43

Cornfields stretch out as far as I can see. Red-winged blackbirds scold me as I pass a grassy brook, and a bobolink flies to the telephone wire that strings from pole to pole to my right. Agatha has taught me a lot about birds, I think as I watch the bobolink watch me in his tuxedo of black and white.

I get about five miles out of town when I can’t carry the suitcase anymore and a blister splits the skin on my third toe. I step into a little ditch, climb on a stone wall, pull off my sneaker, and wonder what I’m going to do.

After a while, I snap open my suitcase and take out my mother’s postcard, the one with Lou’s Diner on the front. I don’t know much about Vegas except that it is someplace in Nevada and it’s hot and it’s dry and it’s about as far away from New England as you can get. I wonder if there are any bluebirds or barn swallows or barred owls that call “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?” in the middle of the night the way they do at Agatha’s. There probably aren’t any stone walls there, I think, settling down on the one I’m sitting on.

But I want my mother. She made a mistake bringing me here; that’s as plain as Wonder Bread. I had planned on walking until I got to a bus station. Where I come from, there’s a bus at every corner, but I have gone miles now and there’s nothing but this road.

I am chomping on an apple when I hear the low-pitched grinding of Bertha’s engine. Agatha has turned her headlights on, even though it’s early, and the light on the right tilts toward the sun. She sees me just as I am finishing my apple. Bertha backfires, refusing to turn off. Agatha climbs out of the truck, slamming the door behind her, then walks over to where I’m sitting, pulling a sugar cube from her pocket and popping it into her mouth. She is so blasted irritating, I think, watching her.

“What you doing down there, Cornelia? That ditch is filled with all kinds of stuff you don’t like, I bet.”

I rub my toe.

She walks over to the edge of my suitcase. “See this little hummock here?” She bends down and inspects a clump of weedy grass. “Now, if this was more of a brook, not just standing water full of mosquitoes, we might have some fiddleheads growing here. They do like gravel like this, yes, they do.”

I roll my eyes.

Agatha sits down on a large rock. Bertha smells as if Agatha ran over a load of manure a while back. I swat a mosquito off my arm.

“Cornelia, you ain’t never goin’ to find your mother this way.”

I shrug, look bored.

“Does she tell people who you are when you don’t do it yourself?”

I look the other way.

“She does or she doesn’t, it don’t matter. I’m not goin’ to do it.”

I ignore her, put my sneaker back on. My toe hurts something awful. She takes the last of the apple out of my hand and chomps on it. “You don’t do your own talkin’, you’re going to be sorry someday.”

“D-d-d-don’t worry about me,” I say.

She stands and throws the core into the corn. “You hide who you are, you live half a life. You speak up, then you can be who you was meant to be.”

My eyes become two fat blazing suns. I jump up and face her, hobbling a bit. Tall as she is, I reach her chin. “And j-j-just who the hell is that?”

She looks straight back at me. “That’s why you got two feet, Cornelia: to put one in front of the other to find out.”

“That’s wh-what I’m doing, see?” I pick up my suitcase and limp away from her.

“But you’re going the wrong way.”

I turn around. “How do you know the right way?” I yell at her. “You d-d-don’t know jack shit about anything, far as I can tell.”

She looks away for an instant, then straight back at me. “I know it’s easy to get all mixed up when you try and do it alone.”