“There you go,” she said.
Mae pictured it, for just a second. The righteous revolution coming for her. She hoped she’d have enough time to put on Jesus’s death party playlist. She hoped she’d go out dancing.
“And hell,” Liv said, breaking Mae’s morbid reverie, “sometimes, if I’m really feeling wild, I’ll take myself on a trip up to Seaside or Astoria. More and more places up north these days to be loud and proud, if I want to be.”
Mae grinned again, putting the revolution behind her.
“I’d love to be invited on one of those trips, one day.”
Liv raised a brow.
“Show your face in town a little more, and I’ll think about it.”
Mae put a hand across her heart.
“I promise to make you proud, Liv.”
Liv reached into the back pocket of her jeans for her wallet.
“See that you do.”
* * *
After waving goodbye to Liv, Mae drove back to 101, turned south.
And then she kept on driving. Past 12 Main Street and Ginger’s, past Freddy’s and the hardware store. The Millers’ candy shop and the tourist shop next to it, the one full of whale stuffed animals and baskets of polished agate. Greyfin Pizza Junction and The Bay Diner.
Country songs by artists she didn’t know filtered by on the radio; it was the only music station that came in here. It had slowly grown on her, the guitars and strong voices and nostalgic melodies. A nostalgia, perhaps, for a world outside of her orbit, for places she had never touched. But sometimes the sweetness of the feeling was enough.
Without fully thinking about it, Mae kept listening to songs about small towns and driving along the coast, the cliffs and the forests and, the further south she drove, the dunes. Toward Newport. Toward Jodi and Felix.
Enough of my kin are still here. To ground me, make me feel safe, you know?
Unlike Liv’s roots, Mae’s parents had only moved to the Oregon Coast a few years ago. Once Mae had left North Carolina for college in Wisconsin all those years ago, Jodi and Felix had drifted, too, as Felix picked up guest university teaching spots: to Massachusetts, as Felix had long dreamed of moonlighting as a New England professor, to St. Louis and Austin. Until finally, they both retired, and decided, somewhat to Mae’s surprise, on fucking Newport, Oregon.
“We’re ready to be lazy!” Jodi had explained with glee, throwing her hands in the air. They’d apparently been researching senior living communities around the country for years. And their apartment in Newport—on the fourth floor, with a balcony facing the ocean—was close enough to their only child that it was easy to visit without breathing over her shoulder.
And then here Mae was, breathing over their shoulder instead.
“Hey, Mom,” she said into the phone once she’d reached their parking lot. “I happened to be in town and I was just wondering…” She looked out the windshield of her car to the waves in the distance.
Was Dell okay?
Maybe the dogs were taking care of him.
What were the people who had taken her and Jesus’s jobs at the center doing right now?
She missed the dogs she used to see in her neighborhood. She always made up little stories about their owners.
She hoped her old favorite baristas were well.
She missed the bus.
She’d planned, on the drive down here, to collapse on her parents’ couch and have a little cry. She’d been wanting to have a little cry ever since Dell yelled at her and threw a mug at her head.
But now that she was here?—
“Would you like to take a walk on the beach with me?” came out of her mouth instead.
