After lunch, I told Meadow to wash up and get her backpack.
“We’re hitting the road!” I said.
She tilted her head. “We’re hitting the road? With what?”
“No, no, no,” I laughed. “We’re going driving. We’re going on a trip. A spontaneous trip. You and me. How does that sound?”
She slid off her stool, leaving the crusts of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the Mickey Mouse plate I kept around for her.
“OK,” she said. “Where’re we going?”
“Well. How’d you like to spend the day at Lake George?”
She clutched her hands in front of her chest. “Yes yes yes!”
“Who wants to sit around here all day? I think it’s plenty warm to swim, don’t you?”
“Yes!”
“Did you happen to pack a swimsuit?”
“No!”
“Not a problem!” I shouted back. “We’ll buy you a new one when we get up there.”
That morning, before her arrival, I had packed myself a small bag (swimming trunks, a toothbrush, some reading material), letting this small bag flirt with my own desire to flee, but not with the clarity of premeditation. It was more with a desperate flourish that the last thing to go into the bag—after a slight hesitation—was my passport. Just in case! You never know! We climbed into my Saturn and rolled down all the windows. Meadow sat in the backseat in an age-appropriate booster. The car was clean and impersonal, with CLEBUS & CO stenciled cheerfully on either side, for anyone to see.
We were mostly through the suburban bottleneck of Albany when I became aware of something in my rearview mirror. A big black shadow of a car that had been lurking along several lengths behind. I took a gratuitous left. The car followed. I took a random right. Again the car followed. I sped up. So did my counterpart. I stopped at a Stewart’s and idled in the parking lot. My counterpart moseyed past only to pull over to a roadside asparagus stand about fifty yards ahead. I shook my head heavily.
“What is it?” Meadow asked.
“Pop-Pop’s following us,” I said.
She craned her head forward to gawk.
I stilled her with my hand. “No. Don’t look.”
“Why’s Pop-Pop following us?”
“I don’t know. I’d better think.”
“Are we still going to Lake George?”
“Hush,” I said. “Let me think.”
Meadow sighed, folding her hands on her lap, muttering, “You said we were going to Lake George. You said we could go. You already said.”
I watched the Tahoe idling just ahead down the road. I could almost picture the poor man gripping the wheel, trying to retract his head into his torso. Did he really think I couldn’t see him?
“It’s so boring sitting at home.”
“Please, Meadow. Let Daddy think.”
“That’s all Mommy and Glen ever do. Sit around and talk talk talk.”
I raised my eyes to the rearview mirror. “Mommy and who?”
“Glen. Daddy, Glen talks forever. He’s boring. He’s a lawyer.”
“But Mommy’s lawyer is a woman, right? Or has she changed lawyers? Or is Glen just a friend who’s a lawyer? Oh, who cares. Right? Who cares? I don’t care. Do you care? I don’t.”
I looked back out at the passing traffic. I thought of my estranged wife confabulating with Glen, whoever the hell he was, toasting another legal victory over a homemade meal. And I almost laughed—a shrill, shattered laugh—thinking of the poor Papa Bear in the story who says, Who’s been eating my porridge? Who’s been sitting in my chair? I reached back and made sure Meadow’s seat belt was snug across her lap and gave her an inscrutable tap on the leg. Then I accelerated so quickly the tires shrieked. I nearly clipped the Pepsi deliveryman as I swerved around the side of the building and pulled out onto the two-lane road going the opposite direction, right in front of a huge Sysco truck. In my driver’s-side mirror, the Tahoe jerked forward, circling the asparagus stand and leaving the roadside pullover in a cloud of dust. This was just the goosing I needed; Grandpa was giving chase. Behind me, he kept trying and failing to pass the Sysco truck across the double yellow lines, the oncoming traffic wailing past. His willingness to drive at such risk was a thrill and made me want to see how far he’d go. At a congested intersection, I led him into the right-turn-only lane, toward the highway, only to cross two lanes at the last second before the light turned green to go left. I was heading north again, on Van Rensselaer Boulevard, and had lost sight of Pop-Pop in the bottleneck he created as he tried to avoid being shunted west onto the Thruway. A cantata of horn blowing. My jaw tingled. I suppressed a whoop of victory.
Who had we been kidding anyway, me and Hank? He was justifiably suspicious of me since the day he met me, and he’d been generous to wait this long to hate me openly. I felt something like gratitude for that. He had always been, to my mind, the kind of upbeat, clannish father I assumed every American was awarded at birth. I stepped on it. We were now going sixty miles an hour through stop-and-go traffic on Van Rensselaer.
I was hesitant to glance back at my passenger. I wasn’t used to spending long periods of time with Meadow anymore. In the intervening year since we’d ceased sharing the same roof, she’d conquered kindergarten, and was a big girl for six, taller and smarter than any of her classmates, and I hoped I’d come out OK as she sat in moral judgment of me back there in her zebra-print booster seat. I reminded myself that even as a toddler, she’d been unsentimental. She didn’t like drippy speeches or ardent kisses, and so I decided to skip the emotional appeals, the flimsy self-justifications for what I was doing. They barely sufficed anyway.
“Traffic is terrible,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“You doing all right back there?”
“Actually, I’m thirsty,” she replied, her voice slightly strained.
“Well, let’s get you something to drink. What would you like? Jelly-bean juice? Hm? Monkey milk?”
“Actually, could I have a Mountain Dew? Mariah drinks Mountain Dew. Her mother lets her.”
“Sure,” I said. “No problem. I’ll stop just down the road a bit and we’ll find you a Mountain Dew. We’ll do the dew. Can’t be that bad for you if it’s dew, right?”
“Yeah. And can I watch Star Wars?”
“Maybe. Listen. One thing at a time.”
“OK.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got this under control. All right?”
That’s when Grandpa reappeared, like a zombie who staggers forward with his head blown off. The fender of the Tahoe was rumpled—I could see this from far away—and he was now driving with fresh desperation, flashing his headlights. Did he really think I would stop? Did he think I would heed him now, both of us with our gloves off? I was not in violation of the terms of my allotted visitation period. There was nothing in our parental agreement that said I couldn’t drive around the outskirts of Albany at high speeds. No, I thought, looking into the rearview mirror. Not today. You’re going to have to kill me.
Somewhere early on in my post-divorce social suicide, I had represented a client in the purchase of a foreclosed bungalow in Loudonville. After the transaction, we became friends, this client and I. He was also single and gave off a whiff, as I must have, of redundant abandonment. When he decided to go away for the summer, whom else did he call to watch over his property, and occasionally run the engine of his new Mini Cooper to keep the battery from dying, but me? I had already visited this friend’s house once and had sat in the garage with the Mini Cooper running, noticing with dispassion that it wasn’t just a Hollywood plot device; you really couldn’t smell carbon monoxide. And it was this Mini Cooper that came to mind—with wonderfully changed function, as an Escape Car—as I headed west on 378, the wounded undercarriage of my father-in-law’s Tahoe throwing sparks in the increasing distance behind me.