Finally I hang up. “No dice,” I say to Aisha.
She says, “Wait. Say the number again.”
I repeat it.
“And his name?”
“Turk B. Funny last name.”
“I think they just use initials in AA,” Aisha says as she types in the number. She stares at her screen and then she stands, all her attention on her phone. “Got something.”
“What?” I stand too.
“Turk Braverman. Thirty-six Prosper Street, San Francisco, California, nine-four-one-one-four. Reverse lookup.”
“Turk Braverman,” I repeat. “Okay.”
But then we just stand there, because the number is from thirty-plus years ago. It could easily be an old number. An old address. I mean, I looked up my mom once on whitepages.com, and she was still listed as living in the apartment she grew up in near Columbia University. The guy may not have known my grandfather that well, and he is probably ancient by now. He could be dead, for all I know.
“Google him,” I say, and Aisha does so. The only thing that comes up is an ad for criminal background checks, and that’s for Turk B., not Turk Braverman. Google asks if we mean Tzuriel Braverman, which we definitely don’t.
We map the address. It’s right in the center of San Francisco, near Market Street, which I think is probably a famous street since even I’ve heard of it. Aisha tries to pull up the satellite image on her phone. The webpage spins and spins.
“Maybe Turk Braverman will be, like, standing out in front of his house waving,” I say, and Aisha laughs.
“And underneath it’ll say, ‘Hi, Carson and Aisha, you found me!’ ”
Finally the picture comes up. It’s a block of thin row houses that look like they come from a hundred years ago, with intricate awnings and rickety staircases. There’s an orange one, a light-blue one, and a lime-green one. But what are the odds some guy who wrote “keep coming back” to my grandfather thirty-plus years ago still knows him? And is it worth a long-ass drive just to find out? Would Aisha even go for that?
I look at her, and it’s like she can read my mind. She maps the route. It’s 737 miles, almost eleven hours away, according to Google Maps.
I wince. “Too far?”
“Too far for what?” she asks.
“You wouldn’t be up for —”
“Hell I wouldn’t!”
“You mean —”
“Carson,” she says. “You think I’d rather go back to Billings than drive to San Francisco? Gay mecca of the world?”
She grins. She wants to go. A slow grin crosses my face too.
“Are we going to San Francisco?” she asks.
“We can keep calling the number on the way,” I say, and she nods.
It occurs to me that we have about a hundred dollars left to our name. I try to figure out if that’s enough money for gas to get there. Gas is like $3.50 a gallon.
“How many miles to a gallon of gas does the Neon get?” I ask Aisha.
“About thirty.”
So $3.50 buys thirty miles. Which means seventy dollars buys six hundred miles, and ninety dollars buys seven hundred and fifty miles. Yes. We have barely enough money to get to San Francisco if we don’t eat, which sounds like a bad idea to me. But so does going home, when we have this one shot at finding my granddad.
So I swallow my fear, say nothing about the cash flow situation, and shout, “San Francisco, baby!”
WE STOP AT the West Salt Lake City Flying J, a gas station, because a sign along the highway alerts us that there will not be another gas station for more than a hundred miles.
“How is that even possible?” I ask. “What if you live in between the two?”
“Might be that no one does live there,” Aisha says, and I realize, of course, that I still have an East Coast perspective. Out here, the empty spaces can be as big as Rhode Island. Bigger.
After we gas up and I use the restroom, I find Aisha standing by the soft-serve ice cream station. She points to the sign. Fifty cents a cone.
“On me,” I say, figuring we can afford a buck for ice cream. “This way, you can never say I was a cheap bastard.”
Aisha isn’t listening, though. She seems to be scanning the cavernous convenience store, and she looks — angry? Sometimes it’s hard to tell with her.
I pay for the ice cream and gas, and we are down to sixty-five dollars. I’m not sure why I’m not more worried about it. I’m just not.
We drive off, and on our right is the Great Salt Lake. It’s as big as an ocean, and the shore is crusty white. I don’t know much about salt lakes, or what makes one lake saltier than others, but it is cool to look at.
Aisha’s quiet, so I say, “Whatcha thinkin’ ’bout?”
She tightens her lips. “Forget about it.”
A pang in my stomach. What happened? Did I do something again? “No, tell me.”
She glances over at me, and I see in her eyes that she’s not mad. She’s sad. “Do you know the last time I saw a person who wasn’t white-skinned?”
I laugh, because that wasn’t what I expected her to say. But then I think back. Wyoming? No, definitely not. Here in Utah? I scan my brain. No. Not that I can remember.
“Jesus,” I say.
“I don’t think about that stuff a lot, but I was looking around the gas station and it was white folks for days, and then I realized — story of my life. Not that there’s anything wrong with white folks. It’s just, sometimes it’s nice to not feel like the only one.”
I think about what that would be like. To be on this trip and not see another white person for three states. I can’t imagine. Not that I somehow, like, identify with all white people and not with black people, but there’s something to be said for … likeness?
“Wow,” I say.
“I mean, Billings. What was my dad thinking? Why did he even take us out of Lincoln? Not like that was so great either. I mean, why couldn’t we live anywhere where there were other people like me? Why can’t I ever be around my people?” She taps the dashboard for emphasis.
“Aisha,” I say, reaching over for her hand. “I’m your people.”
She looks over at me and smiles. She takes my hand. “Yes. And no.”
Her hand feels warm, familiar. It hadn’t really occurred to me that our skin colors make us so different. I mean, I don’t really think like that. But maybe I should?
“That has to be really hard,” I say.
“Sometimes it is,” she says. “Sometimes not.”
We watch the world spin by as we speed west. My phone rings, and I see it’s my dad. I feel my body tighten. For several days now, I haven’t had to think about him. Should I pick up? I decide not to.
“Who was that?” Aisha asks.
“My dad,” I say.
She nods but doesn’t say anything. I’m glad. I don’t want to talk about it.
My phone rings again. It’s him again.
“Shit,” I say. The man is dying. I should answer it.
I take a deep breath and pick up.
“Hello,” I say, monotone.
“You left me,” a weak voice says.
I hear the alcohol in his voice. “You’re drunk,” I say, very clearly, my blood sizzling in my veins. I feel it in my feet, my knees, my skull. “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”
“A little.”
“I won’t talk to you when you’re drunk. And by the way, I didn’t leave you. Mom did. I was three. I didn’t do anything to you. You were a drunk. You did it to me.”
He is quiet for a moment. I listen closely, and I can hear the sound of sniffling.
“I mean now,” he says, sounding like a lost boy. “You left me now.”
I’m not used to this. My dad drunk dialing me, my dad sounding this vulnerable. The sizzle in my bloodstream simmers down a little, like someone threw water onto a hot frying pan.