“Well, we won’t be able to get away at all today if I don’t get off the phone,” Julia said. “We’ll see you when we get there.” And she hung up. She couldn’t imagine having Pamela along for the whole trip. This overnight visit at her house was going to be bad enough.
• • •
JULIA was driving the first leg of the trip. They had been on the road over an hour, listening to a program called From the Top on NPR, featuring especially talented young musicians.
“Did you ever take music lessons?” Carmen said.
Julia nodded. “Piano. Your father could play circles around me, though.” She remembered how she dreaded practicing, not because of the practice itself—she had actually loved playing the piano—but because of her father’s tutorials shouted from the other room, always ending sooner or later with “Stop! You’re slaughtering it! No more!”
They passed a billboard: FIREWORKS AND PEACHES NEXT EXIT. Evidently North Carolina was no different from every other state in the South, all of which were full of such signs that stayed up year-round.
“I never heard Daddy play the piano,” Carmen said, “but you knew he played the guitar, right? He taught me a little. He got me a little plastic ukulele when I was only four.” She positioned her left hand on an imaginary fret and made strumming motions with her right. “Isn’t ukulele a cool word? Has a little Hawaiian twang.” She said it again. “U-ku-le-le.”
“Your father could have played any instrument he picked up,” Julia said. She turned the radio off. “Okay, want to start reading now?”
Carmen reached to the backseat and got a book titled Masterworks of Short Fiction. It was Julia’s idea that they use some of their road time reading aloud. For this purpose, she had selected an anthology of short stories and the novella Ethan Frome, which she wanted to save for after they visited Edith Wharton’s home in Massachusetts. They would listen to the radio, too, of course, as well as the CDs she had brought along.
The truck traffic was heavy along this stretch, but Julia’s driving strategy was to set the cruise control at sixty and stay in the right lane. This meant, of course, that most other vehicles, including eighteen-wheelers, were whizzing past their rented Honda. That was fine with her. She was in no hurry to get to Pamela’s. A red Corvette convertible flew by, then whipped in front of her to pass a car that wouldn’t give up the middle lane.
The stories in the Masterworks book were arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors’ last names. Julia had assumed they would start with the first story and continue in order, but Carmen opened the book and ran her finger down the table of contents, then stopped suddenly and laughed. “Well, how about that? I should’ve known. Here’s a story you probably know from memory—let’s do it first.” And she turned to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
Julia had actually hoped to be the one to read this story aloud since it was one of her four favorites by Flannery O’Connor. But this might be better after all. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t remember ever hearing it read aloud by someone else, though she herself had done it numbers of times.
• • •
CARMEN cleared her throat and plunged in. Julia wished later that she had a recording, not necessarily of the story itself, though Carmen was an expressive, fluent reader, but it was the girl’s commentary along the way she wished she could replay.
After the first page, it was, simply, “She’s a good writer. Very funny, very compact.” On the next page she remarked that it felt odd to be riding in a car reading a story about a family riding in a car. She also said she had a bad feeling about the cat hidden in the basket on the floor of the backseat. “That cat is going to cause trouble, you wait and see,” she said, as if Julia didn’t already know.
She stopped and laughed heartily after the sentence In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady. “I did laundry for a woman in Rhode Island just like that,” she said. “She wore this lacy pink underwear whenever she went out in case she ended up in the emergency room.”
On the next page Carmen paused and said, “So I guess the grandmother’s never going to get a real name besides ‘the grandmother,’ right?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. After the part about Mr. Teagarden and the watermelon, she stopped again and laughed, and when the monkey sprang into the chinaberry tree a little later, she laughed even harder, then said admiringly, “Who would ever think of putting something like that in a story?”
She thought June Star was especially funny, said she used to know a little girl exactly like her. When the Misfit was mentioned again on the fifth page, she said, “Uh-oh . . . portentous. Is he going to show up at the end?” But she kept reading, quite fast, rarely faltering over a word.
Julia hoped the traffic wouldn’t be this bad the whole way. She had thought the roads would be clearer traveling on Saturday. Right now she was hemmed in on all three sides by trucks, with two more lined up behind the one that was passing her. She wasn’t going to let herself get pressured into joining the passing game, though. There was no need to rush. She knew there was a rhythm to freeway traffic. This little bottleneck would loosen eventually. Anyway, it was a fine day for traveling—overcast with an expected high of sixty—and she was listening to one of her favorite stories.
The description of the accident tickled Carmen, especially the way it started, with the cat leaping out of the basket onto Bailey’s shoulder, “clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.” She laughed at some length over that phrase, and the grandmother’s “I believe I have injured an organ.”
But that was the last time she laughed. When the three men in the black car showed up and the grandmother recognized the driver, Carmen stopped and threw her head back. “Oh, no, I knew it. It’s him. I don’t think I want to read any further.” But she kept going, only slower now, as all the family members were marched off into the dark woods except the grandmother. Carmen didn’t even smile when the Misfit said his father died in “nineteen ought nineteen,” and when the last three gunshots were fired, she paused and gave a low half moan before reading the final few paragraphs.
Julia found that she was clutching the steering wheel tightly, her neck tense. Somehow the story seemed more violent this time than it ever had before. Perhaps it was due to the fact that she wasn’t seeing the words on the page. Free from the physical process of reading, maybe her mind translated the words into more powerful images. Or maybe the story was colored this time by Carmen’s remarks or by her slower pace at the end. Whereas it had never before quite seemed like anything that could really happen, this time it struck her with the force of some gruesome report on the evening news. She was suddenly reminded that horrible things could happen to real people on road trips.
The blue light of a police car was flashing up ahead, and as they passed it, Julia saw the red Corvette pulled onto the shoulder of the road. The driver was handing the officer something out the window.
Carmen inhaled deeply and let out a long sigh. “Wow. Are all her stories this . . . harrowing?”
“Well, no,” Julia said, regretting now that this was the story they had started with. She didn’t want Carmen to think she enjoyed stories about old women getting shot by escaped convicts. She wished one of O’Connor’s milder stories had been included in the book rather than this one. Even the one about Hulga Hopewell and her wooden leg would have been better.
And after Carmen’s next words, she wished it more than ever. “Okay, I have a question,” the girl said. “Maybe I’m imagining things, but it seems to me that Flannery O’Connor is sort of interested in religion. I mean, even the title of the story, right? ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’—well, yeah, like impossible, if we’re talking about man’s natural . . . depravity. You think that’s what she was getting at?”
Julia had no desire to discuss man’s natural depravity. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said.
“Well, they’re all sinners, not just th
e Misfit,” Carmen said. “Even the grandmother—she goes from being this very funny character to sort of pathetic, you know? Sort of . . . fatuous. She’s this selfish old hypocrite that gets them on the wrong road first, and then gets them all killed. But then at the end when she finally sees the truth about herself and him and everybody else—well, it’s too late then for . . . grace. I don’t know, though—is that what’s going on?”
In Julia’s years of teaching, whenever a student offered some insight beyond his years, her first thought was always to suspect it was not his own, that he had read it in a journal or online critique and was just trying to show off. But Carmen’s comment had come so spontaneously that Julia was forced to accept it as genuine. She tried not to act as surprised as she felt.
Depravity, hypocrisy, grace—these were Flannery O’Connor’s bread and butter in the way of themes, but how could a high school dropout extract all of this? In one reading, no less? And how could she nail the grandmother’s character so precisely when so many readers saw her as purely comic or purely evil?
• • •
SHE felt Carmen’s eyes on her, as if waiting for an answer, though Julia couldn’t think of what the question was. “Her fiction is very complex,” she finally said.
“But do all her stories have this kind of religious slant?” Carmen said. “I wouldn’t expect you to like stories like that.”
Julia couldn’t remember now why she had ever thought reading stories aloud in the car was a good idea. “I guess you could say,” she replied slowly, “I like her stories in spite of her religion, not because of it. A good story can always be enjoyed on different levels, both literal and figurative.”
Carmen laughed. “Oh, Aunt Julia, I just love the way you talk. I know there’s no way I could ever learn everything you know.” She paused. “You know, that part when the grandmother told the Misfit he was one of her babies? Well, I wonder if . . .”
Thankfully, Julia didn’t have to hear what Carmen wondered, for at that very moment a distraction appeared in the form of a flashing message on a portable signboard along the side of the road: TRAFFIC SLOWING AHEAD. Carmen stopped talking and pointed to it. Seconds later, they came to the top of a small rise and saw a long line of vehicles bumper to bumper in all three lanes ahead of them as far as they could see. They soon came to a complete stop.
All at once this didn’t seem like a welcome distraction at all. Sitting in traffic would mean more time for Carmen to ask questions. Julia sighed. “Must be an accident up there somewhere.”
Carmen seemed to have forgotten about the story already as she unbuckled her seat belt and reached into the backseat. “A GPS would sure come in handy right now,” she said, “but at least we’ve got this.” She pulled out the road atlas, opened it, and found the map for North Carolina.
Julia had declined the GPS offer from the rental place. The most advanced travel aid she ever used was MapQuest, of which she had, in fact, availed herself for this trip. Inside a folder, which was now tucked between the driver’s seat and console, were many pages of MapQuest directions for all the planned stops along their route. They crept ahead a few feet and stopped again. Loud rap music was coming from a car nearby.
Carmen pointed ahead. “There’s an exit coming up. Let’s get off and see what happens, okay?” She sounded excited. Sudden glitches always seemed to rev up her can-do spirit.
Julia wasn’t at all excited. Deviating from a prescribed route had always been equated with risk in her way of thinking. And risk could so easily mean failure.
They crept a little farther. Up ahead several cars were taking the exit.
Carmen looked back at the atlas. “Yeah, this should work,” she said. “We can take this exit and then—well, I guess Highway 21 runs up the right general direction. Maybe we can pick up the interstate again somewhere around Statesville.”
Julia wasn’t comforted by the girl’s word choices—should work, I guess, general direction, maybe.
Carmen glanced up. “You could go ahead and get off on the shoulder now, Aunt Julia. That would get us to the exit quicker. Other cars are doing it, see?”
“Those people probably live out that direction somewhere,” Julia said. “They probably know every inch of those back roads.”
“Well, then, if we get turned around, we can stop and ask one of them where we are,” Carmen said cheerfully.
Julia looked over at the opposite side of the interstate, where drivers were freely traveling toward their destinations, then looked again at all the lanes of traffic in front of her. No sign of a break. Behind her more and more cars were joining the backup. She looked at the car next to her, where a man was pounding on the steering wheel and shouting animatedly.
She didn’t look at Carmen but was very aware of her presence. You’ve kept yourself in a box for half of your life, all because of an accident. It was something the girl had said just days ago, all the while weeping copious tears, after Julia told her about the child whose life she had taken. You don’t understand the definition of accident, Julia had replied, dry-eyed, for she had cried all the tears she could cry many years ago.
And at some point Carmen had said this: You’re too hard on yourself, Aunt Julia. You’re punishing yourself for no good reason. It won’t bring the boy back. As if anyone her age could understand the weight of such a crime and what kind of punishment was appropriate. Nothing could bring the boy back—that much was true. But some offenders deserved no amnesty, she told the girl. Certain sins were beyond atonement.
• • •
SOMEWHERE up ahead a car honked, then another, and a whole spate of honks ensued, different pitches and timbres—blares, beeps, toots, blasts—a cacophony of vented frustration. It sounded like a beginning band warming up.
Julia could feel the girl looking at her. More horns were joining in from all sides. It was amusing, really, to think that these were all adults.
Carmen raised her voice. “You don’t want to sit in the middle of this, do you?”
No, Julia didn’t want to sit here. She took a quick look behind, then checked the right side-view mirror, cautiously pulled out of her lane onto the shoulder, and slowly proceeded to the exit.
Carmen tapped her index fingers together. “And the crowd applauded wildly as Dr. Julia Rich bravely took a step off the beaten path,” she said. She directed Julia to turn right at the stop sign, and as they traveled down the road, the sound of the car horns behind them gradually faded.
Julia couldn’t help thinking of the fact that this was exactly the mistake the family in O’Connor’s story had made: getting off the beaten path. They had taken a hilly red dirt road and ended up getting murdered by a psychopath. Well, this wasn’t a hilly dirt road. Not yet at least.
They drove for almost a mile before they saw a sign verifying that they were on Highway 21 North. It was just a plain, two-lane paved road leading . . . well, somewhere. Every road led somewhere.
• chapter 14 •
ANOTHER CLOUDBURST
“See? That worked out,” Carmen said as they pulled into Pamela’s driveway a few minutes past five o’clock. “We didn’t lose much time at all.”
Julia had to admit that the detour had turned out much better than she expected. She had almost forgotten how much was lost when traveling by interstate—all the local color of small towns and the surrounding countryside, such as the ramshackle diner named The Big Bad Wolf’s Barbecue Pit and the backyard clothesline on which were hanging a half dozen of the largest men’s jockey shorts she had ever seen, plus one pair of jumbo boxers, black with red lips printed all over them. Carmen had laughed at that and said, “Aw, look, somebody loves him,” then had taken several pictures of the clothesline with Julia’s camera.
The front door of Pamela’s house flew open, and Pamela stepped out onto the porch, waving with both hands. She was wearing an old-fashioned bibbed apron over a dark blue sweat suit and sporting a new hairstyle: a little round shrub of tight brown curls—inspired by Carme
n’s hair, she had told them over the phone. “Come on in!” she called. “We’ve been waiting! It’s all ready to eat!”
Inside, dinner was indeed ready and waiting, and within minutes they were hustled in and the four of them were seated around the dining room table, elegantly set with china, silver, candles, and cloth napkins. Since the last time Julia had seen Butch, he had grown a beard and mustache so that he now resembled a caveman more than ever—a middle-aged caveman going gray. He was wearing a faded turquoise T-shirt with Cooper County Senior Athletes Cycling Club printed on it. It was clear from its snug fit over his ample stomach that he was no longer an active member of the club.
Pamela began bringing in platters of food, talking the whole time. “I just love a formal dinner,” she said, “where you pass things around in serving dishes.” She jerked her head toward Butch. “We hardly ever eat this way anymore because somebody is always too impatient.”
Either Butch didn’t hear her or he was too busy illustrating her point as he stabbed two thick pieces of grilled pork and deposited them onto his plate.
Finally all the dishes were passed, and the meal commenced. Right away Pamela introduced a subject dear to her heart: her grandchildren. She bragged in general for a while, then zeroed in on their oldest grandson, Cody, who wasn’t even five yet but already knew how to log on to a computer using his father’s password, had even found his way to the Lego website one day. From Cody, she worked her way down the ranks, detailing the skill set of each child, even the baby, who, to hear her tell it, was far ahead of other three-month-olds.
Carmen was all ears and eyes and smiles. Anyone watching her would think she really was interested in all of this. And, knowing her, she probably was.
Pamela’s talk moved to her two grown children. Even when she stopped long enough to ask Carmen or Julia a question, she managed to make it a quick transition: “So did you finish the props for the Sunday school play?” she asked Carmen, but then allowed only a sentence or two before, “I remember a Christmas play Bobby and Kendra were in at church when they were kids. The two of them were a donkey in the nativity scene, and I had to make them a costume. Neither one of them wanted to be the tail, of course, so we had to make them flip a coin.”
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