“De nada,” Lissa said. We made our way to the restaurant past a big antique steel-tired steam tractor, displays of old plows, and barn-plank paneled walls hung with oxbows, yokes, draped leather harnesses, and collections of brass hondos. The waitress guided us to a booth.
Lissa looked tired but not one whit less beautiful. She fumbled in her purse, could not find what she was poking for. “I would love a cigarette,” she said. “And I don’t give a shit who knows it.”
“Tough lady,” I said.
“Tough lady,” she echoed with a decisive tilt of her head. “He would have killed you.”
“No question,” I said.
“He had that look.”
“He was smiling,” I said.
“He had that look.”
“He looked stoned,” I said.
“He was tagged,” Lissa said.
“Almost certainly.”
“He wore the most godawful suit, did you notice?” Her breath hitched and I thought she was about to cry. She wiped her eyes. “Do you think anyone saw us?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
The waitress brought our drink order. I swallowed my Integumycin tablets. Lissa chased two Tums with a swallow of milk.
“Stomachache?” I asked.
“Calcium,” she said. “I don’t want to get brittle bones.”
“A proper mix of male and female sex hormones is the key,” I said. “You should also begin probiotic therapy for better calcium uptake.”
“I know,” she said. “Rob told me the same thing.”
Now the tears came, and silent but shaking sobs. “I don’t want to do this,” she said, her voice a trembling squeak. “I don’t want to be here, I really don’t.”
I changed seats to put my arm around her.
We ate our sandwiches.
She paid with cash and I drove for a few hours.
“Numbers,” I said, “seem to be important to them.”
But she was asleep. It was two in the morning when I stopped at a blocky, beige, eighties-style motel, another Homeaway, rising alone in the central valley, outlined by big orange lights in the dead of early morning. I walked into the lobby to rent two rooms.
“You want them adjacent?” the desk clerk asked.
Lissa walked in brushing her hair and said one room would do just fine. “They’re suites, right?” she asked.
“Sure are,” the clerk said, and smiled encouragement.
Once again, death had smoked out all my reason. We curled up on the queen-size bed, still in our clothes, and slept for four hours. When daylight peeped in through the curtains, I woke up to the sound of my brother’s widow taking a shower. It was a pleasant, reasonable sound, and the steam coming through the open bathroom door made me bold.
I walked into the bathroom and stood there in my stocking feet, feeling the tile under my toes.
She pulled back the curtain. “You smell like him when you sleep,” she said as she stepped out onto the mat. The hot water had pinked her all over. She looked delicious, raspberries and cream, wet hair the color of butterscotch with vanilla bean streaks. “Oh,” she said. “You surely do.” She was completely unself-conscious. She wrapped her hair in a towel and used another to dry, working from the shoulders down, rational and thorough.
I couldn’t smell any soap. Just the steam. The bars and shampoo in the little wicker basket hadn’t been touched.
She bent over in the small bathroom, butt pointed toward me, and toweled off her hair. She backed up a few inches into my hips and left two damp marks on my pants. She straightened, turned, and said, “We should be on the road soon.”
All perfectly pleasant and reasonable, but with that lingering of sight lines that told me I would not be rebuffed. She took a small bottle of white skin cream—her own, not from the hotel—and rubbed it on her arms, her legs, across her breasts, then on her face.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Los Angeles,” she said, and toweled for the second time between her thighs.
“What’s down there?”
“I’m sorry?” She stopped rubbing.
“In LA.”
