Also, he couldn’t discount the fact that maybe he was acting a little melodramatic because, well, Birdie Maxwell made him crazy. So he wasn’t in a generous enough mood to forge a peace anyway. And he certainly wasn’t in a mood to pass along Carter’s hellos, to tell her about the fiancée, to say that he thought Carter could be a good friend to her if she ever wanted to open herself up to him again.
Instead, they simply did not speak. Not when an eighties station played Queen and reminded them both of their carpool days in high school. Not when Birdie was desperate to pee and rather than pull to the side of the road and ask Elliot to drive so she could run to the back of the RV, she veered to the off-ramp too quickly and nearly leveled a car in each lane as she did. She careened into a pitstop parking spot, hopped out, donning extra-large sunglasses and his Cal hat tilted at an angle, and returned fifteen minutes later with Diet Coke and Mentos and an oversized bag of Cheetos, which she was already eating when she sunk back into the driver’s seat.
She caught him staring and said, “I guess you don’t remember. This is my surprised face.”
He didn’t remember whatever it was that he was supposed to remember, so he stared at her wonderfully beautiful face, though he knew that wasn’t the point, and she stared at him, and naturally, because Birdie had never lost a staring contest even when they were kids, he wilted first and flopped into the passenger seat.
She flipped the key in the ignition and turned up the radio, and they lumbered toward their hometown. After another thirty minutes of silence, he made a show of moving to the well-worn dinette table behind her seat and banged his keyboard loudly enough to let her know that even the infuriating Birdie Robinson couldn’t stymie his discipline. If she didn’t want to talk, then they wouldn’t talk. Who said he needed her for the story? Who said that he needed herat all?
Elliot ran his hands over his cheeks, cracked his knuckles, and redoubled his efforts until he had a semi-decent workable draft, but he was mostly distracted by the fact that he was still circling Carter’s hint about another man, and that his heart lurched constantly with the desperate hope that it was him. He glancedforward and watched her lick the Cheeto dust off her fingertips, and it was so human, so real, so normal, that he knew damn well he wasn’t going to abandon that hope anytime soon, even if it was for the best for his career, even if it was for the best with Mona. Even if, even if, even if. He watched her blow out her breath, then straighten her spine, then hunch over and sigh all over again.
Finally, she turned and said, “Look, don’t take this as a truce because we are still fighting, but I think there’s something wrong with this stupid truck.”
“We’re notfighting,” he started, then stopped, because actually, that was exactly what they were doing. “I just don’t like—”
The engine made an alarming popping sound, and the RV sputtered and lurched.
“Shit.” Elliot felt his eyebrows skew. “What wasthat?”
“Do I look like a mechanic?” Birdie bleated. “It’s not my fault that Mona hasn’t taken it for a tune-up in a decade.”
The engine belched again, followed by an endless fwop fwop fwop, and something smelling like an erupted volcano filtered through the air-conditioning vents. And Elliot, who had been in plenty of dubious vehicles all over the world, began to worry the thing was poised to explode.
“Pull over! The next exit is right there,” he shouted over the increasingly loud fwops. He jumped into her eyeline and pointed. “I’m not going to die in the middle of nowhere California.”
“You think that I’m trying to kill you?” she shouted. “I didn’t even want to drive! I don’t even knowhowto drive. I never agreed to this RV in the first place!”
“Your driving is only part of the problem!”
“What are the rest of my problems?” she yelled, peeling over, then barely making the exit ramp.
“How much time do you have before we end up in a ditch?”
Elliot started compiling a mental list of all the ways she’d aggrieved him, all the ways she pushed his buttons, all the things she did that were just so goddamn infuriating. But then he considered that the brakes on his sister’s hunk of junk could go along with the engine, and because he was a reporter through and through, he grabbed his laptop and uploaded the draft of tomorrow’s story to theTimesserver in case the entire vehicle blew or they landed upside down and unconscious on the side of the road and his words were lost forever. He’d make his deadline if it literally killed him.
Birdie wrestled the RV into a deserted lot off the highway, the wheels or the engine or some sort of exhaust pipe now braying out its dissatisfaction. The smell of sulfur filled the cabin, and Birdie raised the collar of Elliot’s button-down over her nose, then Elliot did the same with his own sweatshirt. She unlatched her seat belt and threw herself down the steps to assess the damage outside. Elliot gave it a beat because he was still feeling testy, then followed.
The front of the camper was smoking. Actually smoking. Birdie stood out in front with her hands curled into fists and pressed into her hips, like she was about to scold the engine.
“Now what?” she said, as a low but audible hiss emerged from somewhere that neither of them could identify.
“I guess we pop the hood?” Elliot said.
Birdie swiveled her head toward him and scrunched every muscle in her face.
“Am I supposed to know how to do that?” she asked. “I barely knew how to drive up until like a day ago when it was foisted upon me.”
He wanted to remind her that he was pretty certain she hadplayed a down-on-her-luck mechanic in a film half a decade ago, but it didn’t seem like the time. Also, he very much wanted to point out that this entire situation was her suggestion—the way to redeem herself in the eyes of America—but she wasn’t totally off base that she hadn’t actually suggested the road trip, and she certainly hadn’t suggested the ancient Winnebago that he probably couldn’t even sell for parts. Not that Mona would let him.
Elliot gingerly stepped forward toward the engine. He thought he’d feel around to see if there was some sort of latch, some sort of button to push. But when he was a few inches away, he could feel the heat emanating from the hood. He wasn’t exactly sure what that foretold, but he tried to sound like he was an expert, like he wasn’t rattled the way that Birdie appeared to be.
“I think maybe a belt snapped,” he said with gravitas.
“You think maybe a belt snapped?”
“Or it could be the oil.”
“It could be the oil?” she repeated.
