American Heart

by Laura Moriarty

  I was most interested in the food. Chloe and I had just come in to use the bathroom, and I knew we didn’t have time to actually sit and eat at the Maid-Rite. But when we were supposedly on our way back out, I stopped at the little counter, pointing at the pastries and banana bread slices to show Chloe I’d get her something if she wanted. She shook her head, so I just got myself a cinnamon roll, still warm in its foil pouch. It tasted so soft and buttery on my tongue I pushed half of it in my mouth all at once.

  Chloe stared at me. By then, we’d walked over to the woven baskets, away from everybody, but my cheeks were still too full to talk. So I just looked at her like, What?

  “It’s getting late,” she whispered. “We should go out.”

  I wiped my nose, but I took another bite, acting like she hadn’t said it. It was so cold out, the wind still blowing hard, and it was embarrassing to go out with the sign.

  But I felt optimistic, looking around at the other customers. It turns out that if you ever need a ride with a safe-looking woman, an Amish store on a weekday is a good place to look. At least the day we were there, it was pretty much older-lady central. I mean, nobody was scooting around with a walker or anything, but it seemed like Iowa women who hadn’t yet reached retirement age maybe had to wait until the weekend to buy their Amish goods. And these were older ladies in a good mood, loading up on half-priced hand-carved nativity scenes and jars of jam with ribbons around the lids. There was one man following his wife around, holding her coat and squinting at his phone, and another man was on his hands and knees, looking up to study the joints of a table. But other than that, all older women. One of them, wearing little snowflake earrings, raised her paper cup of sample hazelnut coffee to us, like a toast, as she passed.

  “I like your pins,” she said, nodding at where I’d pinned my flag on the collar of my coat, and then at the flag on Chloe’s hat. She didn’t smile when she said it, but it was nothing against us. She just meant she was sad about Detroit.

  Still, I wasn’t prepared for all the attention we got when we went outside with our sign. It was the exact opposite of how it had been at the gas stations: nobody just walked by. We weren’t out in front of the store’s covered porch for even ten minutes before we had not just one, and not just two, but three different old women and one old man standing around worrying about us needing a ride to Minnesota. And then every time I heard the front door jangle, the new old person coming out would see that there was a huddle of other old people, and the new one would stop to ask what was going on, and then join right in on the conversation about how it didn’t really seem safe for two women to hitchhike, even in Iowa.

  But for a while, none of them actually offered us a ride.

  “I’m afraid I’m headed south,” said the man, ignoring the fact that our sign specifically said we were looking for a woman, and also that he was holding a newly purchased ladder-back rocking chair, which looked heavy, and which he probably should have set down. “But I’ve got a granddaughter about your age.” He nodded at me. “I’d like to get you two to a bus station.”

  I didn’t like the way he said it, kind of bossy, like I actually was his granddaughter and so he had some kind of right to tell me what to do. But I had a feeling that if I said we didn’t have enough money for a bus, he might have opened his wallet.

  So I said we were hitching on purpose, as I was writing about the experience of hitching through America with my Portuguese relative for a school project, to show her America. Taking a bus would be cheating.

  One of the women narrowed her eyes behind bifocal glasses. Former teacher, I’d bet on it. “A high school project?”

  “I go to MU,” I said, acting offended, and already thinking about whether I meant Minnesota or Missouri, in case one of them asked.

  But they didn’t ask. I don’t know if it was an Iowa thing, or an old-person thing, or maybe just that particular group of people, but for them, it was like hearing something had to do with school was the same as hearing it had been ordained from above. Just like that, they laid off about the bus, and one of the women, with a fuchsia streak in her gray hair, said she was going to Sherburn, right on the interstate, an hour north of Ames.

  “And I’ve been to Portugal,” she added with a little laugh, looking at Chloe, and then at me. “Though that was years ago.”

  I wasn’t happy about that, of course. She didn’t say if she’d picked up any of the language when she was over there. Either way, I hoped she didn’t plan on going down a Portuguese memory lane with Chloe. At that point, though, there was no getting out of it. The rest of them agreed, like they were a committee, that Sherburn was our best bet.

  The woman with the pink streak had a big sedan that looked like nobody had ever been allowed to eat in it, or even drink a soda. It wasn’t a new model, but it had gold, sort of velvet-looking upholstery with no stains, and there was nothing in the little cave in front of the gearshift except for a packet of tissues and a coin purse. My seat didn’t have any options for heating or massage, but it was comfortable enough, and the woman told me I could scoot it back if I wanted more legroom. Chloe was sitting behind the driver’s seat, and by the time we were on the interstate, she’d leaned her head against the back window, her hat pulled over her eyes.

  “I’m Val, by the way,” the woman said. She didn’t ask for Chloe’s name, so I just said my name was Amy.

  “I like your hair,” I added. I was mostly just wanting to stay off the topic of Portugal. But I really did like how the pink of the streak was the exact shade of the frames of her eyeglasses. That was the way to get old, I thought. No need to get drab and boring.

  “Oh, thank you.” She glanced in the rearview with a smile. “My granddaughter talked me into it.”

  Boom, I thought. I knew now I could definitely keep her off of Portugal, however long it was to Sherburn. My grandparents were all dead by the time I was old enough to know them, but in my experience, asking a grandparent if they want to talk about their grandkids—how many they have, how old they are, or all about the clever thing one of them did the other day—is like asking a kid if they’d like some ice cream. You may get a few who aren’t interested, but not many. At Dairy Queen, I worked with two grandmothers, Lily and Dana, and if either one of them happened to come down to the break room while I was in it, it didn’t matter if I was spending time on the laptop or probably if my finger had just been cut off, it was guaranteed I’d be spending my break looking at pictures of little Skyler or little Tayra or not-so-little Evan, and saying, “yes, uh-huh, he sure is cute” and “oh, yeah, she’s getting tall,” until it was time to go back to work. It was probably something that just happened to you, like getting wrinkles or arthritis. You could swear that if you got old and had grandkids, you weren’t going to obsess on them and bore everybody to death talking about every little thing they ever did, but then you had them, and it was like getting zombied—you couldn’t help yourself.

  This lady with the pink streak, Val, was no different. She told me she had five grandchildren, two living on the same street as her in Sherburn, two more in Iowa City, and the other one in San Diego, because their dad was in the military. She was more than happy to answer my questions about which sports they played, what instruments, what they were good at. And I kept going for details.

  “Aren’t you the curious one?” she asked, but you could tell she was happy about it.

  I got her to keep it up for quite a while, her big car rolling along under the darkening sky. I’d never been this far out of Missouri before, and at least so far, I thought Iowa was pretty, as much as it could be without any snow in the middle of winter. There were more hills than I was used to, and even in the clouded dusk, each rise and fall of the land seemed a different shade of brown, purple, or dark green, depending on how the fading light fell on it. We passed a caved-in barn, the paint long gone, with a huge oak growing right out the top. I got out my phone and took a picture.

  Best of all, we were far enough away
from any city that there weren’t any billboards to worry about, digital or otherwise.

  But then Val looked in the rearview, touched her own ear, and asked, “Is something wrong with your ear?”

  I turned around. Chloe had her hand cupped over her bad ear. She blinked in the direction of the mirror.

  “She doesn’t speak English,” I said, though I’d said that back in Lamoni. “She just got some water in her ear. It’ll be okay. She’s got medicine for it.”

  “It seems like it’s really hurting her.” Val frowned into the rearview. “¿Te duele el oído? ¿Necesita un médico?”

  For a second, I thought she was speaking Portuguese. I felt like my heart stopped.

  Val looked at me and shrugged. “I thought she might understand Spanish,” she said. “Some words are similar. You probably speak a little Portuguese, right? You want to ask her if she needs a doctor?”

  “She just told me she was okay back at the store.” I turned around to nod at Chloe, like she needed convincing. She’d stopped tugging on her ear, and she was smiling out her window like she wanted to prove my point. But I knew it must still be hurting her. I hated to think she had to keep smiling when she was in pain. “She saw a doctor in St. Louis yesterday. He said the medicine would need a couple days to kick in.”

  I didn’t want her to think about that too long. I opened my mouth to say something else before I had any plan what to say.

  “Your Spanish is really good,” I said. “I’ve been taking it at school, and I’m okay. But you could be a native speaker.”

  I meant it in a friendly way—really, I was just trying to get her off the subject of Chloe’s ear. But whoa, she didn’t take it friendly. She moved her hand through the pink streak and gave me a hard look before turning back to the road.

  “I’m a US citizen. A legal citizen. I have all the documentation, right with me.”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t meant anything like that. I wasn’t thinking she was a foreigner. She didn’t even have an accent.

  “I didn’t mean . . . ,” I started. But she wasn’t listening. She took her right hand off the wheel and opened the console between the seats. The console of my mom’s car has always been a swamp of melted candy bars and gum wrappers and old lipsticks and pens that were out of ink, and Tess’s and even Aunt Jenny’s consoles were pretty bad, too. But not this woman’s. Her console just had a neat stack of little tissue packets like the one by the gearshift, a roll of breath mints, a folded twenty, and a laminated card that she took out and handed to me.

  It was a birth certificate for Valentina Maria Martinez, born in McAllen, Texas, on December 24, 1955, at 3:14 a.m.

  “Okay,” I said. “But listen. I wasn’t saying anything like that.”

  She tugged the certificate out of my hands and slipped it back into the console. “Well,” she said. “Some people start to make assumptions.”

  I’m not proud of this, but if I’m being honest, I’ll say that it did occur to me how helpful it would be to Chloe, and therefore to me, if I could get hold of that birth certificate. Chloe was quite a bit younger than Val, or Valentina, but we could figure out a way to make it work. It would be stealing, but it would be for a good reason, and it wouldn’t hurt Val any. She probably had another copy in her purse, or maybe even in the glove compartment, the way she was so touchy about it.

  I stretched my neck a little, checking the gas gauge. She had over half a tank left, which was probably enough to get wherever Sherburn was. And even if she did stop for anything, that didn’t mean she’d leave me alone in the car for even a second. She knew I’d seen the twenty in there, and she didn’t seem particularly dumb.

  “That’s neat you were born on Christmas Eve,” I said. “Or maybe you don’t like it.”

  She tilted her head from side to side. “It has its pros and cons.” She smiled like maybe we were friends again. “My mother was born on Christmas Eve, too.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. “What are the chances?”

  “I know,” she said. “Even now we think it’s funny. She calls me on my birthday and says ‘Happy birthday, my daughter!’ and I say, ‘Happy birthday, my mother!’”

  She smiled, and I smiled too. I was thinking her mom must be pretty old, if Val herself was a grandmother. “Does she live close to you?”

  “She’s in Mexico. In Reynosa.” She gave me another glance. “She and my father were both sent back, with two of my sisters. The two who weren’t born here.”

  “Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say. Unless she hated her parents, and also her sisters, that was a pretty sad story. It wasn’t like the old days, when you could go back and forth for a visit. There was just that one little spot in San Diego where people could reach through a fence and hold each other’s fingers and try to press cheeks through the wire. Right then I knew I wasn’t going to take her certificate, even if I had the chance.

  “I’m sorry you got separated,” I said.

  “No reason for you to be sorry.” She lifted her chin enough so she was looking down her nose at the road. “We have video calls. It’s almost the same. And my parents shouldn’t have broken the rules.” Her voice was calm, like she was reading something she’d memorized, but her knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

  I nodded. I thought about Caleb, how I would feel if I only got to see him through a fence. Video calls might only make me feel farther away, and more lonely. Especially if I was old.

  Val glanced in the rearview.

  “Either her ear really is bothering her, or your aunt understands more English than you know. I think she’s crying.”

  I turned around. Chloe was turned to the window, her hand shielding her face. I swallowed, trying to guess what had set her off. It seemed unlikely her ear would have gotten that much worse that quickly. If it was the story about Val’s parents, well, okay, that was sad. Chloe had to be more careful, though. She wasn’t supposed to let on that she understood.

  But maybe she had people she was missing too. Maybe she had people she worried she would never see again. If that were true, I couldn’t blame her for getting upset, for crying even. It seemed like it probably would be true, and thinking about that, how she probably had at least one person that she missed and worried about the way I would miss and worry about Caleb, I felt my own eyes get hot.

  “She understands a little,” I said, turning back around. “And she’s okay. She just gets sad for other people.”

  Val nodded like this didn’t surprise her. “I love the Portuguese people, the ones I’ve met. They’re so caring.” She glanced at me. “Are you all with the church?”

  “What church?” I asked. Normally I’d be worried that I was walking right into a let-me-tell-you-about-my-personal-savior trap, but at the moment, I was happy to talk about anything but Portugal.

  “Sorry. Catholic.” Val squinted, somebody’s undimmed headlights bright against her face. “I figured she is, at least, coming from Portugal.” She looked up at the mirror. “Catholic?” she said, real slow and loud. I turned around and saw Chloe was facing forward again, but she’d lowered her gaze to her knees.

  “Yeah, she is,” I said. “And my mom, too. But we’re sort of laxed on this side of the ocean.”

  Val smiled a little, and as soon as she did, I knew it was lapsed I meant. But I’d never been Catholic, even a little bit. I was doing my best.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m Catholic, and you can tell her that gives me great comfort. The Holy Virgin, especially. She helped me when my dad died and I couldn’t be there. I do miss my mother. And I worry about her. But I have Mary everywhere, you know? It’s like that song.” She started to sing, her voice low. “‘When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me.’”

  I was so glad I hadn’t tried to pretend I was really Catholic, or at least not the serious kind. Because I could hear from the shakiness in Val’s voice how much the song meant to her, how much Mother Mary did, and I didn’t want to lie t
o her about it, or pretend I understood what I didn’t.

  She sniffed, glancing in the mirror. “You know that song. I can tell. You understand Mother Mary.”

  I turned around to see Chloe nodding. There wasn’t a lot else she could have done. But the skin around her eyes was still pink, and just looking at her, how sad she seemed, Muslim or not, you would have thought she truly agreed with Val that that Mother Mary song was the most beautiful song in the world.

  We rode in friendly silence for just a few minutes before I saw a digital billboard up ahead. Even from a distance I could tell it was showing faces, a lot of them all at once. I strained my eyes, searching for Chloe. But as we got closer, I saw there were exactly seven faces, and there were no headscarves, and just one man with a beard. There was the handsome man with the graduation cap. There was the close-up of the boy who’d been sitting with his cat. And five more smiling faces I had to take in without looking away because even though I’d never been to Detroit, I owed them at least that much.