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The station wagon began to pucker.
A car passed southbound, then another. Thanks to the trailer, they didn’t see the woman who was now half in and half out of the deformed station wagon, like Brer Rabbit stuck in the tar baby. Nor did they hear her screams. One driver was listening to Toby Keith, the other to Led Zeppelin. Both had his particular brand of pop music turned up loud. In the restaurant, Pete Simmons heard her, but only from a great distance, like a fading echo. His eyelids fluttered. Then the screams stopped.
Pete rolled over on the filthy mattress and went back to sleep.
The thing that looked like a car ate Julia
In the hoss-trailer, DeeDee nickered and stamped an impatient foot. She was hungry.
4. THE LUSSIER FAMILY (’11 Expedition)
Six-year-old Rachel Lussier shouted, ‘Look, Mommy! Look, Daddy! It’s the horse lady! See her trailer? See it?’
Carla wasn’t surprised Rache was the first one to spot the trailer, even though she was sitting in the backseat. Rache had the sharpest eyes in the family; no one else even came close. X-ray vision, her father sometimes said. It was one of those jokes that isn’t quite a joke.
Joh
Joh
Carla had thrown him an elbow for that, but it was true. She had heard there was less sibling rivalry when the sibs were of different sexes. If so, Rachel and Blake were the exception that proved the rule. Carla sometimes thought the most common two words she heard these days were started it. Only the gender of the pronoun opening the sentence varied.
The two of them had been pretty good for the first hundred miles of this trip, partially because visiting with Joh
In desperation, Carla had started a game of Plastic Fantastic, serving as judge and awarding points for lawn gnomes, wishing wells, statues of the Blessed Virgin, etc. The problem was that on the turnpike there were lots of trees but very few vulgar roadside displays. Her sharp-eyed six-year-old daughter and her sharp-tongued four-year-old boy were begi
‘Want to pet the horsie again!’ Blake shouted. He began thrashing in his car seat, the world’s smallest break-dancer. His legs were now just long enough to kick the back of the driver’s seat, which Joh
Somebody tell me again why I wanted to have kids, he thought. Somebody remind me just what I was thinking. I know it made sense at the time.
‘Blakie, don’t kick Daddy’s seat,’ Joh
‘Want to pet the horrrrsie!’ Blake yelled. And fetched the back of the driver’s seat an especially good one.
‘You are such a babykins,’ Rachel said, safe from brother-kicks on her side of the backseat DMZ. She spoke in her most indulgent big-girl tone, the one always guaranteed to infuriate Blakie.
‘I AM AIN’T A BABYKINS!’
‘Blakie,’ Joh
‘She’s broken down,’ Carla said. ‘See the traffic cones? Pull over.’
‘Hon, that’d mean the breakdown lane. Not such a good idea.’
‘You don’t have to do that, just swing around and park beside those other two cars. On the ramp. There’s room and you won’t be blocking anything because the rest area’s closed.’
‘If it’s okay with you, I’d like to get back to Falmouth before d—’
‘Pull over.’ Carla heard herself using the DEFCON-1 tone that brooked no refusal, even though she knew it was setting a bad example; how many times lately had she heard Rachel using that exact same tone on Blake? Using it until the little guy broke down in tears?
Switching off the she-who-must-be-obeyed voice and speaking more softly, Carla said, ‘That woman was nice to the kids.’
They had pulled into Damon’s next to the horse-trailer and stopped for ice cream. The horse lady (nearly as big as a horse herself) was leaning against the trailer, eating a cone of her own and feeding something to a very handsome beastie. To Carla the treat looked like a Kashi granola bar.
Joh
‘Cost you a quarter,’ the big lady in the brown riding skirt had said, and then gri
‘Whoa, soft!’ Blake said. Carla had never heard him speak with such simple awe. Why haven’t we ever taken these kids to a petting zoo? she wondered, and immediately put it down on her mental to-do list.
‘Me, me, me!’ Rachel bugled, dancing around impatiently.
The big lady set Blake down. ‘Lick that ice cream while I lift your sister,’ she told him, ‘but don’t get cooties on it, okay?’
Carla thought of telling Blake that eating after people, especially strange people, was not okay. Then she saw Joh
The horse lady lifted Rachel so Rachel could pet the horse’s nose. ‘Wowie! Nice!’ Rachel said. ‘What’s her name?’
‘DeeDee.’
‘Great name! I love you, DeeDee!’
‘I love you, too, DeeDee,’ the horse lady said, and put a big old smackeroo on DeeDee’s nose. That made them all laugh.
‘Mom, can we have a horse?’
‘Yes!’ Carla said warmly. ‘When you’re twenty-six!’
This made Rachel put on her mad face (puckered brow, puffed cheeks, lips down to a stitch), but when the horse lady laughed, Rache gave up and laughed too.
The big woman bent down to Blakie, her hands on knees covered by her riding skirt. ‘Can I have my ice cream cone back, young fella?’
Blake held it out. When she took it, he began to lick his fingers, which were covered with melting pistachio.
‘Thank you,’ Carla told the horse lady. ‘That was very kind of you.’ Then, to Blake, ‘Let’s get you inside and cleaned up. After that you can have ice cream.’