I snap into the room in the motel, cold liquid dripping from my face, my hair.
What the—
Then I see Mom standing over me, an empty water glass in her hand.
Sorry, honey, she says. You wouldn’t wake up.
Mom! I’m soaking. What the hell?
She pulls a face. Sorry. Sorry. Hey, when I was a girl guide, in Alaska, this was how they woke us up every morning at camp.
You were a girl guide?
Yep.
Wow. I can’t imagine this AT ALL. I mean, 0 percent. My mom is the least girl-guide person in the world. She’d get the cross-stitch badge no problem, but before this week, the closest she’s ever come to the outdoors is those pictures of Scotland she makes. She would never even come climb the little mountains next to Phoenix with me.
I was a terrible guide, she says.
Yeah, no shit, I say.
Okay, Okay, my bad, she says. She tosses me a towel. Get dry and get dressed. It’s eleven a.m., sleepyhead. They’ve stopped serving breakfast here.
I put on my CAM Walker and then pull my slit jeans over it, and grab my T-shirt and sweater. It’s so much colder here than in Phoenix; I can feel the air creeping through my clothes, wanting to chill the life out of me.
Okay, overdramatic, but it’s what I feel. Like the cold is leaching something from me. Some force. For the first time I get what Mom means about the rain.
Anyway, I walk into the main room and Mom and Luke are standing there with their bags by their feet.
Finally, Sleeping Beauty appears, says Luke.
I mime gut-busting laughter and Mom rolls her eyes. We thought we’d go to a diner, she says. In town.
Okay, I say.
Then I see her glance over at the still-full coffee cups of wine on the table. Luke, you want to take the bags to the car? she says. We’ll follow.
He nods with that kind of oh-yes-girl-stuff nod and picks up the bags, leaves the room.
Mom goes over to the cups and takes them to the bathroom—I see her tip them into the sink, then rinse them out. Weird. She comes back into the room and claps her hands together, like, let’s go.
I’m sure the maid would have gotten those, I say.
Yes, yes, she says. I don’t like to leave a mess. I was a guide, remember?
She smiles but I don’t. I’m looking at the bottle of wine, the still half-full bottle of wine that she has left on the table, like she doesn’t consider that to be mess. What gives?
There’s something obvious here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Then Mom puts HER fingers on my arm and steers me out the room, and then down to the car.
Luke drives us back into town and we find a parking spot on the main drag opposite the Western Frontier diner, close to the corner with Gene’s Western Wear on it. He gets out and inserts coins into an old-fashioned parking meter and we walk to the diner—or rather Mom and Luke walk, and I do my elegant CAM Walker shuffle.
We go in and get a booth close to the entrance. Luke tosses the car keys onto the table, and they slide to a stop by the ketchup, which comes in a bottle shaped like a tomato. Mom orders me a strawberry milkshake and burger, and a hot dog for herself. Luke goes for home fries and a steak.
Our server’s name is Candy, and she has a smiley-face button on her uniform. She doesn’t have a smiley face on her FACE, though. She looks like we just ran over her cat. Who knows, maybe we did. Or maybe she’s met Luke before, and she thinks he’s going to tell her a story about attending a scene in a diner where someone chopped off their hand.
I almost want to show him the scars all over my legs, and say, you ever see anything like that?
Anyway, my shake comes, and it’s good.
Leaves blow past, outside.
Candy brings us our food, and just about holds herself back from spitting in it in front of us. She hands Luke a steak knife and takes away his normal knife.
And then Luke’s mouth drops open, and doesn’t close.
He’s facing the other way to me and Mom—we turn in our seats and see the TV mounted on a bracket on the wall. It’s on mute, you can see from the little red symbol in the corner of the screen, a speaker with a line through it. But that’s not really what I’m looking at.
No, what I’m looking at is footage from the hospital CCTV cameras, of me and Mom leaving Phoenix General, me in my wheelchair. Closed captions flash up.
You’re not going to believe this, Veronica, says the male anchor, but police think these images may just show An—
I turn around as I feel Mom moving very quickly. She has Luke’s steak knife in her hand, like it just jumped there from the table, all of its own accord.
I’m so sorry, Luke, she says.
Then she brings the knife down like a hammer, and it goes through Luke’s hand like, well, like you know what. It sticks in the table too, because when she takes her own hand away it’s standing up like a flag in a burger bun.
Luke stares down at it, and his mouth goes, O-O-O-O-O-O.
I’m guessing his scream is loud. But I’m deaf. I only hear like 10 percent of it. That 10 percent is bad enough for me, though. I feel like my stomach is falling out through a hole in my pelvis. I guess that’s shock.
Mom grabs the car keys and my arm, and pushes me out of the booth and then out the door. Candy is rushing to Luke, behind us, who is still just staring at the blood gushing out of his hand like a whale’s blowhole spraying red, and all this is happening but only like half a second has gone by.
If anyone chased us, we’d be screwed, because I’m going as fast as I can on my CAM Walker, using the weird rocking gait that you have to use with it, not knowing why Mom did that and why we’re running, and Mom is not an athlete. But we get to the Honda without anyone stopping us, and I guess that’s because they’re freaking out about Luke’s hand and trying to help him, and then a little scary voice at the back of my mind says, yeah, she knew that would happen, that’s probably why she did it.
And then I’m in the car, and Mom shuts my door and gets in the driver’s seat and pretty much floors it, and the tires smoke as we gun it out of there.