“What is reason?” he said.
“Oh, it’s too many things, honey,” she said. “Not now.”
“Fine, ginger ale,” he said.
“That’s easy,” she said.
“Easier than reason?” he said, knowing he was being funny.
“Max, do you know the way you help Mama chop vegetables in the kitchen?”
“Sure. I’m good at it.”
“You’re very good at it. The lady downstairs who checked us in? There’s a restaurant on the other side of the hotel. But one of her cooks didn’t come in. And she’s got a hundred potatoes that need peeling. You will be paid in ginger ale.”
“What is this?” Alex stirred.
“Mama and Papa have to go somewhere for an hour,” Maya said. “And when you’re finished with your one hundredth potato, we will come pick you up.”
“Are you leaving me?” Max said, the humor gone from his face.
“Leaving you?” Maya exclaimed. “For about one hour, silly goose.” She wrapped him in her arms and rolled with him on the bed, her face pressed into his cardigan. He looked so grown-up in that cardigan — like a grandfather in a boy’s body. “Why don’t we go downstairs and I’ll show you what I mean. You don’t like it, we’ll figure out something else.”
Max didn’t answer — he seemed placated.
“Max, wait for us in the hallway outside?” Alex said. “We have to lock up.”
Max looked between them, rolled off the bed, and walked out of the room.
“What are you doing?” Alex said after the door closed.
“You want to go and get it done with, so let’s go. We can’t take him with us.”
“Where were you?” he demanded.
“I went to the supermarket and bought five bags of potatoes. And then I gave fifty dollars to Wilma. And all of a sudden she developed a need for a hundred peeled potatoes, in exchange for watching an eight-year-old boy. Free potato with everyone’s steak for dinner tonight.”
“You’re going to leave Max with a woman who had to be bribed,” he said. “A woman we met an hour ago.” Alex was right, but in Maya’s mind, Wilma’s avarice was mitigated by her attachment to a kitchen. She would save on old carpeting, but she would not let a boy come to harm. Kitchen code. “Why not just leave him in the room?” Alex said.
“Because then he would not be distracted. Then he would be worried and sad. Then he would want to escape. As would I.”
“Then I’ll stay with him, and you go.”
“I can’t drive, remember?” she taunted him. She taunted again: “Want to go by yourself?”
They took the steps down in a file. By the time they reached the restaurant, Max had forgotten about being left behind and bounded into the kitchen, the air thick with the aroma of browning meat and herb-scented steam rising from a pot larger than him. A man in a spattered apron with tattoos up and down his arms reached down for a low-five from his apprentice, which the apprentice supplied. Max walked through the kitchen like a cat — like someone who had been in a kitchen before. Maya was proud of him.
“I got you a bucket to sit on,” Wilma Gund appeared in the kitchen. “You mind sitting on a bucket?” Max shook his head no. “I’ve got a large Canadian party, so I’ve got to shoo. You’ll tell Derek here how things go?” Max got the joke, smiled.
“He looks like a street urchin,” Alex said to Maya.
“Eugene and Raisa don’t have to know,” Maya said. “Max, honey, we’re going. We’ll be back in an hour.” Max shouted bye.
“An hour,” Alex said when they had bundled into the Escape. The antique clock attached to the Valley First National Bank said six o’clock. He watched one of the arms slide: 6:01. Both nothing and too much had happened already on this day, and it was still light outside. The Rubins were in Adelaide, Montana. He was about to call on Max’s birth parents. In mere days, he had traveled definitively away from life as he knew it. How little it took to unravel things, compared to what it had taken to make them cohere. It was masochistic, this behavior — because voluntary. Yes, he had remembered the license plate. He could have pretended he hadn’t, though he had called it out before he could think to suppress it. Either way, he could not — he was not in the habit of hiding things from his wife. But he regretted being here. He regretted it — that was the only word for it. He was filled with the foreboding that accompanies gratuitous risk. And wondered in mystification at the person in the passenger seat.
14
The stunted emptiness of eastern Montana had been so demanding — it was a negative demand; the demand was for stillness, to bear it — that, in some way, Maya’s confidence that they would make it through was not final. When she had seen Adelaide rise from the road as abruptly as the shower that shook them a half hour outside town, she blinked twice, just like her son, wanting full confirmation. Now the Rubins were reciprocating the unannounced visitation of the other side eight years before, only, incredibly, even more unannounced. Maya had tried other ways. They didn’t have a phone. Who didn’t have a phone in the twenty-first century?
Alex turned on the ignition and the car came to humming, obedient life. It was colder here than in the prairie, also later in the day, and he switched on the heat. Despite the drop in temperature, the sky was clear, stingingly clear.
“What if they’re not there?” Alex said. Maya looked over at him and saw that he was holding down half a dozen unanswered questions. If they’re not there, do we wait for them? Leave a note? But what if the note spooks them? But we can’t very well stake out the place, can we? And then what if they’re not there in a more permanent way? That is, if the whole thing is an error and there is no Laurel and Tim at 2207 New Missouri Trail South? Or no 2207 New Missouri Trail South? And what if they say they want to meet Max? Or they can’t tell us why he behaves the way that he does? Or that they don’t remember saying not to let their child do rodeo?
“I don’t know, Alex,” she whispered.
“Can we go home tomorrow?”
“It’s my birthday tomorrow.”
“You want to spend it here?” he said.
“Better than in the car, driving all day.”
“We are so far from home,” he sighed. “We are on the other side of the continent. I wish we could fly home.”
She wished to tell him to take Max and fly home — and leave her behind. “Okay, we’ll leave tomorrow,” she said, so quietly that Alex gave her his straining look. “Let’s drive. Max is a genius at peeling potatoes. He’s probably halfway done.”
The GPS said nine miles from Adelaide proper to New Missouri Trail South. The first bit of sunset, pink as a dog’s ears, was creeping into the sky; the Rubins would return the favor of a visit at dinnertime. As they slicked along the new tar of U.S. 89, Maya stared at the mountains blurring in an unbroken line outside her window. At first, they were so vast and eye-filling that Maya could not manage to do anything but stare senselessly or look away to the dashboard, so reassuringly minor and there. But now, some invisible thing having happened inside her — she was checking into the hotel, arguing with Alex, buying potatoes, but somewhere offstage some wheel was turning without her awareness — she wanted to look at the mountains. The mountains were large enough to blot out Laurel and Tim, and even Alex and Max. She had nine whole miles to spend on them — fifteen minutes according to the especially careful way Alex drove here, even though there were few cars compared to New Jersey. She, a non-driver inept at measuring distances between vehicles, was always grateful for his care at the wheel, but she was especially grateful now. When she was young, by some miracle awoken fifteen minutes before the alarm, they appeared endless from the vantage point of a matted head on the pillow. For fifteen minutes, the world was hers. They lasted forever. She wanted the same now.