middle of nowhere, and then an hour after that, we’re in Laughlin.
Laughlin is like a strange hybrid: part nowhere desert town, but plunked down in the center of it are all these high-rise hotels jutting out from the banks of the Colorado River. We drive through the depressing strip of downtown to a more modest stretch of motel–casinos, stopping at the Wagon Wheel Sleep ’n’ Slots, which is advertising rooms for forty-five dollars a night.
We pull in and ring the bell, and a friendly woman with her hair in braids asks if she can help us.
“Do you have two rooms?” Ben asks.
The cash is depleting faster than I’d thought. I think about last night’s motel-room-induced panic attack, Ben’s comforting voice on the other end of the phone. What he told me earlier today in the car. “One room, two beds,” I say.
I pay for the room and we go unpack the car. It was so clean and tidy when we left, but now it’s littered with trip detritus. I attempt to tidy some of it while Ben carries both of our bags up to the room.
When I get upstairs, he’s shuffling through a bunch of papers. “They have takeout menus. Do you want to go out and grab something to eat? Or order a pizza?”
I remember our afternoon a few months back: burritos, TV, the couch.
“Let’s do pizza.”
“Pepperoni? Sausage? Both?”
I laugh. “One or the other.”
Ben picks up the menu, and a half hour later pizza, garlic knots, and vats of Pepsi and Dr Pepper show up at the door. We spread it all out on a towel on one of the beds and sit cross-legged, having a picnic.
“God, it’s good to be out of the car,” I say.
“Yeah. Sometimes after a tour, my ass vibrates for days.”
“Too bad it’s not one of those motels with the vibrating beds; you could keep the magic going.”
“I’ve never actually seen one of those,” Ben says.
“No, me neither. I actually haven’t stayed in that many motels.” The truth is, I can count on one hand the number of nights I’ve stayed in a hotel or motel. Tricia wasn’t one for vacations. Most of the trips I’ve taken have been with the Garcias, and we usually went camping or stayed with their relatives.
“So not many opportunities to share a motel room with a guy before?” Ben asks lightly as he pays an inordinate amount of attention to his pizza crust.