She made quite a sight rising above the slope, winter wheat clinging to her hair, sweater, and cheeks. Alex and Max, a window per man, eyed her with worried antipathy.
They had been playing tic-tac-toe. Alex was careful to lose.
“Are you all right, Mama?” Max said cautiously.
From the front seat, she made herself pull his ear. “Of course, Mama’s all right,” she said. She wanted them gone. But there was nowhere here to go away from each other. Here, where there was more space to disappear than anywhere she had known — a mother with a felonious heart could ask for no better place than the prairie of eastern Montana — you huddled together, your protections against the surroundings already so meager.
“I’d like to drive,” Maya said.
Alex went from impatience flecked with concern to his look of straining to comprehend. He expected her to read in it all the skepticism he wished to communicate without having to state it explicitly in front of their son. But she would not grant him that favor of intimates. Alex clucked his tongue. “You don’t know how to drive on the highway,” he pointed out.
“Precisely,” she said with false reasonableness. “If I did, you wouldn’t have had to come and chauffeur your wife up and down the moon.”
“Maya,” he said chidingly. Not with Max in the car, the rest of him said.
“Where would I learn if not here?” Maya said, and pointed to the road, straight and empty, though the lanes seemed narrower than back home.
“Now, you want to learn?” Alex said.
“Now,” Maya said.
“What if we see a policeman?” he dug into her. “We’re on a short leash and you don’t have a license.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Alex checked the rearview window. “Maxie,” he said, turning around. “You’re going to be all right back there?”
“I want to drive, too,” Max said, blinking twice.
“I will drive for a little bit, and then you will go in my lap,” Maya said before her husband could answer. “And we’ll learn together. How does that sound?”
Before Max could reply, Maya opened her door, commencing the car’s dinging. As Alex and Maya passed each other at the hood, he looked at her but she did not look at him.
Montana Rte. 212 was actually an inferior place to learn driving — the straight line of the road required negotiation of no four-way intersections, parking restrictions, K-turns, or merging. (Alex had insisted on taking the interstate from the Badlands, which would have spat them out near Billings, only two hours from Adelaide — he imagined an evening visit with Laurel and Tim, and an early start back the following morning; though this was more driving than he wished to do in a year, he would have been happy to strain himself if the strain was aimed eastward — but Maya had asked for the local road.) Montana 212 required little outside Drive, with occasional sharp deployment of the brakes though they were going no more than forty. Alex harassed Maya from the passenger seat, his feet tapping his mat as if he were the one at the wheel. He leaned forward as if riding out stomach pain. He couldn’t understand why a job had to be performed poorly when there was someone around to perform it the right way. Maya relished his discomfort.
“Uh-oh,” she said.
“Uh-oh,” Max copied from the backseat.
There was a battered sedan pushing up from behind. The way to find other cars was to go forty on the highway and they would find you. The sedan, a sickly green Taurus, gained on them quickly.
“Alex, what do I do?” Maya said.
“It’s okay,” Alex said. “It’s okay.”
“Uh-oh!” Max shouted.
“Should I stop? Should I slow down? Does he want to pass?”
“Maya, how can I know?” Alex said. “Just stay steady. Don’t slow down. Don’t do anything. If you’re too slow for him, he’ll do what he has to.”
“And what is that?” she asked, but Alex was silent. He was full of recommendations when no emergency presented itself, but now he sat wordlessly.
She grasped the wheel with two hands as the Taurus loomed.
“Uh-oh!” Max shouted. There was a note of madness in his voice.
“Max!” his father howled.
“It’s getting into the oncoming lane!” Maya shouted.
“He’s going around you,” Alex said.
“What do I do?”
“Don’t do anything,” Alex said. “Do not do anything, Maya. Let him do it.”
The Taurus blew by on the left with such force that Maya shrieked and yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. The Escape demonstrated itself to be unexpectedly lithe and followed her command too obediently. However, Maya managed to turn the wheel again, righting them before the car reached the edge of the road. In the second before she managed the correction, she heard Alex shouting her name with something like hatred. He was not lunging toward her, or the wheel, or their son; he was shouting her name with hatred at the top of his voice.
Alex did not wait for the shock to subside before he yelled for her to pull over, pull over, pull over. They were hardly stopped before he flung open the passenger door. As they crossed at the hood, now she sought him out but he ignored her chastised, relieved look. There was such enmity in Alex’s eyes that he was too embarrassed to look at his wife. Maya felt the dour satisfaction of the more generous side. Then she wondered if she had asked to drive only because Alex did not know how to teach and she knew it would breach the anger that he was keeping in such magnificent, magnanimous check.
+
An hour outside Adelaide, the earth started climbing. First, there were hills, patchy and tentative, then, all of a sudden, mountains upon mountains. Maya eyed them with gratitude; she willed them to keep rising. Even Max stirred at their sight, leaning into his window. Emerald firs rose off the flanks in neat rows like heads in a choir, the cottonwoods among them so gold they looked like bullion bars. The Escape was soaked by a shower that arrived from nowhere and disappeared just as instantly. Max shrieked when the first heavy drops stunned the roof. They were pounded on for ten minutes, Alex clutching the wheel and straining to see. Then it was over and clear, an argument settled. The sky came back with a histrionic palette of yellows and pinks.
And then, with no warning, Adelaide was growing around them, the windshield suddenly full of tackle shops, muffler specialists, diners. The road had been so lulling that they had taken several lights before Maya remembered why they were here. Laurel and Tim could be eating in that diner. Max might lay eyes on his birth parents as a conscious being for the first time in his life. Maya had reassured Alex that they would visit the cowboys alone, and that if Laurel and Tim became demanding, they would be told Max had not come on the trip. But what if Laurel and Tim were not patiently awaiting the Rubins at 2207 New Missouri Trail South? What if they were living, breathing beings walking around town? Would they recognize their son? Would they stir recognition in Max?
“Town of bars, town of churches,” the laconic legend underneath the Welcome to Adelaide sign said; no other comment appeared, not even the date of settlement, save for the words “Adelaide, Australia 8830km (crow only),” sided by a kangaroo silhouette. Some inner flag raised by the symbolism of their arrival, Alex pulled over on the gravelly shoulder. Traffic had been picking up steadily; they were at the edge of a veritable metropolis. They felt the accomplishment of having made it to some other side.
Maya put her hand on Alex’s forearm. “Let’s go to the hotel first. Please.”
Alex looked ahead, both hands on the wheel. He had been hoping to go directly to Laurel and Tim’s, but they couldn’t very well show up with Max. Setting off his blinker, he pulled back out on the road.