American Heart

  It turned out I stayed in the bathroom way longer than I had to. When I came out, just the little lamp on the nightstand was on, and Chloe was in bed, either sleeping or pretending to sleep, the shiny back of her hair facing my bed. She had a hand cupped over her ear, and I guessed it must still be bothering her.

  I pulled down the covers of the other bed and eased myself between the sheets. They were scratchier than the sheets at Aunt Jenny’s, but I would have been happy to go to sleep on the ground at that point. Seriously, it felt so good to finally lie down, all clean and warm, with a soft pillow under my head, and the heater humming beside me. It was all I could do not to sigh. But I stayed quiet, wanting to be considerate, in case Chloe was really asleep.

  9

  I WOKE TO the clatter of the blinds going up, and the sting of sunlight on my eyes. When I stopped blinking enough to focus, I saw Chloe standing by the window, already dressed in different pants and a red sweater. The coffee maker gurgled in its corner.

  “Jesus,” I said, pulling the blanket over my eyes. “What’s wrong with you? Pull that back down.”

  “Sarah-Mary.” She said my name the weird way again. “It’s after nine o’clock. We should go. The daylight is burning away. Do you want coffee? I had some. It is not so bad.”

  My mouth was dry, and I could tell, even before I lifted my head, that I was going to have a headache. I’d only had half of a gin and tonic, but it wasn’t like I was used to them. Or maybe it was just that the room’s heat was on too high, with no humidifier like at Aunt Jenny’s. I peeked out from under the blanket. Chloe had already made her bed, which was a weird thing to do, as the maid was going to have to strip the sheets. Her messenger bag was zipped up and set on the table by the television. A hardback book sat next to it with some kind of Arabic, or I guess Farsi, writing on the spine.

  “I hope I did not disturb you when I did my prayers this morning? I’m sorry.”

  Here we were with the prayers again. I shook my head. Tess once said that every time she was in a hotel room, she cracked herself up thinking of all the people who’d been in it before, and all the strange situations they could have been in, and how some of them had probably woken up in the very bed she was lying in, smiled uncomfortably at another person, and wondered what the heck they’d been thinking the night before. I know she meant that in a sex way, but whatever the history of this room was, as far as waking up and feeling awkward with someone, it seemed like Chloe and I should get first prize.

  “Okay,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. “I’ll have some coffee.”

  By the time she brought me a cup, I was sitting over at the little built-in desk, and I’d taken the yellow notepad out of my bag. She was right that we needed to get going, but I wanted to make a new sign before we left. I didn’t have a marker, just the pen that the hotel left out on the desk. I had to keep going over the words to make them big and dark enough to be legible from a few feet away.

  GOING NORTH?

  WE’D LIKE A RIDE!

  I looked up. Chloe sat at the foot of her bed, frowning at the sign.

  “What?” I asked. “You think you could do a better job, go ahead.” I held out the pen.

  She waved it away, crossing one leg over the other. “You have better handwriting. But ‘north’ is not good. It is too general. People will think of Canada, and they’ll know why.”

  “Well,” I said. “We don’t want to get too specific. At this point, we just got to go up.”

  She looked out the window, two fingers to her lips. The lines between her eyebrows went especially deep, or they just looked that way in the sunlight. She pushed up her glasses. “Iowa,” she said.

  “Just Iowa?” I made a face. “That seems pretty general.” It also didn’t seem that ambitious.

  “When someone asks you, you can say we are trying to get to Minneapolis. But just getting to Iowa would help.”

  I looked down at what I’d written. She was maybe right. I got out two new pieces of paper, taped them side by side, and tried again.

  HEADED TO IOWA?

  WE’D LOVE A RIDE!

  I added a smiley face, and looked up at Chloe. “And we’re still just getting rides with women?”

  It’s not like I wanted her to be the boss all of a sudden. But after last night, I wasn’t sure about the women-only rule. We’d had to wait a long time for a ride, and by just saying no to all men, we were cutting out half our possibilities.

  “Right,” she said, no question in her voice. “It is much more safe.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table, thinking. That was probably right, too. Most men weren’t rapists and killers. But most rapists and killers were men. Even Tess had made that rule.

  “And no more black people,” Chloe said. “Unless we are very, very desperate.”

  I about spit out my coffee. Before I could swallow, I was already shaking my head, revving myself up to tell her right off. Who the hell did she think she was, of all people, saying racist stuff, when it was those nice black people, black Americans, thank you very much, who’d been the ones to help us out last night when we were out there freezing our butts off? Talk about being an ingrate.

  “That’s racist,” I said. “Shame on you. You got a lot of nerve, considering everything, and—”

  “Not racist. Just practical.” She shrugged and rubbed her ear. “Black people are more likely to be pulled over, much more likely in some places. We should avoid riding with them, at least in the daytime. Last night was fine. But in the daytime, we shouldn’t take the risk if we can avoid it.”

  I stared at her. She didn’t know what she was talking about. I was the one who’d grown up here.

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “They do not get pulled over more. Not if they’re just driving a regular car down the highway and not doing anything.”

  “They do,” she said. “There have been studies.”

  She said that last part like that was the end of it, like if there’d been studies, well, oh my God, or oh my Allah, everybody better just bow down and accept it as truth. I took another sip of coffee. I supposed it might be true. There didn’t seem any reason for her to make something like that up. I looked down at my hand holding my coffee cup, my skin pale and dry in the sunlight.

  Somebody started up a vacuum cleaner in the hallway. Chloe rubbed her ear again. Her glasses went crooked, but she fixed them.

  “I did not say that is the way it should be,” she said. “I’m saying that is the way it is.”

  The sign for a gas station, just in front of the highway overpass, didn’t seem so far away from the window of our hotel room. But it seemed a lot farther when we were actually out walking, as even with the sun, it was way colder out than it had been the night before. I wore the black hat pulled down over my ears, and Chloe and I both kept our heads lowered against the wind. Some guy leaned out the window of a growling truck and wolf-whistled as he went by, laughing when we both jumped. “Sexy!” he yelled, which was just so dumb. Even by Berean Baptist standards, we were both pretty bundled up. Somebody who whistles out the window like that just wants to scare you because you’re female and out walking without a male, like a dog without an owner. Nine times out of ten, in my experience, it’s got nothing to do with showing skin.

  We’d already decided we would get something to eat at the gas station, so we would be, at least officially, paying customers, and then the cashier might not be so put out about us using the bathroom or standing out by the door with our sign. Chloe got a bag of unsalted peanuts and a banana. Judging from the look on her face, she didn’t think much of my breakfast choice, which was a pack of glazed mini-doughnuts and an energy drink. But she couldn’t say anything about it, as she was a Portuguese-only speaker again. Which was nice.

  We ate fast and quiet at a table by the window. And then there was nothing to do but throw away our trash, take out the sign, and go back out in the cold.

  It was same as last time. Most people didn’t even read the s
ign, and the ones who did were men. Women acted like they couldn’t see us, or if they did look at the sign, they didn’t stop to ask questions. I kept smiling, real friendly, like, Oop! I see you’re walking away, ma’am. No hard feelings. I get it. I really do. But if you change your mind, you know where we’ll be. That didn’t help, though. If anybody looked at our sign on their way into the gas station, they didn’t look at it when they were coming out.

  So we kept standing there, breathing in car exhaust and gas fumes from the pumps, the bell on the entrance going ding! every few seconds. My toes felt snug and warm, as Chloe had given me a packet of toe-warmers. But even after the energy drink, my head still ached a little, and after what seemed like an hour, I started to wonder if my dumb smile could actually freeze to my face.

  But it hadn’t been an hour. I made the mistake of checking Tess’s watch and saw we’d only been out for thirty-five minutes.

  “You need a break?” Chloe murmured. “You need to go inside?” She hardly moved her lips at all. She was like a trained ventriloquist. Pretty good for a second language.

  I shook my head. “You?” That was all I could manage. She shook her head too, though I could see her eyes were watery, maybe from the cold, maybe from the car exhaust. I turned away from her, smiling again.

  And then a short white woman was standing in front of us, squinting down at the sign. She looked about ten years older than Chloe, though her hair was dark blond, no gray. She wore a black leather coat that had fringes all over it and little rhinestones along the collar, with glittery swirls running down the front by the zipper. It wasn’t nice of me, but just in the privacy of my head, I was thinking no matter how cold I was, I would never wear a coat that ugly. Seriously. I’d rather freeze.

  “What part of Iowa?” she asked. Her eyebrows were really high up on her forehead, maybe naturally, maybe not.

  “Oh!” I said, all excited. “Well, we’re actually trying to get home to Minneapolis, but we thought Iowa would be a good start. So anywhere in Iowa is good.”

  “I’m headed to Hamilton,” she said.

  Chloe looked at me, and I looked back at the woman. “Hamilton,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t know even know where that is.”

  She shook her head like she felt sorry for me. “Hamilton, Missouri?”

  I was right. The dumb smile really had frozen to my face. I waited for her to go on.

  “Have you heard of J. C. Penney?”

  I nodded. The woman looked at Chloe like she couldn’t believe she wasn’t nodding too.

  “She’s my mother’s cousin visiting from Portugal,” I said. “She only knows Portuguese.”

  “Hmm,” the woman said. “Even Portuguese people have probably heard of J. C. Penney. And he’s right from Hamilton. That’s where he was born.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.” It wasn’t especially helpful information, but this was the closest thing to a nibble we’d had all morning. “Where is Hamilton?”

  “It’s also the quilting capital of the world. It has more quilting stores than about any place. That’s where all the bees are.”

  “Bees?”

  She laughed, not in an especially nice way. Her teeth were as white as Chloe’s coat.

  “The quilting bees,” she said, like I was pretty much the stupidest person in the world. “Anyway, I’m taking the long way to Hamilton so I can stop by the Walmart in Cameron. I could drop you there. You’d be a lot closer to Iowa than you are now, and Cameron is right on thirty-five. From there it’s a straight shot up to Minneapolis.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, like I already knew, like I was just agreeing with her.

  She raised her chin. “I could use some gas money.”

  “Yeah.” I was still nodding, still smiling, still trying to look friendly. “Of course. How much were you thinking?”

  “Well it’s over four hours to Cameron. Maybe twenty dollars?”

  I kept nodding. “That sounds fair.”

  “Or thirty,” she said. “Thirty.”

  “Thirty,” I said, but I said it like it pained me. I didn’t want her to keep going up, but more than that, I didn’t want her to think we had a lot of cash on us in case she was a thief. I turned to Chloe and held up three fingers, and then made a zero with my forefinger and thumb, and then rubbed my fingers and thumb together, like we had a special sign language. Chloe watched my hands then nodded as if she just now understood.

  “Do . . . we . . . have . . . that . . . much?” I asked. I had thirteen dollars and change left over from the twenty I’d spent on the doughnuts and energy drink. I pulled that out, all crumpled, keeping my remaining twenties out of sight. For a second, I was worried Chloe wouldn’t know not to whip out one of her hundreds and say she had to go get change for it. But she was smart. She unzipped a little side pocket of her bag and took out a five and a ten, and then, after pushing her hand deep in the pocket for a while and looking unsure, she pulled out three more ones and two quarters.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s twenty-nine fifty.” I fished out a dime and a nickel from my coat pocket. “Twenty-nine sixty-five.”

  “That’s fine,” said the woman. “I can let the rest go.” She said it like she had a magic wand, and was touching each of our heads with it. She took the money and pointed behind her. “I’m over there, at pump four.”

  I thought she was kidding. A silver Striker was parked at pump four, its long hood low to the ground. It’s not like I know a lot about luxury cars, but I recognized the little cobra hood ornament, and I knew a new Striker cost more than most people’s houses. But she wasn’t kidding. She pointed her clicker at it, and the headlights came on with their reddish glow, which made the shiny grill below it look even more like a set of bared teeth. My first thought was: Whoa—I get to ride in that car? My second thought was maybe it wasn’t such a hardship for her to spot us the thirty-five cents.

  But I acted like it was no big deal. I just walked over to the passenger side like I didn’t even notice the little cobra on the hood, like I rode in cars like this all the time. Chloe followed me over. Neither of us got in. I liked that Chloe was thinking the same way I was—nice car or not, we had a system.

  “Oh, hey,” I said to the woman. “I promised my dad I’d text him a picture of the license plate every time somebody was nice enough to give us a ride. That okay?”

  The woman frowned, though her high eyebrows stayed high. I waited too, still smiling, but not moving at all. If she didn’t let me take a picture, we weren’t getting in, even if we lost our money. It seemed unlikely she was out to rob us, but then again, it was super weird she’d asked us for gas money when she had a car like this.

  “It’s just for my dad,” I said. “He deletes them when I come home.”

  The woman blew through her teeth. “We’re already on video.” She pointed up at the little roof over the pumps. Her black gloves were trimmed with gray fur. “Everything we do these days is watched and recorded.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t thought about that, how we were being filmed right now. I didn’t look up, and neither did Chloe.

  “It’s just for my dad,” I said. “He’s a worrier.”

  She clicked her tongue, opening the door to the driver’s seat. “Yeah. My husband is the same way with me and our daughters. You know what we each got for Christmas? A new gun. Go ahead and take your picture.”

  I thought for a second she was trying to give me some kind of double message about her having a gun. But she shrugged and got into the car, so I think she was really just telling me her husband worried about her as much as my made-up dad worried about me. I took out my phone and went around to the back of the car. The bumper stickers were hard to miss.

  QUILTERS LOVE YOU TO PIECES

  IF LIFE GIVES YOU SCRAPS,

  MAKE A QUILT!

  GET ’EM OUTTA HERE!

  No Refuge for Illegals and Islamic Terrorists!

  It’s not Islamophobia when

  they’re really trying
to kill you!

  My chest went hot under my coat. Chloe had already gotten in the backseat—I could see the back of her blue hat through the rear window. The woman started the engine, probably watching me in the rearview. There was nothing to do but hold up my phone and act like I was taking a picture. And then I had to come around to the passenger side, smiling again, pretending hard to both of them that everything was fine.

  The woman took off her gloves to drive. Her nails were short and unpainted, but I couldn’t believe the size of the diamond on her ring. I was thinking maybe it was just a big rhinestone, to match the ones on her jacket, but if it was real, I guess it made sense she’d gotten a gun for Christmas, especially if she was going to go around picking up hitchhikers in her Striker.

  “Did you see my bumper stickers?” she asked.

  Exactly no part of me wanted to have this conversation. Or really, any conversation at all. We were already cruising up the entrance ramp to the highway, the ride smooth even as we picked up speed. It seemed like we could all just get through this, and maybe quite comfortably, if we kept the talking to a minimum. My seat had a control for heat, and another for a back massage, and I was thinking that after a while, if it didn’t seem awkward, I might ask if I could turn them both on. Already the seat was so comfortable, the headrest made of soft leather, and tilted up just right. It was like being in a dentist chair, but without the dentist.

  The Quilter glanced at me, waiting for an answer.

  “I did,” I said. Simple question, simple answer. Yes, I’d seen the bumper stickers. But I guessed that wouldn’t be the end of it.

  “Do you like them?” she asked. “I’d say you better like them today.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Get ’em outta here. For sure.” I waved my hand like I was shooing smoke. Even on the highway, the car was silent, and Chloe could of course hear us from the backseat. She must have known what that particular phrase meant, as it was on a lot of bumper stickers and T-shirts. The topic of conversation was likely making her nervous.