I hadn’t realized she’d dwelled on it—Lily’s overt pass at me, but now, here we are, in the middle of the Arizona desert, and somehow her refusing to fill up the gas tank has morphed into raising the issue all over again.
I wave my phone out the window again, still nothing. “I think we might die here,” I say. “Like, in the middle of the desert with our dog. This is how I’m actually going to fucking die.”
I open the car door and Monster scrambles into the front seat, across my lap, and out to the shoulder of the deserted highway.
“FUCK!!” I scream into the canyons. My voice bounces off the rocks and back to us.Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck,until it fades. Monster cocks his head and looks at me curiously.
Tatum slams her own door, marches around the Jeep, and says: “Jesus, you’re acting like I did this intentionally!”
“I don’t think you did this intentionally, Tate. But I asked you three times to pull over, and you kept saying we were fine.”
“I thought we were!”
“So as I said—maybe not part of a Machiavellian master plan, but Idothink that sometimes you get off on the drama without thinking through the consequences.”
“Like when?”
I jerk my thumb toward Monster. “Like that impulse acquisition? Like the very first time we met, at the bar, with the bet?”
“It’s not like any of those things ended badly,” she says.
“It’s a metaphor.”
“So this is my fault.” She clenches her fists and rams them into her hips.
“Well, technically, yes.”
Monster wanders over to a bush and lifts his leg.
“We can hitchhike,” she says.
“We haven’t passed a car in hours.”
Monster spins over a spot next to the bush and poops. If we were in Santa Monica, this is when I’d walk over and scoop it up with a little baggie while Tatum watches. Because we are in the middle of nowhere, I leave it be. I check my phone again. No bars. I am due in Dallas in two days. Even if we lose these hours and these miles, I’ll still make it. That’s not a concern. Freezing to death in the middle of the desert tops my list right now; not throttling my wife who was too stubborn to stop for gas isn’t far behind it.
Tatum’s eyes well up, almost as if she’s been given a director’s cue, but I know that this is genuine, not some emotion she’s aiming for in her close-up.
“I’m sorry, OK, I’m sorry! I thought I was being spontaneous, and I thought I was, like, I don’t know, living on the edge or something, and now we’re fucking stranded here in the middle of the desert, and I don’t have any idea where the next town is—you’re right—and I was impetuous and dumb!” She pops the trunk to the Jeep and sinks into the open space, her shoulders heaving under the weight of her tears. Monster senses her despair and leaps into the trunk, sitting next to her as if on guard.
“OK, listen,” I exhale. “It’s just one night. And I don’t want to fight.”
“It’s just one night!” she wails. “We’re going to be, like, eaten by coyotes!”
“Monster will protect us,” I say.
She momentarily slows her cries to gape at Monster, as if considering this, as if, were we to be attacked by coyotes, this goofy lump of a dog could do anything other than take a giant crap on them to scare them away. Then she rubs behind his ears absentmindedly, then gazes back toward me, her eyes still swimming pools. Though she is the best actress I know, I also can see that she is sincerely sorry for this. And because she is so transparent with me, here, now, and because this is a reminder that she is nearly always transparent and that we trust each other and we are each other’s best allies, I feel myself softening.
I shove my hands into my pockets, teeter back on my heels, stare up at the wide-open pink and orange and still blue landscape above us. The stars are beginning to poke their heads out of the dusk sky, announcing night’s arrival.
“Did I ever tell you how once Leo and I got lost in the woods one night in Vermont?”
“No,” she hiccups. Monster settles in, nestling into her lap, and she pats the top of his head, then leans down and kisses him.
“Well, anyway, my parents used to have a house up there. Good for skiing, good in the summer for hiking and getting bitten by ticks. They sold it after Leo got Lyme disease one year.”
“Oh,” she says.
“Anyway, we were pretty much given free rein to romp around the woods, do whatever, you know. That’s how kids grew up back then, like, no one watching, no responsibilities.” I pause because it occurs to me that Tatum grew up with nothing but responsibilities. But I press on. “I was always super careful to mark our trail: I carried different colored chalk in my pockets to clip the trees so we could make our way back. Once I forgot about it, and it went through the wash ...” I laugh. “Oh my God, my mom, just ...”
