SPN FIC - My Little Runaway
This is something I've had pending for ... well, years. Started working on it in earnest last December, but couldn't decide if I felt right about it, so I let it sit. In the interest of cleaning up my hard drive, and rather than let it go on sitting, this morning I scanned in the accompanying pictures and finished it up, so it's yours to ponder from here on out.
You see ... back in 1979 three friends and I decided to move to California. You know: swimming pools. Movie stars. Someplace different and exciting. Someplace that wasn't here. I took off from home behind the wheel of a light blue '72 Chevy Malibu, loaded down with all my earthly belongings, figuring good things lay ahead. Cried for the first two or three hours of the journey. And a few days later, I landed in Lawrence, Kansas.
A lot of this is true. I was in Lawrence on July 13, 1979. There was a defaced bumper sticker. There was a Bob's Big Boy with strawberry pie. My friend and I were furious with each other throughout most of the trip, because neither of us had air conditioning and the central United States was just so goddamn hot.
Was there a bickering young couple with a cute baby? I'll let you decide.
CHARACTERS: Mary, John, wee!Dean, and ... me :)
GENRE: Want to call it Het? I don't, but you can go right ahead if it suits you.
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: That would be a "no."
LENGTH: 3072 words
MY LITTLE RUNAWAY
By Carol Davis
Lawrence, Kansas
July 13, 1979
Hi you guys,
Not much to do here so here is another letter. I'll be going to bed soon so we can get up early in the morning.
This room is real nice, the nicest we've had so far and only $26. It's nice to have a room with HBO - cable too. There's something on every channel. Shopping center across the road about 100 yards. I'd stay here a day or two but I really do want to cover some ground each day. Don't want to camp in Kansas. Tomorrow I'd like to be near Colorado.
The guy on the radio said 90's through Sunday. Aauugghh.
We ate at Bob's Big Boy. I had chicken filet with salad bar.
J. is still mad, so after dinner I went outside to sit by the pool for a while, and there was a girl sitting out there with the cutest baby…
~~~~~~~~
They'd been over at Bob's, I was pretty sure, while J. and I were there eating our chicken filets and strawberry pie: this blonde girl and her baby, sitting in a booth over near the door. There'd been a guy with them then - dark hair, great eyes, gorgeous - but he wasn't with them now, out by the Best Western's weird little kidney-shaped pool.
They'd been mad about something, over at Bob's. Both of them. The kind of mad where you don't say anything, you just sit there eating and scowling.
Kind of like me and J.
And now the girl was crying.
For a second or two I thought about doing an about-face, going back upstairs to the room, but the temperature up there was about forty degrees and wasn't likely to climb any higher until a certain someone got over her David Cassidy bumper sticker's being defaced by - well, neither one of us had any idea who did it.
I would have thought Somebody with taste, but there'd been a day when it was All. About. David. for me too, and it wasn't all that long ago. Either way, J. was mad at the world, and was likely to go on being mad until she got an apology from whomever had scrawled SUCKS on top of CASSIDY ROCKS! with a big black marker.
An apology?? Like that would ever happen.
You can't advertise, I told her. If you've got an unpopular opinion, you can't advertise it and expect people not to…
You can guess how well that went over.
Going back upstairs wasn't a good option. Not right then. Maybe not ever. Which left sticking to what I'd come out here to do: picking out a chair by the pool and reading the next few chapters of The Stand.
The blonde girl looked at me as I got closer to the pool, and I did a little head-duck, gave her half a nod and half a smile, and picked out a chair far enough away from hers to give her (and myself) some privacy.
Being that whatever her problem was, it wasn't any of my business.
But she must have been in a sharing kind of mood. I was trying to walk on past her chair when she said, "I'm sorry."
And I thought, Shit. I just wanted to sit out here and read.
"I shouldn't - I'm not even staying here," the girl went on, and snuffled, a big wet one that said she was in serious need of some Kleenex. She shifted the baby around, got an arm slung around his middle, and tried standing up - to leave, I guess - but in mid-rise the baby dropped the beat-up stuffed bear he'd been clutching and let out a howl they probably heard a mile down the road, close enough to the girl's ear to make her yelp in pain. When she tried to dip down to scoop up the bear, she fumbled the baby, lost her footing, and they both ended up on the ground, her on her butt and the baby sprawled across her lap.
They probably heard that baby screech in space.
"Deeeeeean," she begged, and it was like watching cats wrestle, her trying to keep hold of him and him trying to go after his bear, still shrieking like he was being sautéed. "Dean, honey, nooooo, stay with Mommy pleaaaaase Dean."
The heat, and the damn humidity, probably didn't help. It'd been so bad at noontime, when J. and I had stopped for gas outside of St. Louis, that I couldn't get a grip on the doorhandle to open the car door. Seven hours later the temperature was still over ninety, with humidity - jeez, how high can humidity go? It felt like a thousand percent, the kind of hot-and-suffocating that pretty much slaughters any "good will towards men" you might have started out with.
Ol' Dean didn't have any teeth, I didn't think, but I was still afraid he'd bite me if I touched him. Or touched the bear.
"Can I -" I said.
Kleenex I could do. Allergies, you know. I never travel without Kleenex.
She took the fistful I offered her and scrubbed at her nose with them, hanging onto Dean's fat little arm with her other hand. Somehow, with me kind of spotting her and Dean and the bear, she got up off the ground and back into the chair with Dean in her lap and the bear in Dean's.
"This is my LIFE," she moaned.
The only thing I could think of to say was, "He's very cute."
And she mumbled, "Thank you."
"Could I - do you want me to call somebody? Or something?"
She looked past me, down the parking lot, over toward Bob's. Maybe the guy with the great eyes was still in there?
"No," she said. "There's… no."
Not my problem, I thought. Tried to think, anyway. I don't know you, or your husband, or your baby. I'm only gonna be here one night. Gonna get in the car in the morning (with or without J. - she can sit here and sulk about her damn bumper sticker forever if she wants to) and head west, just like I planned. Gonna be looking at Colorado by tomorrow night.
But that girl didn't seem to have anything with her. No purse, no diaper bag.
"Do you want some water or something?" I asked her.
"No. Thanks."
Dean had started peering up at me like I was something he couldn't figure out. I was intending to take another stab at walking away when he shoved a hand out towards me, palm up, like he expected me to give him something. A cookie, maybe. Or some cash.
He was cute.
"He'll be back," the girl said, kind of rapidly, like she needed me to believe what she was saying even though she might not believe it herself. "My husband. He'll drive around for a little while, then he'll come back and get us. We do this… all the time. Cool-down time."
She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. I wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting out here, but she looked as soggy as I'd been at the gas station at noontime; her hair was sliding out of its ponytail, and there were big dark sweat stains on her t-shirt. Dean's little shirt and shorts looked pretty damp, too, and he was kind of red in the face.
Her husband had driven off and left them here, huh? Niiiiice.
On the other hand, J. was sitting upstairs in a damned air-conditioned room, sprawled on her bed with her David Cassidy photo album and full access to HBO, and I was stuck outside in the unrelenting awesomeness of mid-July in eastern Kansas.
"I'm moving," I said, for no reason I could think of. "Cross country. To California."
I guess I thought that would distract her - give her something to ponder other than her runaway husband, at least for a minute or two. Let her forget that she and Dean had been left to fend for themselves while her "better half" (he of the nice eyes) drove around trying to get over being pissed off so he could take his family home.
Instead, she looked unhappier than she had a minute ago.
"We were supposed to buy this van," she sighed, looking over at the pool. "I thought we could use it to see the country. You know. Sleep in the back. Or out under the stars, with sleeping bags. Just get away from here. I waited all afternoon for him to come pick me up. And when he did, when he finally got there, he was driving this black Impala. So I said, 'Um… where's the van?' And he says, 'I bought this instead.'"
Then she went quiet, teasing Dean's cheek with her finger. When she looked at me again, she was back to being upset, like she'd been over at Bob's. "I should have known, when he showed up with that car. I should have known none of it was going to happen. I wanted to get out of here, and he said he'd take me. He promised. But that was six years ago, and we're still here. Living in a tiny little house with no air conditioning. I told him he had to take us out to eat, because if I sat in that house any longer I was going to puke."
"Where did you want to go?" I asked her. "Before he bought the car?"
"Anywhere."
I'd always known where I wanted to go. I was running away from something, yes; but running toward something just as much.
California.
Swimming pools. Movie stars.
"Anywhere," she said again.
Then she got up from the chair and walked over to the pool with Dean braced against her belly. When she got to the edge, at the end where there were wide, shallow steps leading down into the water, she toed off her sandals and walked down the steps. Dean looked startled at first, when she dunked him low enough to let the water lap against his toes, then seemed to enjoy being cooled down a little.
"Do me a favor?" she said as she slipped the stuffed bear out of Dean's grasp and held it out towards me. "Hang on to Fred for a minute."
The water seemed to work wonders for her, too. After a minute she stopped looking angry and sat down on one of the middle steps with the baby nestled between her legs. She didn't seem to care that her shorts and Dean's (and Dean's diaper) were wet and would have to stay that way until she could get home to change, just sat basking in the sun with her eyes half-closed, scooping handfuls of water up over Dean's belly.
Fred was pretty tattered, close up. A little smelly, too.
"Fred?" I said.
She grimaced. "John named him."
I watched cars go by - the pool was pretty much right out on the road - and went as far as opening my book, though I figured I wasn't going to get any reading done. "I want to be a writer," I said after a while. "That's why I'm going to California. I want to be a writer. When I told my family I wanted to move out there, my father stopped speaking to me."
"You're alone?"
"With a friend."
"Boyfriend?"
"Friend-friend."
Currently furious. Partly because I was still angry with her for making me sit in a parking lot in rural Indiana for three hours the day before yesterday, because she refused to drive in the rain. Partly, I think now, because we were both scared. We had no jobs lined up, nowhere to live. We were simply headed west, in separate cars. Headed toward something, though neither of us had any real idea what that was.
"I've never been there," she said. "California."
"It's nice."
She looked around. Took a good long look around, taking in everything we could see from the edge of the pool.
Asphalt, mostly. Concrete. Utility poles. There was a wide patch of grass between the motel parking lot and the road, but it had all gone brown and crackly in the heat. I thought eventually she'd say it was nice there too, in Lawrence, but she didn't seem to believe that, any more than I was willing to offer anything good about the town I'd left behind.
"I can go over to the store if you want," I said. "Get you a box of diapers."
She started to cry again.
"It's hot," she wailed. "It's just so goddamn hot."
Cooler in Colorado, I hoped. Up in the mountains. The forecast for Lawrence said "steamy" for the next few days, but surely it would be cooler up in the Rockies.
She sobbed for a long time. For a minute or two, Dean amused himself by slapping the water, splashing it around their legs and up onto his shirt. Then he squirmed around and peered up into his mother's face. He was six months old, I figured, too little to know what was going on, but he certainly seemed to understand that his mother was unhappy. He flailed toward her face with a small, wet hand and managed to land it on her cheek.
"Oh, Dean," she said. "I'm sorry. Mommy's sorry."
But she didn't stop crying.
There wasn't much I could offer, other than a beach towel I fetched out of the trunk of my car. She let me wrap it around the baby, let me hold him and old smelly Fred on my lap while she sobbed into her hands.
She let up, finally, as a big, rumbling black car pulled into the parking lot over at Bob's. Her husband got out and stood beside it, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked for her. It took him a minute to find her; after he'd seen where she was, he walked from Bob's parking lot into the motel's, past my old blue Malibu and J.'s sadly defaced Mustang, then stopped. He was still some distance from the pool, but when he said "Mary" we could all hear him.
Dean looked at his father, then at his mother. Didn't seem any too eager to go to either one of them.
Not if there was going to be more yelling, I figured.
"Mary," her husband said again.
I should have left, I suppose. Should have given them their privacy. But after two days of dealing with the heat and David Cassidy, I felt kind of determined to stand my ground. Hang onto my chair by the pool and the opportunity to read my damn book until the sun went down.
None of this was turning out to be what I'd expected - this road trip with a friend across the big, wide U.S. of A., headed toward the glory and palm trees of southern California.
As Mary's husband came closer, he offered me a nod. An acknowledgment that I was holding onto his son - who, although he was dripping wet, had at least stopped squirming. He had his bear clutched to his chest, was resting his face between its musty-smelling ears.
She'd said his name was John. Her husband.
John and Mary. If this were something I was writing, I'd give them more interesting names than that.
He crouched down alongside her, lowering his head close enough to hers that he could speak to her without my being able to what he was saying. Her back and shoulders stiffened a little, at first, and she shook her head, but a minute or two into his monologue she leaned slightly toward him and when he rested a hand on her shoulder she didn't shake it off.
"Okay?" he said.
"It's hot, John," she insisted. "It's just so damn hot."
"We'll get a pool. Okay? Tomorrow, after work. I'll run in K-Mart and get one of those little pools."
"John -"
"You'd like that, right, buddy?" He got to his feet, smiling, and took his son out of my lap, swirling the soggy towel around the baby like a sarong and holding him up to grin into his chubby, sun-pinked little face. "You want to go swimming every day, right in our yard?"
He bobbed the baby up and down a couple of times, managed to get a matching grin out of him, then said to me, "Thanks," though he seemed to be trying to figure out who I was. If he knew me, or should have known me.
"No problem," I told him.
Mary got to her feet slowly, streaming water onto the steps, then onto the tile apron around the pool. Her face was flushed and her eyes had started to puff up, but she'd begun to calm down a little. She looked more at peace than she'd been at any point since I'd first encountered her - though really, that wasn't saying a whole lot.
"She's going to California," she told her husband.
"Yeah?" he said, and told me, "Never been there."
"It's nice," I said.
"That's what I hear."
"We're wet," Mary interrupted. "We're going to - we can't get in the car like this."
"It's only water," John told her. "Don't sweat it. It's only water."
He slung an arm around her as they walked toward the car. The "cool-down time" had worked, apparently; she leaned into his embrace enough that they seemed to walk as one person, him carrying the baby, Mary carrying that beat-up bear. I watched them climb into the black Impala, listened to the rumble and roar of it when John started it up. It wasn't any bigger than my car, I thought, but it was a hell of a lot louder. It called attention to itself all the way up the road, until well after it was out of sight.
I realized then that they'd taken my beach towel.
No matter. I wouldn't have had a way to dry it out before morning.
~~~~~~~~
Tomorrow we're gonna take off plenty early, like 7:30. I just told J. that and she looked horrified. But if we can get 4 hours in before lunch and maybe an hour after, we can stop before it gets real hot.
Well, time for putting on my jammies. When I get my P.O. box in L.A., you guys have to write me some letters.
Love you and miss you,
Carol
* * * * *
You see ... back in 1979 three friends and I decided to move to California. You know: swimming pools. Movie stars. Someplace different and exciting. Someplace that wasn't here. I took off from home behind the wheel of a light blue '72 Chevy Malibu, loaded down with all my earthly belongings, figuring good things lay ahead. Cried for the first two or three hours of the journey. And a few days later, I landed in Lawrence, Kansas.
A lot of this is true. I was in Lawrence on July 13, 1979. There was a defaced bumper sticker. There was a Bob's Big Boy with strawberry pie. My friend and I were furious with each other throughout most of the trip, because neither of us had air conditioning and the central United States was just so goddamn hot.
Was there a bickering young couple with a cute baby? I'll let you decide.
CHARACTERS: Mary, John, wee!Dean, and ... me :)
GENRE: Want to call it Het? I don't, but you can go right ahead if it suits you.
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: That would be a "no."
LENGTH: 3072 words
MY LITTLE RUNAWAY
By Carol Davis
Lawrence, Kansas
July 13, 1979
Hi you guys,
Not much to do here so here is another letter. I'll be going to bed soon so we can get up early in the morning.
This room is real nice, the nicest we've had so far and only $26. It's nice to have a room with HBO - cable too. There's something on every channel. Shopping center across the road about 100 yards. I'd stay here a day or two but I really do want to cover some ground each day. Don't want to camp in Kansas. Tomorrow I'd like to be near Colorado.
The guy on the radio said 90's through Sunday. Aauugghh.
We ate at Bob's Big Boy. I had chicken filet with salad bar.
J. is still mad, so after dinner I went outside to sit by the pool for a while, and there was a girl sitting out there with the cutest baby…
~~~~~~~~
They'd been over at Bob's, I was pretty sure, while J. and I were there eating our chicken filets and strawberry pie: this blonde girl and her baby, sitting in a booth over near the door. There'd been a guy with them then - dark hair, great eyes, gorgeous - but he wasn't with them now, out by the Best Western's weird little kidney-shaped pool.
They'd been mad about something, over at Bob's. Both of them. The kind of mad where you don't say anything, you just sit there eating and scowling.
Kind of like me and J.
And now the girl was crying.
For a second or two I thought about doing an about-face, going back upstairs to the room, but the temperature up there was about forty degrees and wasn't likely to climb any higher until a certain someone got over her David Cassidy bumper sticker's being defaced by - well, neither one of us had any idea who did it.
I would have thought Somebody with taste, but there'd been a day when it was All. About. David. for me too, and it wasn't all that long ago. Either way, J. was mad at the world, and was likely to go on being mad until she got an apology from whomever had scrawled SUCKS on top of CASSIDY ROCKS! with a big black marker.
An apology?? Like that would ever happen.
You can't advertise, I told her. If you've got an unpopular opinion, you can't advertise it and expect people not to…
You can guess how well that went over.
Going back upstairs wasn't a good option. Not right then. Maybe not ever. Which left sticking to what I'd come out here to do: picking out a chair by the pool and reading the next few chapters of The Stand.
The blonde girl looked at me as I got closer to the pool, and I did a little head-duck, gave her half a nod and half a smile, and picked out a chair far enough away from hers to give her (and myself) some privacy.
Being that whatever her problem was, it wasn't any of my business.
But she must have been in a sharing kind of mood. I was trying to walk on past her chair when she said, "I'm sorry."
And I thought, Shit. I just wanted to sit out here and read.
"I shouldn't - I'm not even staying here," the girl went on, and snuffled, a big wet one that said she was in serious need of some Kleenex. She shifted the baby around, got an arm slung around his middle, and tried standing up - to leave, I guess - but in mid-rise the baby dropped the beat-up stuffed bear he'd been clutching and let out a howl they probably heard a mile down the road, close enough to the girl's ear to make her yelp in pain. When she tried to dip down to scoop up the bear, she fumbled the baby, lost her footing, and they both ended up on the ground, her on her butt and the baby sprawled across her lap.
They probably heard that baby screech in space.
"Deeeeeean," she begged, and it was like watching cats wrestle, her trying to keep hold of him and him trying to go after his bear, still shrieking like he was being sautéed. "Dean, honey, nooooo, stay with Mommy pleaaaaase Dean."
The heat, and the damn humidity, probably didn't help. It'd been so bad at noontime, when J. and I had stopped for gas outside of St. Louis, that I couldn't get a grip on the doorhandle to open the car door. Seven hours later the temperature was still over ninety, with humidity - jeez, how high can humidity go? It felt like a thousand percent, the kind of hot-and-suffocating that pretty much slaughters any "good will towards men" you might have started out with.
Ol' Dean didn't have any teeth, I didn't think, but I was still afraid he'd bite me if I touched him. Or touched the bear.
"Can I -" I said.
Kleenex I could do. Allergies, you know. I never travel without Kleenex.
She took the fistful I offered her and scrubbed at her nose with them, hanging onto Dean's fat little arm with her other hand. Somehow, with me kind of spotting her and Dean and the bear, she got up off the ground and back into the chair with Dean in her lap and the bear in Dean's.
"This is my LIFE," she moaned.
The only thing I could think of to say was, "He's very cute."
And she mumbled, "Thank you."
"Could I - do you want me to call somebody? Or something?"
She looked past me, down the parking lot, over toward Bob's. Maybe the guy with the great eyes was still in there?
"No," she said. "There's… no."
Not my problem, I thought. Tried to think, anyway. I don't know you, or your husband, or your baby. I'm only gonna be here one night. Gonna get in the car in the morning (with or without J. - she can sit here and sulk about her damn bumper sticker forever if she wants to) and head west, just like I planned. Gonna be looking at Colorado by tomorrow night.
But that girl didn't seem to have anything with her. No purse, no diaper bag.
"Do you want some water or something?" I asked her.
"No. Thanks."
Dean had started peering up at me like I was something he couldn't figure out. I was intending to take another stab at walking away when he shoved a hand out towards me, palm up, like he expected me to give him something. A cookie, maybe. Or some cash.
He was cute.
"He'll be back," the girl said, kind of rapidly, like she needed me to believe what she was saying even though she might not believe it herself. "My husband. He'll drive around for a little while, then he'll come back and get us. We do this… all the time. Cool-down time."
She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. I wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting out here, but she looked as soggy as I'd been at the gas station at noontime; her hair was sliding out of its ponytail, and there were big dark sweat stains on her t-shirt. Dean's little shirt and shorts looked pretty damp, too, and he was kind of red in the face.
Her husband had driven off and left them here, huh? Niiiiice.
On the other hand, J. was sitting upstairs in a damned air-conditioned room, sprawled on her bed with her David Cassidy photo album and full access to HBO, and I was stuck outside in the unrelenting awesomeness of mid-July in eastern Kansas.
"I'm moving," I said, for no reason I could think of. "Cross country. To California."
I guess I thought that would distract her - give her something to ponder other than her runaway husband, at least for a minute or two. Let her forget that she and Dean had been left to fend for themselves while her "better half" (he of the nice eyes) drove around trying to get over being pissed off so he could take his family home.
Instead, she looked unhappier than she had a minute ago.
"We were supposed to buy this van," she sighed, looking over at the pool. "I thought we could use it to see the country. You know. Sleep in the back. Or out under the stars, with sleeping bags. Just get away from here. I waited all afternoon for him to come pick me up. And when he did, when he finally got there, he was driving this black Impala. So I said, 'Um… where's the van?' And he says, 'I bought this instead.'"
Then she went quiet, teasing Dean's cheek with her finger. When she looked at me again, she was back to being upset, like she'd been over at Bob's. "I should have known, when he showed up with that car. I should have known none of it was going to happen. I wanted to get out of here, and he said he'd take me. He promised. But that was six years ago, and we're still here. Living in a tiny little house with no air conditioning. I told him he had to take us out to eat, because if I sat in that house any longer I was going to puke."
"Where did you want to go?" I asked her. "Before he bought the car?"
"Anywhere."
I'd always known where I wanted to go. I was running away from something, yes; but running toward something just as much.
California.
Swimming pools. Movie stars.
"Anywhere," she said again.
Then she got up from the chair and walked over to the pool with Dean braced against her belly. When she got to the edge, at the end where there were wide, shallow steps leading down into the water, she toed off her sandals and walked down the steps. Dean looked startled at first, when she dunked him low enough to let the water lap against his toes, then seemed to enjoy being cooled down a little.
"Do me a favor?" she said as she slipped the stuffed bear out of Dean's grasp and held it out towards me. "Hang on to Fred for a minute."
The water seemed to work wonders for her, too. After a minute she stopped looking angry and sat down on one of the middle steps with the baby nestled between her legs. She didn't seem to care that her shorts and Dean's (and Dean's diaper) were wet and would have to stay that way until she could get home to change, just sat basking in the sun with her eyes half-closed, scooping handfuls of water up over Dean's belly.
Fred was pretty tattered, close up. A little smelly, too.
"Fred?" I said.
She grimaced. "John named him."
I watched cars go by - the pool was pretty much right out on the road - and went as far as opening my book, though I figured I wasn't going to get any reading done. "I want to be a writer," I said after a while. "That's why I'm going to California. I want to be a writer. When I told my family I wanted to move out there, my father stopped speaking to me."
"You're alone?"
"With a friend."
"Boyfriend?"
"Friend-friend."
Currently furious. Partly because I was still angry with her for making me sit in a parking lot in rural Indiana for three hours the day before yesterday, because she refused to drive in the rain. Partly, I think now, because we were both scared. We had no jobs lined up, nowhere to live. We were simply headed west, in separate cars. Headed toward something, though neither of us had any real idea what that was.
"I've never been there," she said. "California."
"It's nice."
She looked around. Took a good long look around, taking in everything we could see from the edge of the pool.
Asphalt, mostly. Concrete. Utility poles. There was a wide patch of grass between the motel parking lot and the road, but it had all gone brown and crackly in the heat. I thought eventually she'd say it was nice there too, in Lawrence, but she didn't seem to believe that, any more than I was willing to offer anything good about the town I'd left behind.
"I can go over to the store if you want," I said. "Get you a box of diapers."
She started to cry again.
"It's hot," she wailed. "It's just so goddamn hot."
Cooler in Colorado, I hoped. Up in the mountains. The forecast for Lawrence said "steamy" for the next few days, but surely it would be cooler up in the Rockies.
She sobbed for a long time. For a minute or two, Dean amused himself by slapping the water, splashing it around their legs and up onto his shirt. Then he squirmed around and peered up into his mother's face. He was six months old, I figured, too little to know what was going on, but he certainly seemed to understand that his mother was unhappy. He flailed toward her face with a small, wet hand and managed to land it on her cheek.
"Oh, Dean," she said. "I'm sorry. Mommy's sorry."
But she didn't stop crying.
There wasn't much I could offer, other than a beach towel I fetched out of the trunk of my car. She let me wrap it around the baby, let me hold him and old smelly Fred on my lap while she sobbed into her hands.
She let up, finally, as a big, rumbling black car pulled into the parking lot over at Bob's. Her husband got out and stood beside it, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked for her. It took him a minute to find her; after he'd seen where she was, he walked from Bob's parking lot into the motel's, past my old blue Malibu and J.'s sadly defaced Mustang, then stopped. He was still some distance from the pool, but when he said "Mary" we could all hear him.
Dean looked at his father, then at his mother. Didn't seem any too eager to go to either one of them.
Not if there was going to be more yelling, I figured.
"Mary," her husband said again.
I should have left, I suppose. Should have given them their privacy. But after two days of dealing with the heat and David Cassidy, I felt kind of determined to stand my ground. Hang onto my chair by the pool and the opportunity to read my damn book until the sun went down.
None of this was turning out to be what I'd expected - this road trip with a friend across the big, wide U.S. of A., headed toward the glory and palm trees of southern California.
As Mary's husband came closer, he offered me a nod. An acknowledgment that I was holding onto his son - who, although he was dripping wet, had at least stopped squirming. He had his bear clutched to his chest, was resting his face between its musty-smelling ears.
She'd said his name was John. Her husband.
John and Mary. If this were something I was writing, I'd give them more interesting names than that.
He crouched down alongside her, lowering his head close enough to hers that he could speak to her without my being able to what he was saying. Her back and shoulders stiffened a little, at first, and she shook her head, but a minute or two into his monologue she leaned slightly toward him and when he rested a hand on her shoulder she didn't shake it off.
"Okay?" he said.
"It's hot, John," she insisted. "It's just so damn hot."
"We'll get a pool. Okay? Tomorrow, after work. I'll run in K-Mart and get one of those little pools."
"John -"
"You'd like that, right, buddy?" He got to his feet, smiling, and took his son out of my lap, swirling the soggy towel around the baby like a sarong and holding him up to grin into his chubby, sun-pinked little face. "You want to go swimming every day, right in our yard?"
He bobbed the baby up and down a couple of times, managed to get a matching grin out of him, then said to me, "Thanks," though he seemed to be trying to figure out who I was. If he knew me, or should have known me.
"No problem," I told him.
Mary got to her feet slowly, streaming water onto the steps, then onto the tile apron around the pool. Her face was flushed and her eyes had started to puff up, but she'd begun to calm down a little. She looked more at peace than she'd been at any point since I'd first encountered her - though really, that wasn't saying a whole lot.
"She's going to California," she told her husband.
"Yeah?" he said, and told me, "Never been there."
"It's nice," I said.
"That's what I hear."
"We're wet," Mary interrupted. "We're going to - we can't get in the car like this."
"It's only water," John told her. "Don't sweat it. It's only water."
He slung an arm around her as they walked toward the car. The "cool-down time" had worked, apparently; she leaned into his embrace enough that they seemed to walk as one person, him carrying the baby, Mary carrying that beat-up bear. I watched them climb into the black Impala, listened to the rumble and roar of it when John started it up. It wasn't any bigger than my car, I thought, but it was a hell of a lot louder. It called attention to itself all the way up the road, until well after it was out of sight.
I realized then that they'd taken my beach towel.
No matter. I wouldn't have had a way to dry it out before morning.
~~~~~~~~
Tomorrow we're gonna take off plenty early, like 7:30. I just told J. that and she looked horrified. But if we can get 4 hours in before lunch and maybe an hour after, we can stop before it gets real hot.
Well, time for putting on my jammies. When I get my P.O. box in L.A., you guys have to write me some letters.
Love you and miss you,
Carol
* * * * *