She fiddled with her hands in her lap. “I’m going to regret it, but can we make one more stop? It’s a little out of the way.”
“Of course, just tell me where,” I said without hesitation.
We drove on a country road in silence for a few minutes until she said, “It was my brother.”
“The guy just now?” I asked in surprise. He’d seemed a good bit older than her.
“No,” she said. “The grave. The guy was my dad.”
What the fuck? I almost just hit her father? Not exactly how I’d envisioned meeting her parents.
She was quiet again, obviously not ready to tell me more about her brother.
“Does he know…what you do?” I asked, still seething at what he’d called her.
A laugh escaped her, and then another. “He has no idea.” She kept giggling. “If the bastard only knew the full extent of my shamefulness, he’d shrivel up and die on the spot.”
I looked over at her, not anywhere near ready to laugh. “Maia, I almost just punched your dad.”
She couldn’t breathe she was laughing so hard. “It’s fine. You didn’t.”
I put a hand on her thigh, fiddling absently with the hole in her jeans as we drove until she pointed to a farmhouse and I pulled in.
A woman in overalls appeared on the front porch as I opened Maia’s door. The woman looked her up and down, then said, “About damn time you came home. And you’ve brought a young man I see. About damn time you did that too.”
Maia squinted at me and smiled. “This is Zane. Zane, this is Miss Alice.”
The woman jerked her head in invitation and went back into the house.
“Is that your mom?” I asked as we followed her through the screen door.
“She’s not my mama,” Maia said loud enough for Alice to hear. “But she might as well have been.”
It was surreal in the hours that followed our arrival to be sitting at a kitchen table, sipping iced tea while the two women caught up. Maia hadn’t been home in years from what I could tell.
“So what will you do now that you’ve finished school?” Miss Alice asked, peering over her glasses at Maia, pride written plainly on her face.
“I still have to work my way up to where I want to be, but I got this internship that’ll be a good start.”
“She’s being modest again,” I said, nudging Maia with my knee and making her smile. “It’s the most competitive internship in North America and she was picked for it.”
Miss Alice was appraising me now. “And what about you, young man? Will you be in LA as well?” She said LA like it was an infectious disease and not a city.
“I hope so…eventually. I’m in a band and we’re going to be playing shows all over the place for a while.”
Maia laughed. “Now who’s being modest? He’s opening for Hail Fire on their tour.”
Miss Alice clapped her hands. “EvenI’veheard of them. Well, good for you.” She looked between us. “So…tough choices to make, then.”
Maia rolled her eyes. “Way to be Debbie Downer.”
Miss Alice turned to me. “She always did like to bury her head in the sand. Don’t you let her run away just because it gets hard, you hear? She’s done that before too…”
She raised her hands and got up before Maia could splutter outrage at her.
Miss Alice went out on the porch to smoke a cigarette, leaving tension in her wake having brought up the forbidden topic. If we didn’t talk about it, we didn’t have to answer it.
Maia acted like nothing had been said. “It’s getting late. How would you feel about sleeping here instead of in a motel tonight?”
