The Golden State

“How long are you here? We should get together. My kids love little kids. And they’re homeschooled so we love getting together with other families.” I feel equal parts suspicion and guilt at the word “homeschooled” but I say “That sounds really good” and it actually sort of does. She’s so cheerful and nice. She picks up a pen to take my number and I consider giving her the number which is functionally useless but then I think that’s hostile and I say “My phone doesn’t work that well here, and we cut off the landline. Maybe we ought to just pick a time.”

“Gotcha,” she says. She looks inside her mind with the look all women get as they tally their forthcoming obligations. “How about Tuesday lunch?”

“Great,” I say weakly.

“You want to just save my address on your phone? It’s out on County Road Twelve” and rattles off a number that I type into a draft text message. Honey is still resting limply against my body and I am feeling so fatigued from this interaction that I start rocking from one foot to the other in my impatience to exit.

“Well, see you then,” I say. An elderly man in a trucker hat hobbles up to the hostess stand.

“Well, let me get you seated,” she says, and she puts us in the corner by the huge window looking over the swing set and the lake and lugs over a high chair for Honey.

“Can’t wait to catch up,” she says, and I say “Yes, yes” and she goes back to seat the old man. I get Honey in the high chair and Alice slowly eases herself into her chair.

“You found a friend,” Alice says drily.

“It’s so strange. I hardly remember anything from when I was a kid,” I say. “Like I deleted most of my memories somewhere along the line. But I remember her face.”

“They always come back when you least expect it,” she says. “Prime rib, rib eye, T-bone, New York strip, lamb chops, pork chop,” she reads. “Not an easy place to be a vegetarian.”

“Oh god, I’m sorry,” I say. “You didn’t say.” I scan the menu. “There’s, uh, a Caesar salad. French fries.”

“Oh, I’m not a vegetarian anymore,” she says. “It’s too hard on the road. Especially here in cow country.”

I am distracted by Kimmy walking back to the hostess stand. “Three kids,” I say absentmindedly. “I literally cannot imagine.”

“Well, some people take to it better than others,” Alice says and I feel a little resentful at the implication.

Honey takes a soft gold-wrapped square of butter from the bowl next to the basket of dense white bread and mashes it onto her salad plate. I’m suddenly aware of the lingering upset of my stomach and the pounding of my head. “What am I going to do,” I say to Alice helplessly.

“Order your prime rib,” she says kindly.

A teenage boy comes to wait on us and we order. I ask for the inevitable Sierra Nevada which I am suddenly desperate for and Alice asks for a glass of red wine.

“So how much longer are you planning to be on the road,” I ask Alice, while Honey tears up her bread and stuffs it into her mouth.

“Well, the map says it’s just a few more hours to the place I’m trying to get to.”

She looks out the window. “I’ve been stalling. It hurts so much to drive honestly, I’m not sure what to do.”

“And then you’re supposed to drive all the way back once you’ve gotten there?”

“Something like that,” she says. Honey grabs a fistful of the polyester tablecloth and yanks, and I put both hands on the surface of the table to stabilize it and say, “We don’t do that,” while keeping one eye on Alice.

“The last day before I got here I could hardly stand an hour in the car.” She looks at her little bird wrist and gnarled hands. I remember that I left my child unattended with a ninety-two-year-old woman all morning and the chorus unfit mother unfit mother resumes in my head. I pull Honey’s hand away from her mouth into which she is trying to stuff a piece of bread. “Slowly, please,” I say, and she pulls free and jams the bread in.

“Ha,” Alice says drily.

“What are you going to do, then?”

The food arrives, the expected enormous slab of prime rib hanging off my plate, run through with stringy fat. Honey starts flapping her arms and saying “Heh heh eh eh” and lunges over to scrabble her fingers across the surface of the meat. “Wait just a minute please, Honey. Please be patient. Please do good listening,” etc. etc. I cut some little tiny pieces and put them onto her plate and she starts shoveling them into her mouth forming a meat wad and then spitting it out. A really uninspired salad is set down in front of Alice, cubes of cheese and kidney beans from the can on iceberg lettuce.

“So really, how are you going to get back?”

“Well,” she says. “Mark and Yarrow and I had talked about one of them flying out to drive me back. Or fly me back. Or some combination of things.” She rummages around in her leather purse and pulls out a burner cell phone.

“I call them every day with this,” she says. “Tell them where I am and assure them I’m eating and taking my medicine.” She rolls her eyes.