You Are Here(25)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

She pretended not to hear him.

All she’d ever wanted was a normal birthday, with a swimming pool or a magic show, a big-nosed clown twisting balloons into dogs, cupcakes with sugary frosting, and ice cream melting on plastic plates. But most years the big day was instead colored by gifts like maps and bug boxes, puzzles and history books, things she was told she’d come to appreciate someday, though as the years ticked by and the pile of unused presents in her closet multiplied, Emma began to seriously doubt that that day would ever come.

But now her seventeenth birthday was just four days away, and here she was hurtling toward North Carolina, carried south along I-270 by Peter Finnegan and his stolen blue convertible. And in a rare display of all those things that had so far eluded her in life—determination and persistence and dogged curiosity—she was secretly hoping to spend her birthday on her own terms, at the resting place of the person who’d once shared it with her.

They were well into Maryland when Emma took charge of the music, switching off the jazz station Peter had found and popping in a CD instead. After listening to the same song four times in a row, Peter leaned forward and jabbed at the stop button.

“Hey,” Emma said, reaching to turn it back on.

“How can you listen to the same thing over and over again?”

She shrugged. “I’ll probably listen to it a thousand times in a row, then never play it again.”

He shook his head. “You’re nuts.”

“Nuts is a relative term in my family.”

Peter turned off the expressway, and the road quickly tapered off into a single lane, which wound through great swaths of farmland, the fields quartered off into neat slices of brown and green.

“Are we lost?” Emma asked, reaching for one of the many maps that wallpapered the back of the car. The dog was sitting squarely on top of the pile and looked greatly put out when forced to scoot over.

“We’re fine,” Peter said. “It’s just nice to get off the highway now and then.”

Emma frowned over the tangle of squiggles and lines on the map, trying to locate their whereabouts amid an alphabet soup of stars and dots and unfamiliar names. “How do you know where you’re going?”

“I just do,” Peter said, obviously pleased with himself as they left behind the billboards and gas stations for a series of small towns with white churches and general stores and vegetable stands.

“Okay then, Columbus,” Emma said, tossing the map behind her again.

“Columbus got lost, actually,” Peter said. “So not the best example.”

“And you think I’m nuts.”

“You are,” he told her. “But it’s not such a bad thing. Some of the most interesting people I know are a little bit nuts.”

“Like my family?”

Peter rubbed a hand over his jaw and gave a little laugh. “They’re not as strange as you think they are,” he said. “They’re interesting. There’s a difference.”

Emma shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Maybe you’re not looking hard enough,” he said. “Besides, have you ever thought maybe you’re just as interesting as they are?”

“I’m not,” she told him flatly.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I think maybe it’s too soon to tell.”

They stopped for lunch at a seafood stand with checkered tablecloths and menus shaped like giant lobster claws. They were far enough from the coast, but the air still smelled salty, and the other customers were all laughing over their lunches. Emma leaned forward with her elbows on the table and smiled.

“What?” Peter said, looking at her suspiciously. She didn’t blame him. Only this morning she’d been about ready to leave him in Gettysburg, but now the heat of the day had burned off and the dust had drifted away. In the past twenty-four hours the car had broken down and she’d somehow managed to pick up a stowaway dog and an unlikely partner in crime. But here they were, sitting in Maryland with the sun on their faces and the smell of seafood thick in the air; they’d made it this far, and suddenly that was all that seemed to matter.

“Nothing,” Emma said, still grinning from behind her menu.

After they ordered, they watched the other customers cracking the tough shells of the lobsters and letting the juice run down their bare arms as they ate. Peter pulled a map from his back pocket and spread it out on the table between them, smoothing the creases along the wooden slats.

“So, I found a map of the town where Nate lives,” he said. “The one where you were born. And where I assume we’re headed.”

“Where?”

He looked up at her blankly. “In North Carolina.”

“No, I mean where’d you manage to find a map of it?”

“Oh,” he said. “In the trunk. Anyway, did you know there are three different cemeteries there?”

Emma shook her head.

“Do you know which one it is?”

She bit her lip, but said nothing. She simply hadn’t thought that far ahead yet.

“That’s okay, I’m sure Nate will know,” he said. Emma must have looked stricken at this—the thought of having to explain herself to her family—because Peter reached over and quickly spun the map so it was facing her. “Or you can just close your eyes and point, and we’ll go to whichever’s closest.”

She smiled at him gratefully, clapped a hand over her eyes, and jabbed a finger at the map. When she looked up again, Peter was marking the spot with a pen, humming over the grids in cheerful concentration.

“Okay, then,” he said after a moment. “At least we know where we’re headed now.”

The dog began to squirm beneath the table, eyeing a little boy who was picking at a piece of corn bread. There was a small grocery store beside the restaurant, and Peter walked over to see whether they carried dog food. He came back a few minutes later carrying a small bag of kibble, which he poured onto a paper plate and set on the ground. But the dog only sniffed at it, then went back to eyeing the bread, and when their corn bread came, Emma passed her portion underneath the table.

“He’s gotten spoiled,” Peter said, kicking at the bag of dog food. “Or else he has no clue what it is.”

Emma licked the crumbs from her hand. “Maybe he’s just got good taste. We’ll try again at Annie’s house.”

“Will she be okay with us bringing him?”