Bernie had slept most of the day, with the intention of driving through the soothing night with memories of Miriam. Jane had been on the move since 4:20 this morning, when she’d awakened in the motel in Ardmore, Oklahoma. By 11:35 Thursday night, as they reached Van Horn, Texas, she couldn’t stop yawning.
“Sleep, sleep,” Bernie said. “An owl should be as awake as me. If I need you, I’ll give a shout.”
If it turned out Jane couldn’t trust him, then her intuition was not worth beans anymore, and she was as good as finished anyway. She powered the back of her seat to a slant and closed her eyes.
He said, “Can you sleep to some music?”
“Right now, I could sleep to artillery fire.”
“I’ll keep it soft.”
He fiddled with the CD controls, and when the music came on, Jane said, “Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Orchestra. You like big-band music, swing?”
“I don’t know one big band from another.”
“Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman. Great stuff.”
“Miriam liked to watch Lawrence Welk on TV way back when. I know his music is corny.”
“It is what it is, nothing to be ashamed of. He gave people what they wanted. He just never stretched, never had an edge.”
“You know music?”
She almost said, I can rock a piano. She was too tired to trust herself in conversation. “Good night, Grandpa.”
Her dreams were not unpleasant, with bubbles in them.
When she woke after an hour or so to Welk in full mellow mode with “Apple Blossom Time,” the Mercedes wasn’t in motion. She sat up, alarmed. They were parked on the shoulder of the highway.
Bernie wasn’t in the car. She needed a moment to locate him in the darkness, a few steps off the road, his back to her, urinating.
When he returned to the car and saw her awake, he said, “Sorry. Prostate like a cantaloupe. If you need lady facilities, we’ll be fueling in El Paso in forty minutes.”
“No, I’m good.”
She closed her eyes as he took a foil-wrapped hand wipe from a supply in the console box and tore it open. The fragrance of lemons.
As she fell asleep, she wondered if they were close enough to El Paso that cell service was good. But if he’d had his phone when he got out of the car, who could he have called? He hadn’t turned her over to the police at the roadblock, when he’d had the chance.
She had to trust him. Controlled paranoia was a survival mechanism. Unrelieved paranoia was a greased chute into madness.
As if drugged, Jane slept undisturbed during the fuel stop in El Paso.