Sasha pulled into the first fast food restaurant she saw. She figured they would just swing past the drive-through, but Kinsey insisted they park and go inside.
“You have to actually eat something,” she said as Sasha turned into the parking lot. “You won’t if we stay in the car. Plus it’s easier to bully you into letting me pay if we go inside.”
Relieved to hear Kinsey getting back some of her usual stubbornness, Sasha didn’t argue.
By the time they finished their cheeseburgers, Kinsey seemed to have gotten a grip on her panic. Getting some food in her stomach probably did most of the heavy lifting in the mood department, but Sasha had done her best to help by filling the silence with a yarn about her and her cousin Trevor getting stuck up a tree for so long Trevor’s parents had started organizing a search party by the time they made it back.
Sasha didn’t realize until she was partway into the story that it was one she usually tried to avoid. There was too much she had to change or lie about in order to avoid it getting depressing. Like why they were up the tree in the first place. And why it took so long for anyone to notice they’d disappeared into the dark woods. She had to do some on-the-fly editing to skim over the tricky parts, claiming she and Trevor had been out adventuring and she’d just climbed too high and got stuck for longer than she actually had. Though she worried she hadn’t patched the story up very neatly.
Fortunately, Kinsey wasn’t paying a lot of attention. She may have pulled herself together, but her thoughts seemed far away.
Sasha disposed of the remnants of their burgers when they were done and went to use the bathroom while Kinsey ordered a milkshake for the road. Kinsey was still waiting for the order next to a harried-looking mother at the far end of the counters when Sasha came out. Sasha caught her attention with a wave and poked a forefinger in the direction of the car. Kinsey acknowledged this with a somber thumbs-up and Sasha slipped outside.
It was nice out today. Nippy and breezy, but warm enough to make you believe spring was right around the corner. Sasha leaned against her van, inhaling the fresh air laced with french-fry grease and the faint bite of car fumes.
Maybe she should have searched harder for a different story, she thought as she watched the traffic go by. The trouble with refiguring anecdotes until they were almost unrecognizable was that the truth she’d smoothed over always seemed to stick with her afterward, pressing on the base of her skull, reminding her of everything she’d left home trying to forget.
She didn’t miss Wyoming very often. She didn’t miss the people she used to call her friends. She didn’t even miss her family—apart from Trevor, of course. And he lived in California now. Sasha preferred the life she was making here, on her own. Where she didn’t have to fight so damn hard for every little victory. Where she had more control over what happened to her. Where her home life rarely had the chance to invade her space and ruin everything she was working toward.
Still, every now and then she missed the wide-open spaces. The sloping fields on the back of her grandmother’s property. The sprawling forests. Sky that seemed to stretch on for miles. Air that smelled more of grass and evergreens than concrete and gasoline. Heck, she even got nostalgic about how careful they had to be with horse feed and garbage, in case bears decided the yard was a good place to find an easy meal. She loved New York, but sometimes it was just so . . . crowded.
One hand in the pocket of her bomber jacket, Sasha puffed out a wayward sigh and checked her phone, thinking she’d scroll through Instagram or something until Kinsey came out. Kick herself out of this funk that stupid story had put her in so she could focus on getting Kinsey to North Carolina.
But she didn’t get that far. She’d missed a call from Trevor. She usually only heard from him in the evenings of days he wasn’t working.
Unless something was wrong.
She glanced at the restaurant’s door. No Kinsey yet. Biting her lip, Sasha called Trevor back.
“No one’s dying,” Trevor said, without even saying hello.
“That’s a promising opening,” Sasha remarked, her stomach twisting.
“I’m just, you know, trying to keep everything in perspective.”
“Yeah, that makes me feel loads better. Thanks, Trev.”
“Sorry. Listen—um—you haven’t heard from your mom since last night, have you?”
“No,” Sasha said, pressing her fingers into the back of her neck. She’d been quietly relieved her mom hadn’t contacted her again since proposing the scheme to fly out to New York. In fact, she’d been doing her best to forget about the plan entirely, hopeful that the lack of communication meant Cynthia had already forgotten. It hadn’t occurred to her to worry the silence was because her mom was busy getting herself into some other kind of trouble. “Why?”
“It’s probably a false alarm,” Trevor said. “I’m only calling because it seems like something you’d want to know.”
“What’s something I’d want to know?”
There was a beat of silence. “My mom just told me that she got in an argument with your mom—one of their big ones—and Aunt Cynthia took off for Mexico. And hasn’t been answering the phone.”
Sasha swore under her breath. That sounded like her mom, all right. The terrible timing included. Sasha was barely out of the gate on one rescue mission and Cynthia turned up with crisis number two. She wished she felt surprised. “She isn’t hitchhiking, is she?”
“Not that I know of. Mom said she left in her car.”
“That shitbucket from the ’80s?” Sasha asked, frustration sharpening her voice. “She won’t get fifty miles.”
“I don’t think there’s any reason to freak out yet—”
“When did this happen?” Sasha interrupted. It was her mom. She knew when she should freak out. Which she wasn’t. Freaking out only made it harder to solve the problem. First step was to figure out what was actually going on.
“I don’t know, a few hours ago? I just got off the phone with my mom, and she said it was early this morning when Aunt Cynthia took off.”
Sasha bit her tongue to stop herself from starting on a rant. Half the time it seemed like she was the last one to hear about whatever impulsive crap her mom was trying to pull. But it wasn’t Trevor’s fault. And he’d called her as soon as he heard, even though Aunt Rosemary had probably already talked his ear off about her crazy sister today. He didn’t deserve fielding another rant, even if he was willing to listen.
“I’ll call you back,” Sasha said, and hung up without waiting for a goodbye.
Nothing Trevor could do, out in San Francisco. Not a lot Sasha could do either, except maybe talk her mom out of impulsively going to Mexico. Or convince someone back home to go out and find her. And she didn’t have a lot of time to do anything, with Kinsey coming to join her any minute.
Cynthia’s phone went straight to voicemail. Not surprising. If Cynthia was steaming over whatever she and Rosemary fought about—usually either Cynthia’s terrible taste in men or her inability to clean up her act—she’d probably turned her phone off.
“Hi, Ma,” Sasha said after the beep, hoping she didn’t sound too angry. Her mom didn’t respond well to anger from anyone, and she seemed to resent it most from her own daughter. “Just wanted to check up on you. Call me back when you get this, okay?”
She hung up and sent a text as well, in case Cynthia didn’t bother with her voicemail for a few days: Please call me when you get a minute
“Are you okay?” Kinsey’s voice drifted over from the sidewalk three cars away. She carried a milkshake in each hand, and watched Sasha with a somewhat suspicious expression as she approached.
Sasha couldn’t let Kinsey suspect anything was wrong. She’d insist on Sasha abandoning the road trip, leaving Kinsey to get to North Carolina on her own while Sasha did nothing but fret about her mom and Kinsey from a helpless position in New York City.
She flashed her most disarming smile, stashing the phone in her pocket, reaching for the first stupid, flirty thing that came to mind. “Better for seeing you, angel.”
Kinsey scowled and the world was put to rights again. “Seriously? That line has to be as old as my grandparents.”
“It’s vintage,” Sasha said with mock outrage as they climbed into the car.
“It’s moth-bitten,” Kinsey countered. She shoved one of the milkshakes in Sasha’s direction. “Here, Casanova. You like chocolate, right?”
“Thanks.” Sasha took the cup, touched by the gesture. “You didn’t have to get me one.”
“Oh yes, I did. If I’m stress-eating ice cream, you’re joining me. I don’t need to be feeling guilty about the calories when my mom’s in the hospital.”
Sasha raised her eyebrows. “Did you just play the sick-mom card to make me drink a milkshake?”
“Is it working?” Kinsey asked, mirroring the expression as she sipped her own strawberry shake.
Sasha laughed. The hoops Kinsey would jump through to avoid anyone noticing she’d done something nice. “Next time save your guilt trips for something I wouldn’t do anyway.” She took a gulp and dropped the shake in a cup holder to buckle her seatbelt. “All right, let’s get this show on the road.”
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“When you were stuck in that tree . . . where were your parents?”
Sasha paused with her hand on the gearshift. “Huh?”
Kinsey dunked her straw a few times. “You said Trevor’s parents were going to organize a search party. What about yours? Weren’t they worried, too?”
“Oh. Well, my mom didn’t know. And my dad was never really in the picture, so . . .” She shrugged, flashing Kinsey a grin. Not a big deal. I don’t care. Neither should you. “Guess he wouldn’t have known, either.”
A funny look passed over Kinsey’s face. It was close to her you’re being ridiculous frown, but with an undercurrent of worry. “You never said you came from a single-parent home.”
“Well, you know.” Sasha shifted into reverse and checked she was clear to back out. “That many family members living so close to me, I was hardly lacking in company. Or parental figures.”
“But why didn’t your mom know you were stuck up a tree for half the night?”
Sasha pretended she had to concentrate on getting out of the parking lot to stall for time. She really hadn’t thought Kinsey was paying attention to her long, rambling story. Sasha could chatter about her cousins’ antics for days, and she’d just latched onto the first memory that came to mind. Maybe because in the true version she’d only been out in the woods that late because her own mother had been in crisis. But she’d been careful to leave out any mention of how, at ten years old, she had snapped under the pressure of single-handedly keeping her tiny, broken family together. How, in the middle of the chaos inside, no one but Trevor even noticed her slip out the back door of her aunt’s house and run out into the woods. She’d very deliberately skipped the part where she was sobbing into a tree trunk, Trevor squeezing her ankle sympathetically from another branch and doing his damnedest to convince Sasha it wasn’t her fault—
“Sasha?” Kinsey asked, her voice weirdly tentative. “Why didn’t anyone call your mom?”
Sasha plastered on another smile as she turned out of the parking lot. “She was . . . out of town,” she said, trying a half-truth. “No one wanted to bother her. We’re talking rural Wyoming here. Big ranch right on the edge of a forest. Everyone thought we’d gotten lost or been eaten by grizzlies. They probably wanted to make sure there was actually something to worry about before they got my mom involved.”
Kinsey made a noncommittal humming sound. “You don’t talk about her much.”
Oh boy. This conversation was not going the way Sasha wanted. “I’m sure I must’ve mentioned her before,” she said, as though she hadn’t been intentionally glossing over the problematic figure of her mom in all her family stories for most of her life. “And you know how it can get when you’re small and having adventures. Adults are peripheral.”
“Didn’t you ever have adventures with your mom, though?”
Sasha let out an oddly stiff laugh before she could stop herself. Adventures with Cynthia weren’t the kind of things you whipped out for fun, folksy story time. Even the heavily edited versions. They were usually disasters from start to finish.
“You just won’t let it go, will you?” Sasha said, trying to keep her tone light. “Why do you care about my mom all of a sudden?”
Kinsey sighed and turned her head toward the window. “I guess . . . I mean . . . You helped drag my zombie ass through a bad breakup when I barely knew you, I see you practically every day, you’ve been at my house for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I only just now today find out your mom raised you by herself?”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Sasha said as she steered the van back onto the turnpike.
“Yes, it does,” Kinsey said vehemently. “I should’ve known. That’s basic get-to-know-you shit. For all I know, you’ve got four brothers, a dog, and an aging pony back home, anxiously awaiting your return. And I wouldn’t know because I never bothered to ask! What the hell kind of friend am I?”
“Easy, there, Kins.” Sasha risked a nervous glance in Kinsey’s direction. This seemed like a really strange thing to get so worked up about. Maybe it was the stress of having a parent in the hospital coming out in weird ways. “You’re being way too hard on yourself.”
“Am I?” Kinsey demanded.
“Yeah. You are. I haven’t been keeping a horde of siblings and pets from you. I’m an only child with one parent and a ton of cousins. Which you already know.”
“I didn’t know about the one parent thing, though. That’s the point.”
“Oh my god, not knowing about that isn’t a shitty friend thing. I never talk about my mom. To anybody.”
The dead silence from Kinsey’s side of the car was what clued Sasha in that she hadn’t brushed the topic off as neatly as she’d hoped. And that never talking about her mom was probably a pretty big indication that she had some baggage attached to the topic. Now Kinsey was going to want to know why she was keeping all that baggage to herself, and what was in it. And that wasn’t an interrogation Sasha was prepared to face right now. She didn’t exactly have a good track record for keeping the people she cared about around once they realized what a mess her life was.
She wondered if driving into a ditch would be sufficient distraction to make Kinsey forget about this conversation forever.
“Why don’t you ever talk about your mom, Sasha?”
“I think we need some music,” Sasha said loudly, pretending she hadn’t heard. She switched on the radio for the noise, and then pointed Kinsey to the aux cord she could use to pipe her phone’s music app through the car speakers. Which Kinsey already knew about, having driven in Sasha’s van many times before. But it put another little bit of distance between Sasha and the topic of her mother—and the pent-up bitterness that always came out when Sasha talked about her. And with nowhere else to escape, verbal distance was all Sasha had to protect herself.
Kinsey sighed, but cued up a playlist on her phone and fiddled with the radio until the opening guitar riff of Heart’s “Barracuda” filled the car, mercifully bringing the discussion to an end.