Around the Bend Read Free Page A

and we were back to all lightness and fluff.
    I did that well. I was, after all, my father’s daughter. It was the serious, let’s-stick-together-forever kind of thing that I had trouble with. Nick knew it, but he persisted, either because he had some fairy-tale version of our reality playing in his head or he was a glutton for punishment.
    Reginald had finished his business and was now twirling around me, wrapping the leather leash against my legs. I stood there, bound by a pig in one place and by a man wanting more than I could give in another.
    “I have to go, Nick. I’ll call you when we stop tonight.” I hung up the phone before he could say anything else, like that he wouldn’t be there when I called. Then I untangled myself from the pig and headed back to the car.
    I didn’t want to think about Nick’s words for the next gazillion miles. I didn’t want to ponder marriage or anything more committed than a date for Friday night. I wasn’t good at that kind of thing and I was too old to learn a new trick.
    Woods behind me. My mother and an endless cross-country trip ahead of me. Nick somewhere in the next county, expecting an answer. I considered ditching it all and heading into the forest.
    Considering I’m the type of woman who can’t survive without indoor plumbing and take-out Chinese, I’d have better survival odds with my mother.

three
    I reached the Mustang, opened the door to let Reginald in, giving him a little shove when the speeding traffic whipped by and freaked him out, causing him to skitter back, bumping into my knees, nearly knocking me over. “Come on, Reginald,” I said, pushing on his rear, but Reginald held firm on the road, refusing to move.
    Then I saw why. It had nothing to do with rushing semis. And everything to do with a six-foot cardboard cutout sitting in the backseat, unfolded but still crinkled in four places. “What the hell is that?”
    “Your father.”
    It was indeed, a giant picture of my father, like one of those stand-up G.I. Joes they put in stores to tell young men and women the Army wants them. The photo, so lifelike and real, socked me in the gut, rolling over me with memories. For a second, I could really believe he was there, then reality slapped me.
    It was as if my mother had given me a Christmas present—the one I really, really wanted, the top one on my list toSanta—but after I’d torn off the wrapping and exclaimed with delight, the box turned out to be empty.
    “Why is this in my car?”
    “Your father always wanted to travel and never got the chance. I thought we’d take pictures along the way, of him enjoying the different stops we’re going to make.” She held up something small and silver. “Look, I even bought a digital camera so I can send the pictures back to Erma and Rhonda.”
    A digital camera? My mother, the one who had yet to install cable or buy a VCR and had fought the touch-tone revolution like some people resisted root canals, had bought a digital camera?
    I stared at her, searching for signs of early dementia. “That’s insane.”
    “It’ll make for great memories.” She put the camera into the ashtray that now served as my change dish. It snuggled up to my cell phone, twins of technology.
    “Of what?” I lifted Reginald into the backseat, grunting under his hundred-twenty-plus-pound body. He scrambled away from me, nicking the vinyl again, and began searching under the front seat. No wild mushrooms there, I wanted to tell him, just some cold, hard French fries and a couple dimes.
    Reginald knocked into the image of my father, and suddenly anger rushed over me. How could my mother be so cavalier about my father?
    “What were you thinking, Ma? That us and Flat Stanley here were going to be traveling the globe? Dad died five years ago. I don’t think he cares about seeing the world’s largest ball of twine.”
    Silence carpeted the car, as heavy and uncomfortable as tacky shag. Outside, the traffic whizzed past in a high