11

Kelli was exhausted and stiff by the time she saw the distant mountain peaks she knew surrounded Flagstaff. She kept her eyes focused on her goal as the sun sank beneath the horizon and the world turned dark.

She found a room in an older downtown hotel, then went in search of something to eat. It was almost eight on Sunday evening, but a fair number of people still roamed the sidewalks. She was happy to join them and work out some of the kinks from a long day in the car. The streets in the area were lined with small cafés and pubs, with music spilling out from several nightclubs.

Finally, she found a diner, ’50s themed, which was mostly empty. She sat down and ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake, knowing she would regret this high-calorie splurge, but for tonight, she was willing to pay the price.

She pulled up a note-taking app on her phone and began to type in a list of plans for when she arrived in Tennessee. She made a column header:

What are my goals for this trip?

To actually lay eyes on my mother, brother, and/or sister.

To find out as much as possible about what happened without telling anyone who I am.

I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY need to find out the reason my father did this.

To come back home and pick up my life without looking back.

Even as she typed out the goals she knew that meeting any or all of them was going to be difficult. At least by making this trip, she would always be able to say she had done everything in her power to find out what’d happened. She could move on without regret at not having done something.

That was the hope.

“Here you are.” The waitress was a teenager, long hair, bright eyes. “Need anything else?”

“No thanks.”

“Alrighty then. I’ll check back in a few minutes.” She nodded at the milkshake in the old-fashioned soda glass. “You better watch those things. They’re addictive.”

“They look it.”

The waitress walked over to the next table and began wiping it down, humming beneath her breath. It was so easy to be happy when you were young, innocent, and didn’t know your entire life had been a lie.

Kelli picked up a French fry and started another list:

What am I going to say when people ask me why I’m in town?

Just traveling through (seems lame and unlikely)

Visiting some friends (except in a small town like that, people are likely to ask who I’m visiting)

Looking for inspiration for my jewelry collection?

Kelli looked down at the bracelet on her wrist. She did make bracelets and necklaces in her spare time. Sometimes she even sold them at craft fairs, but it was not even a real hobby, just something she did when she felt like doing it. Still, she could come up with some sort of story about hoping to start her own little business and wanting to be inspired by another part of the country. It was weak, but it might work if she couldn’t come up with anything else.

Then again, why not just tell the truth?

Looking for my long-lost family

She erased the last line almost as soon as she’d typed it, but somehow putting down the words made her feel better.

By now, the screen cover on her phone was smeared with greasy fingerprints, so Kelli set it aside and concentrated on the burger and fries in front of her. After she ate, maybe she would go for a walk, try to burn off a few of these calories, and figure out more of a plan.

Daddy always had this goal of driving Route 66 from Los Angeles to Chicago. Every summer he would declare that this would be the year, pull out a handful of maps, and start planning. He would wax eloquent about all the old Americana we’d see along the way, then he’d go into one of his tirades about how people were too used to immediate gratification and that freeways, along with the Internet, were mostly responsible for the downfall of modern society. Every summer, Mimi would tell him something to the effect of “Have a nice trip.” She was never much of a car traveler, and certainly not when it involved two lanes and traffic lights. Those things didn’t much appeal to me, either, so I always took her side and wished him well on his solo journey.

He never went.

Now, here I am in Flagstaff, Arizona, where part of Route 66 runs directly through the center of town, less than a block from the hotel where I am staying. There are signs about it everywhere, all over the interstate, all around Flagstaff. What I wouldn’t give now, if I had taken him up on that trip.

He spent plenty of time doing the things I wanted to do, that much was for sure. It was selfish of me not to return the favor. Maybe if we had done this thing, this long road trip that Daddy chose, maybe we would have talked in a way that we never talked. Maybe then, in the midst of doing what he wanted to do, away from all the pressures of his regular life, maybe then he would have opened up to me and told me I had another family.

I went for a walk tonight after dinner. I walked beside the very road where we might have had that talk. This car drove by, and there was a teenage girl in the passenger seat, and her father was driving. I started screaming, “Tell your daughter the truth. Tell her before it’s too late.” They kept driving. If they heard me, they gave no indication of it (probably thought I was crazy or drunk). It occurred to me that it really wouldn’t help anything if I ended up in jail for disturbing the peace, so from then on, I walked in silence. The same kind of silence my dad chose for the past twenty-four years.

Silence is not a comfortable thing. But it is the easy thing.

Tomorrow I head for Amarillo. Hopefully there is something besides silence somewhere up ahead.