She says this with such finality, and with such precision, that I am simultaneously eager to drop the subject and to ask her another question, because I’m fascinated with the way she speaks. She has blue eyes that seem to radiate intensity. I know that’s just an optical illusion; eyes do not technically radiate anything. Eyes take in light that is reflected off an object. This light passes through the cornea, which refracts (I love the word “refracts”) the rays that pass through the pupil, the round black hole in the middle of an eye. The colored part around the pupil is called the iris, and it opens and closes to regulate how much light passes into the eye. The lens of the eye then further refracts the rays and sends them to the retina, in the back of eye. The retina is full of things called rods and cones, which detect such things as colors and details. The cones and rods convert the light into electrical impulses, which are sent to the brain, producing an image. That’s how eyes work. Everybody knows this.
What I’m saying is that her eyes make her look extra-alert, and that appeals to me. I cannot explain why.
Also, her dirty-blonde hair is pulled up into the kind of ponytail that Donna Middleton (now Hays) often wears.
“How long have you owned this motel?” I ask.
“Groundbreaking was April eighteenth, nineteen sixty-seven. First room was rented on May first, nineteen sixty-eight.”
“You owned it then?” I am flummoxed and again impressed with the precision. This woman cannot be much older than I am. “You would have been a little girl.”
“I wasn’t born yet, as a matter of fact. My mom and dad owned it. They’re in the ground now, so it’s mine.”
I like the euphemism “in the ground.” I may start describing my father this way. She and I have this in common, that our fathers are dead.
I start to ask another question but she cuts me off. “Can’t talk. Lots to do. Enjoy your stay.”
She walks past me, down the hallway into the main part of the motel, and disappears behind a closed door.
I guess I will talk to her later.
Kyle is still not speaking to me. That’s his choice. I speak to him. This is my choice.
“Kyle, your debt is cleared. You don’t owe me anything. I will not keep track of your bad deeds or your good deeds. You do what you think is right, and Saturday I will take you to Wyoming, and you can meet your parents and be free of me.”
Kyle does not say anything. He keeps playing that bird game on my bitchin’ iPhone.
“Also,” I say, “the lady who owns this motel says this TV is the best she can do.”
Kyle stops playing the game on the phone and tosses it onto my bed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, Kyle, she says that it’s expensive to put in cable television and—”
“No, douche, that’s—” He stops talking, and he frowns like he has an ache somewhere. “I’m sorry. Really, Edward, I’m sorry. What I mean is, why aren’t you keeping track of what I do anymore?”
I feel stung by what Kyle just said. He claims to be sorry, but he keeps calling me names. I want to give him what’s called the benefit of the doubt, but how can I do that when there’s so much doubt? I consider not answering him and letting him feel what it’s like to get the silent treatment, but then I remember that the whole point of this conversation was to start fresh with him. Dueling silent treatments would not help the situation.
“You need to stop calling me names,” I say.
“I said I was sorry.”
“And I said you need to stop. Sorry won’t work.”
Dr. Buckley’s words are again coming out of my mouth, and this continually astounds me. She used to say this very thing to me when I first started going to her office, when my condition was out of control and I said a lot of mean things to her. I think that’s why I am so sensitive to such things now. I think that someday Kyle will look back on how he’s acting now and be sorry for the things he has said to people. That’s called regret, and regret hurts for a long time.
He looks down. “OK, I’ll stop.”
“OK,” I say, and I sit down on my bed, keeping my distance but also trying to let him know that I will not hold a grudge. “I’ve decided to stop tracking your behavior because it’s none of my business. I think you’re a good young man, and I think no matter how hard things have been for you, you know what’s right and what’s wrong because your parents have raised you well.”
Kyle nods. I keep talking. It’s hard for me to believe these things are coming out of my mouth, because I don’t sound like me. I sound like Dr. Buckley. Again.
“We were friends when you lived in Billings, and in my head and in my heart we will always be friends. But I don’t know what kind of friends we’ll be. A lot of it—most of it—will be up to you. I’m not going to make it hard on you by tracking your behavior. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a new day.”
I really can’t believe I’m saying this, because it’s such a stupid, self-evident phrase; every day is a new day no matter what, and it’s silly to point it out.
Kyle sits on the edge of his bed quietly. I think this is the first time on this whole trip that he is actually listening to me. Not that thinking matters very much. It’s the facts that count.
“Why did we come here?” Kyle asks. “This town is so small and boring.”
I cannot argue with Kyle, even if I wanted to. When we drove into Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, last night, even though it was dark, I recognized this motel and the grain elevators in town, and that was it. It’s funny—and not ha-ha funny—how something can appear to be so precise and vivid when you dream about it and then be so foreign and unrecognizable in the conscious world, when the cones and rods in your eyes are sending electrical impulses to your brain and showing you what things really look like.
The simplest answer to Kyle’s question, the one Occam’s razor would lead us to, is that I don’t have a good reason for why we came here. But I don’t tell Kyle that. I choose a different answer, one that is just as true.
“My father, before he became a politician in Billings, used to work for an oil company, and he was the boss of some crews that worked around here on the oil pumps. Those crews did some pretty neat things. Would you like to see the oil fields?”
“Sure,” Kyle says.
We both stand up and grab our jackets and head for the door. Once we’re in the hallway, the motel owner comes walking past us.
“Storm is coming,” she says, her intense blue eyes looking straight at me. And then she is gone into the room two doors down and across the hallway from us.
She flummoxes me.
“That was weird,” Kyle says.
It certainly was. I’m definitely going to talk to her later.
Kyle and I stand on the side of a dirt road, and I point out across a fallow (I love the word “fallow”) field to an oil pump in the distance. The head of it slowly bobs up and down, like a bird pulling a worm out of the ground.
“That’s an oil pump,” I say.
“I know that.”
Kyle thinks he’s so smart.
“Do you know what cathodic protection is?” I ask.
“No.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
“Yeah.”
I try to explain this simply, which means I leave out the most interesting parts, like electrochemical potential and cathodic disbonding.
“These oil pumps will corrode over time unless something is done to combat it. That’s what my father’s crew would do. They would attach a power source to the pump with cables that they buried underground, and these cables would also go to something called an anode, which would get corroded instead of the pump, so the pump could keep doing its business. Does that make sense?”