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Saturday couid not have been more miserable— cold and foggy, pouring buckets of frigid rain. Maude's alarm clock failed to go off, so she had to be hauled bodily out of bed at departure time, eight a.m. She groggily tossed some clothes and toiletries in an overnight bag and crawled into the backseat of the Volvo with Max and Olivia.
Olivia had to stop to go to the bathroom twice before they left the Bartonville city limits. By the second stop, she—and the Volvo's leather seats— were drenched with rain.
It didn't take much longer than that for Max's mother and father to remember why they had gotten divorced in the first place.
"Do you have to drive like that?" Ellen Plunkett complained.
"Like what?" asked Dr. Carmody innocently.
"With your seat reclined halfway to the tailpipe. You look like you're propped up to read in bed."
"The ancient Romans used to eat in the reclining position/' he argued.
"Maybe so/' said his ex-wife. "But they didn't do it while driving their chariots. Hey, you missed the turn."
"No, I didn't."
She pointed behind them. "The sign said Route forty-four!"
"I know a short cut," he insisted.
Maude watched in horror as Max took out his tape machine and placed the headphones over his ears. "What are you doing?" she hissed.
"I've got a cassette of my act in here," Max explained. "It can't hurt to do a little last-minute cramming."
"But you can't leave me alone"—she dropped her voice to a whisper and motioned toward the
front seat, where Max's parents were still bickering—"with theml"
Max shrugged. "I gave you the chance to back out." He hit play and retreated into the world of his comedy.
Maude slumped back against the leather, exasperated.
Olivia looked at her earnestly. "My brother's going to be famous after today."
Maude snorted under her breath. "Yeah, sure."
"He's going to be on TV. I wonder if I'll get to be on TV with him."
Maude shot her friend a withering glare and replied, "Why not? You'd be a lot less ugly!"
That was all Olivia had to hear. "You think I'm pretty?"
"Better than him, that's for sure," sneered Maude.
Olivia tried to sidle over on her booster seat toward the older girl. "My daddy says I'm a princess. Do you think I'm a princess?"
"I'm not too big on royalty," Maude replied. "I had an asthma attack at Buckingham Palace last summer."
Olivia regarded her with deep respect. "You went to a real palace?"
Maude nodded. "They had a bunch of princesses there. Princes, too. Even a queen. I never figured out what they did with the king. He can't be very popular, because her face got to be on all the money."
Dr. Carmody reached over and nudged his ex- wife's arm. "Are you following that little civics lesson in the backseat? Your daughter could learn a lot from Maude Dolinka."
"Bite your tongue," she groaned. "Six billion people on this planet, and Livy has to pick this one as a role model."
"I think it's cute," Dr. Carmody teased.
"That's because she isn't your daughter," she muttered. "And I'm pretty sure we're lost."
"We're fine. We should hit Indiana in an hour or so."
It was not often that Maude had an audience hanging on her every word. So she launched into a speech on her favorite subject—why the odds were always stacked against her.
"It all started on December nineteenth, 1992, the day I was born. The hospital ran out of pink blankets, so I had to have a blue one. My mother said everybody thought I was a baby boy, as if I had a
mustache or something. Even today I feel the cold sting of humiliation from that moment casting a shadow over everything I do."
"Wow," breathed Olivia.
"Day care was tough," she continued bitterly. "It wasn't all purple dinosaurs and finger paint like it is for you kids today. How was I supposed to know fish don't like ice cream? The water got so cloudy they couldn't even see to pluck the bodies out. The teacher deliberately put my diaper on wrong every day."
It went on. Problems in preschool. Calamities in kindergarten. There was a separate tale of woe for every grade at Bartonville Elementary.
Olivia listened, her blue eyes widening until they were like half-dollars. In the front seat, the adults were focusing their attention on the road, which was becoming narrower and bumpier, leading through towns with names that were no longer familiar.
"This can't be right," Mrs. Plunkett said sharply.
"It has to be," replied her ex-husband. "See? Here's the highway."
Alas, the approaching sign did not point the way to the interstate. It read simply pavement ends.
The Volvo bounced along the dirt road, stopping for cows that wandered out of the fog.
Max pulled off the headphones. "Well, I hope I'm ready—" He took in his surroundings in dismay. "Is this the way to Chicago?"