The Summer the World Ended

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Sorry,” said Dad.

  “What”―she started to snap, but relaxed and sighed the rest―“for?”

  “For whatever put that mug on your face.”

  “Look, Dad, just… don’t call me that.”

  “Okay, okay… fine.” He sighed, seeming sad. “I guess I’ll have to learn you’re not my little girl anymore.”

  Why did you leave if it bothers you? She squirmed in her seat. “Don’t hit me with guilt. I got enough already. You left. You still haven’t trusted me with why.”

  He squinted at the road. His mouth opened and closed a few times, words dead at the tip of his tongue.

  “Is it something Mom did, and you don’t wanna ‘speak ill of the dead?’”

  “No.” He pursed his lips for a moment. “I was getting involved with some stuff at work that I was afraid would wind up putting the two of you in danger. We got a whisper that some foreign nationals were attempting to threaten immediate family to turn someone.”

  She furrowed her brows. “Turn someone?”

  Dad wrung his hands on the wheel, causing the truck to wobble in the lane. “Pass sensitive information to hostile governments in exchange for… not hurting the people you love.”

  “Oh, damn.” She looked straight ahead. “Seriously? That’s…”

  “Like something out of a movie?” He reached over and squeezed her hand. “I didn’t believe it either until Dan’s wife died in a crash two blocks from their house. Only her car and a garbage truck were on the street. That was no accident.”

  “Who’s Dan?”

  “He sat across the aisle from me at the office in Edison. The company we worked for at the time was a frontend for DoD software development. It let them bring in civilians to work on classified projects, each person getting a small piece of the puzzle without having access to the whole pie. The code was modularized down to a level that no one really knew what they were working on.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed. “Are they, like, still trying to kill you?”

  “Nah. I’ve covered my tracks pretty good.” He eased to the right lane and took an exit ramp. “If it were possible, I would’ve quit. I’d already been approached by the Russians. I had no choice.”

  Riley twirled an extra-long piece of frayed denim on her shorts around her finger.

  “I can’t believe Lily let you wear those. You’re not old enough to show that much leg. Does your ass hang out of that thing?”

  “Dad.” Riley blushed. “Jesus… No it does not.”

  The truck stopped next to a row of gas pumps. Dad killed the engine and opened the door. A rapid pinging came from the dash since he’d left the keys in. “I’ll run inside and grab some road snacks.” He handed her a credit card. “Go ahead and fill it with regular.”

  Riley looked around. “Where’s the guy?”

  Dad paused halfway out the door. “What guy?”

  “The gas dude. The one you give the card to.”

  “Riley…” Dad cracked up for a moment. “Wow, you don’t get out much do you?”

  She glared.

  “New Jersey has this strange fear of people pumping their own gas. You have to pump it yourself.”

  She stuck the card into her chin and bit her lip. “Really?”

  “Yeah, come on.” He slid off the seat. “I’ll show you.”

  Riley undid her seat belt and climbed down out of the truck, scuffing flip-flops around the nose to the gas cap behind the driver side door. She turned the credit card over in her hands, standing on tiptoe to look around. One semi truck and a few normal cars dotted the massive filling station. No one paid much attention to her standing there.

  Dad pointed at the pump. “Put the card in that slot and push the button for regular.”

  “We’re not gonna get in trouble?”

  “Nope.” He walked her through the steps of running a gas pump.

  Riley wrestled the hose into place and squeezed the trigger with both hands, continuing to hold it.

  Dad waited a minute before he couldn’t stop from laughing again. “Flick the little kickstand thing down, you don’t have to stand there with it.”

  Riley did so, and stepped back with her arms folded. “Oh.”

  “Be right back.” Dad jogged across six lanes of filling stations, and ducked into the convenience store.

  She folded her arms and stared at the numbers racing upward until the unexpected growl of a semi roaring to life startled a yelp out of her, not that anyone heard it. The truck pulled away, leaving her a clear view of the store and Dad through the windows. With him in sight, she felt a little safer. Dad collected a few items and went to the register. At the moment he gathered two bags and walked out, the pump stopped with a loud click. Riley pulled the hose out of the tank and hung it on the pump. Dad slipped past her and set the bags behind his seat.

  “Might wanna use the bathroom while we’re here. I’d like to make some progress before we have to stop again.”

  “Okay.” She looked around at the wide-open tarmac, wondering if there was really anyone out there who’d want to hurt her to make Dad be a spy. No way. That’s got BS all over it. When will he tell me he got caught cheating? She glanced up at him. “Dad? You really left so no one hurt me an’ Mom?”

  He looked her straight in the eye. “Yes.”

  If he was lying, he was damn good at it. Riley found herself jogging to get behind the safety of a closed bathroom door.

  full day of driving and another awful motel room later, they took a break at a rest stop somewhere near the western edge of the Texas Panhandle. The dashboard clock read 11:12 a.m., but it seemed wrong. Riley figured out his truck’s clock must’ve been set to New Mexico time, which meant Texas was at noon. Her emotions had taken a beating over the past week, and offered little more than a crash-test-dummy’s personality as she fell out of the truck and followed him to a place with the name Bernadette’s over the door in sputtering neon. A middle-aged woman in a green apron led them to a table, gave her a strange, intense stare, and backed away.

  “This is like a knock-off of Denny’s,” whispered Riley after they’d been seated in a window booth.

  The hostess and three waitresses clustered at a counter lined with padded stools, near a cake minder full of brownies. All four of them looked at her and whispered.

  Riley looked down at the menu, her appetite gone.

  “Hon?” Dad slid his hand across the table. “What’s bothering you?”

  She let him hold her arm. “They’re all watching me. Probably calling me bulimic or something.”

  “One, you’re a beautiful girl. Two, don’t let what anyone thinks affect what you think of yourself. It’s your body. You’re the one who has to live with it.” He waited two beats. “You’re not, are you?”

  “No.” She’d leaned on the word so hard it came out sounding more like ‘Noah.’

  “Sooner or later you will laugh at a joke.”

  “I know… It’s just old.” She sighed. “I eat normal, I just don’t gain weight. Actually, I kinda eat a lot.”

  “Oh, you’ll probably hit thirty-five or so, then turn into a blimp.” He chuckled. “One day, your metabolism will fall on its ass.”

  She smirked. Her almost-laugh died as she remembered Mom battling the scale. Her mother wasn’t fat by anyone’s imagination, but she worried constantly about it.

  “What can I get you folks?” asked a nervous woman with dark skin and straight hair. She looked a bit like Amber might after growing up and having kids. “Coffee? Juice?”

  Riley shot a forlorn look at Dad, then at her abandoned menu.

  “Two eggs over easy with hash, please. She’ll have an omelet with Swiss cheese and mushrooms.”

  The waitress jotted down the order. “Drinks?”

  “Two coffees, please.”

  “Be right back with the coffee.” She collected the menus and rejoined the gossip hounds.

  Riley stared out the window, watching traffic whistle past on I
-40 in the distance. Dad rambled on through a story about how he and Lily met in college. He punctuated it with self-flagellating comments about how it had been a mistake to leave and he’d regretted it every minute of every day.

  Her most elaborate response was “mmm.”

  Their food arrived, and Riley went about the motions of eating. The eggs tasted like foam rubber, the home fries oozed grease. She assaulted it with black pepper, though the seasoning had been sitting out so long it added little more than color.

  Look at them staring at me. They don’t think I’m gonna eat this whole thing. Or, they think I’m gonna puke it up as soon as I finish. She stared defiance at them while shoveling eggs and potatoes into her mouth. They only whispered more feverishly.

  She sulked.

  “Be right back. Gotta hit the head.” Dad slid out of the bench and made his way to the bathroom.

  Riley got two more bites of egg down before a tall waitress with strawberry blonde hair and way too much perfume walked over.

  “Are you okay, sweetie?”

  “Huh?”

  The woman looked in the direction of the bathrooms and crouched, whispering, “Have you been kidnapped? We’ll stall him and get a cop here right away. You don’t have to be afraid. He can’t hurt you.”

  She blinked. That’s why they were staring at her. Rumpled clothes she’d worn three days in a row, the expression that must be on her face, how quiet she’d been. “I’m okay.”

  “What did he threaten you with?” The woman looked at the bathroom again, as if terrified he’d catch her here.

  “Nothing. He’s my dad. Chill out.” She pushed potato around the plate. “My mother died two weeks ago, an’ I gotta move across the country.”

  The waitress hesitated, looking back and forth between her and the other servers. “Okay… Sorry, we just assumed. He didn’t look quite right.”

  Riley scowled at the woman. “He’s not creepy, he’s my dad. We’ve been driving from New Jersey. Not sleeping much.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” The waitress stood. “You looked so… forlorn.”

  “S’okay. Guess it’s better to ask in case you were right.”

  The woman hesitated, as if not quite believing her.

  “Would he have left me alone if he kidnapped me?”

  “Depends on what he threatened you with, honey.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  Riley stabbed the half-omelet on the plate, and stared through her reflection at the highway. This feels like a horrible dream. This is someone else’s life. When do I get to wake up and go back to being me?

  She startled when Dad plopped himself down.

  “What’s got you so jumpy?”

  “They didn’t think I was too skinny. They thought you kidnapped me.”

  “Well, I suppose I did. Not like you wanted to leave home.” He offered a wistful smile.

  “I didn’t want Mom to die.” Riley pushed her plate away. Her father gave her a scolding look until she got up and moved around to sit next to him. “You’re still my dad.”

  He put an arm around her and kissed the side of her head. She leaned against him and finished her lunch, wondering if her future might not totally suck.

  he view outside the truck seemed like something from another planet. Aside from small tufts of brush, Riley hadn’t seen anything green for what felt like an eternity. Last night’s motel stop hadn’t left much of an imprint upon her memory. Exhaustion finally caught up to her and sent her tumbling into sleep. Per a short guy with massive eyebrows and a tweed blazer behind the front desk―who had been way too chipper for 7 a.m.―the place had offered complimentary breakfast: cold eggs and rock-hard bacon.

  Dad kept quiet for most of the morning, though he did smile more in the past four hours than he’d done in two weeks. She craned her neck to look at the horizon, glancing right, straight ahead, and out his window. Everything was the same―flat open nothing with a single line of road. Riley spent a moment admiring her father’s profile and six-day beard. He didn’t seem as creepy as when she’d first seen him. Enough of his little habits rang true in her memory to tamp down her weak sense of unease. The way he held his mug, the way he hunched ever so slightly forward in his seat, and his aversion to loud noise all seemed ‘right.’

  Riley pulled her right foot up onto the seat and let her cheek rest against her knee. Her flip-flop fell off. She brushed her fingers over her toenails; the glittery blue paint reminded her Mom hadn’t been gone that long. Heaviness settled in her chest, though she didn’t cry.

  Everything outside looked the same, save for the distant haze of a couple of mountains along the horizon. Miles and miles of rolling pale sand covered with a haze of short green scrub brush stretched into the distance. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the sound of her mother’s voice. Somewhere on her phone or laptop, she had a couple of videos she’d taken of Mom. At least two were from birthday parties, and one had been her attempt to prove to Mom she drank too much. For a moment, Riley thought about deleting that one when she could, but changed her mind. Any memory of Mom was a memory she wanted to keep―even an unflattering one.

  A little past noon, they passed a brown sign bearing the words, ‘Elephant Butte Lake State Park.’ Riley couldn’t help herself and giggled. Less than twenty minutes later, Dad took an off ramp labeled ‘Truth or Consequences’ soon after an overpass.

  “Gee, that doesn’t sound ominous at all.” Riley stretched.

  The truck shuddered as they slowed and went around a giant rightward turning circle that let them out on a smaller two-lane road. Off to the right, traces of civilization poked up out of the desert. Closest was a large building she assumed to be a hotel, rectangular with large square windows and bands of brown. When they passed in front of it, she smirked at the Holiday Inn logo.

  “I wonder if their beds are any more comfortable than the boards we’ve been sleeping on.”

  “You’ll be in your own bed tonight.” Dad smiled. “Won’t be much longer now. Just gotta cut out onto 51 East through Las Cerezas.”

  “Geez, they have Walmarts here?” Riley pointed at a sign passing on the right.

  He laughed. “Yes, Riley… Civilization has penetrated the desert.”

  They stopped at a Chevron to top off the tank and feed it some antifreeze and wiper fluid. As grungy as she felt in the same clothes she’d worn the whole trip, her surroundings were a far cry from Menlo Park Mall or anywhere anyone she knew would see her. No one here seemed to notice or care she felt frumpy.

  Riley kept quiet as they headed south through a relatively large main road and hooked a left onto 51. Everything seemed so wide open. The mountains in the background still felt weird. Home had so many trees and so many people packed in tight, seeing this much space between buildings kept her staring around like a tourist. Most of the buildings were only one story and wide. Shops had strange names, chains that didn’t exist in the east. A square house covered in multicolored stone passed on the right, a picnic table in front and a large blue plastic playground to the right. Riley made a face. It looked like people randomly built structures here and there. To her Jersey eyes, most of them looked ramshackle, as if a stiff storm would knock them down. A moment later, a tiny white house passed on the left, shingles peeling from the roof, windows broken and boarded.

  Why did Dad take me here? Everything’s falling apart.

  Homesickness hit hard again, and she wondered what was going on inside Mom’s house. Were people looking at it now? Was someone walking through her bedroom at that very minute? Riley narrowed her eyes. Dad said he’d give her any money the sale produced. She’d let it sit in the bank until she could use it to buy Mom’s house back. Another four years, and she’d be eighteen, and no one could tell her where she could live.

  Yeah, right. She let her head fall back against the seat. I’d need a job good enough to pay taxes. I’m never gonna be able to go home. Quiet tears slipped out of her eyes.

  “Riley?” aske
d Dad.

  “Homesick,” she muttered.

  “A house is just a pile of wood. A home is everything inside, all the memories. Memories you can take with you wherever you go.”

  “Okay, fortune cookie.” She chuckled and wiped her eyes.

  “You know, it might be better for you to be away from there anyway. Everything would remind you of Mom.”

  “What about stability of a familiar environment?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I gotta deal with Mom”―she still couldn’t say dying―“and, um, now I’m out in the middle of nowhere.” She sighed and let her arms fall to her sides. “Sorry. You didn’t have to take me in. I shouldn’t be ungrateful.”

  “You’re wrong, Riley. I had to. I… You would’ve been happier with your mother, but we are still family.”

  “Is it true what you said? You never divorced Mom?”

  “Yep. We didn’t have issues. I only wanted to protect you two.”

  “Russian assassins coming after us?” She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes.

  “Doubtful.” Before Riley could smile, he continued in a scary-serious tone. “They’re too busy right now with the situation in the Ukraine. I’m a mid-level programmer working on missile guidance routines and some encryption stuff for communication satellites deemed ‘nonsecure.’ I’m not a high value target to them. The threat is really from extremist cells from the Middle East and unstable regimes like Korea, and that whole Middle East mess, and I don’t think God even knows what the hell Putin will do next.”

  She stared at him for a long minute in silence. Holy shit.

  “Sorry, hon. I’ve been trying not to scare you, but you keep asking.”

  Route 51 snaked out of Truth or Consequences heading east. Large hills passed on either side, feeling a bit like they drove through a canyon. About thirty-five minutes out of the city, a tiny town sprang up around the road. One hand-painted sign read, ‘Welcome to Las Cerezas.’ Aside from a scattered number of private homes, she spotted a hardware store, a mechanic’s garage named Lonnie’s with a couple of Harley Davidson bikes clustered by the door, two churches, a couple of empty-looking warehouses, a Hernandez Grocery, and a place that looked like a restaurant with a fading sign over the door calling it Tommy’s. A slim one-lane dirt road curved around behind the hills to the south toward the hint of a trailer park in the desert.