“It turned into number two!” Max shouted from within. They all laughed at the counter, the girls looking up from the cell phone. Maya laughed, too, enjoying the moment — then wondered if they were embarrassing Max. When the man, Marion, laughed, the balefulness went from his eyes.
Maya returned to the counter. The diner clamored around them with the universal sound of forks on plates, water pouring into glasses, a laugh from one of the booths. Was it the surrounding emptiness that explained the unfamiliarly convivial feeling of the restaurant despite its godforsaken appearance — a huddling amity, exiles roped together on a crevasse at the edge of the world? She inhaled the thick aroma of the coffee; just the fog of it was tantalizing: leaves, a wood, autumn.
Marion waved his hands. “It isn’t hot anymore.”
“I walked away for a second,” Maya said, rolling her eyes.
“Hot,” Marion said. He took her cup for himself, and poured her a new one.
Maya sipped at the coffee. It brought her closer to sleep but loosened the strain in her neck. On the other side of their father, Alma and Celia stared rhapsodically at a cell phone. They were as square-shouldered as their father was lean. She imagined their mother in some kind of heavy robe that hid the ample folds of her figure.
“Max is adopted,” Maya said. She bolted upright. Her heart started pounding, lifting her fatigue. She looked over her shoulder: Max was still in the bathroom. She clenched her jaw to try to get some focus into her face. She was really letting herself get away from herself.
“Sometimes, I think they’re adopted,” Marion said, bending his head toward his daughters.
“You’re having breakfast with your daughters, I would say that’s a triumph,” Maya said diplomatically, wishing to return the conversation to comprehensible ground.
“They’re having breakfast with their cell phone,” he said. “I’m having breakfast with you.”
The bathroom door swung open, and Max stepped out. How especially frail he looked in the fierce light pouring in from the large windows. The light was all but coming through him. She set her coffee down on the counter.
“Finish your coffee,” Marion said. “We’ll get some juice for — Max.”
“We’re. .”—momentarily Maya struggled with the tense—“we’re being waited for.”
Marion nodded. “I see.”
“Mama?” Max said.
“Just a second, honey,” she said. “This man will tell us about a campground where we can stay tonight.” She tried to sound casual, but her ears were still ringing with the unnecessary disclosure she had made a moment before. She should have rushed out of the diner — Marion didn’t know that Max didn’t know and could say something carelessly. She tried to collect herself — for the tenth time in ten minutes. She turned to Marion. “I don’t know where we are,” she said. She felt the fright she had given herself in her body: Her tiny breasts swelled; her belly felt soft; her heart was beating.
Marion moved his eyes from Max to his mother, and considered her with that balefulness. “In a diner outside Badlands National Park. If you want to camp, there’s just one place. You go down 240 until it splits off. You’ll have gone past the park. But you stay on the road — it’s just 377 then. You can’t miss it.”
She thanked him and stood. She stood longer than she needed to. “Will you tell your brother how good a coffee he makes?”
“Enjoy this magnificent country,” Marion said.
+
Alex was on the phone. She could tell from across the road that he was speaking with his parents because he was speaking with extra volume. Was he reporting to them what had happened? “Already, Maya has acquainted herself with the law,” she imagined him saying. Her temples were aflame. She clutched Max’s hand so hard that he squirmed. She didn’t trust herself, crossing the road.
Alex paced the shoulder, as if he was in their living room. He could not sit and speak on the telephone at the same time. How tiny he looked splashed against the ridgeline, like an insect parading down its broad brown windshield. Only a little larger than the oblong white birds, which continued to leap as if they never lost hunger. The ridgeline looked as if it had grown in the warming rays of the sun, a sun-shower mushroom of rimrock and scree.
The sun was burning strongly and the stinging chill of early morning had gone. Maya knelt before Max and yanked off his jacket. The zipper wouldn’t give and she was too violent with it. The sun felt good on her face, and she lost a moment staring up at the sky, her eyes squinting at the light, Max’s jacket half off.
“What do you see, Mama?” he said.
“I bet you’re hungry,” she said. “We should have gotten you something inside.” She wondered whether she could go back in. She could leave both of them in the Escape while she went in to get takeout.
“Who was that man?” Max said.
Maya hesitated. “He was the coffee man. He comes to the diners to give them their coffee.”
“When will I be allowed to drink coffee?”
“When you go to college.”
“I don’t want to go to college.”
“Oh, yeah?” she rustled his hair. “What do you know about it? Go say hello to your grandmother and grandfather.”
He turned to walk toward his father, but she held him. “Hold on. I’m sorry. That wasn’t the coffee man.”
“Who was it?”
“Did you get scared in the police car?”
Max shook his head.
“I’m sorry. I made a bad decision. Sometimes I do that. I’m sorry. Okay?”
“It’s fine,” Max said. “I wasn’t scared. Who was that man?”
Maya laughed sorrowfully. “That was a new friend. Like Oliver is for you. Do you miss Oliver?”
“He borrowed three books.”
“Is he the kind of person who returns the things that you loan him?”
“I don’t know,” Max shrugged. “I’ve never done it before.”
“Why did you agree this time?”
“I thought I would miss him.”
Maya bit her lip. “You’re a very good friend to him. And he to you.”
“How do you know if someone is a good friend?” Max said.
“A friend is if you feel good about them in your soul.”
“What’s a soul?” Max said.
Maya laughed and nearly let a tear fall. She took his ears in her hands and rubbed them like wishbones. “A soul is that part of you. . It’s that part of you where you’re the most honest about yourself. It’s always the truth in your soul. Does that make sense?”
“Am I honest?”
“You’re more honest than anyone I know.”
She let him go. She circled the SUV until she was out of Max and Alex’s sight, slipped to the ground, and leaned against its sturdy black frame. She stared up at the blinding light until it started tears again. Here were reasons for a trip far from home in a big car: The sun was strong enough to set off tears in her eyes, the Escape large enough to conceal her as they fell to the ground.
11
The Rubins drove past Badlands National Park/Pennington County Campground even though the sign advertising it was large and clear — too clear against the burnt-gray nothingness that it fronted. They drove past in a unanimous wish — so rare for them unanimity these days; perhaps they wished to savor it — for the campground to turn out to be some place other than the fenced-off patch of hard ground to which they reluctantly returned. The hard-baked pan of the plot was rejected even by plants. They gazed longingly at a rickety-looking motel off on a ridge — it seemed grand. The campground fence was strung with warnings against rattlesnakes, exhortations to conserve water, regulations regarding campfires, the opening and closing hours of a little shed on the edge of the lot that said OFFICE. How could a place of so few amenities require so many regulations? The Americans were regulated even when practicing wildness. In Kiev, Maya and her schoolmates had crept into the Alexeyevsky Theater at night because the city did not bother to keep it locked. They acted out their favorite film scenes on stage and drank moonshine in the aisles. They always deposited a bottle with the old watchman so that he would be amiably distracted. They did clean up when they were done — they weren’t savages.