“So.” Her fingers drum on the steering wheel. “Seen anything good lately?”
“Not really.” I watch thirty-year-old sitcoms because sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps my mom from breaking down in tears. I haven’t seen anything new in months. “You?”
“That movie about a bunch of farmers in a murder cult. Did you see it?”
“No.”
“It was terrible. Like, really bad.” She laughs, and for a second the fog lifts and I feel like myself again. “Not even, like, so bad it’s good. Just, straight up, sucks that I wasted my money on a movie ticket, bad, bad, bad.”
She goes for another laugh, but it comes out strained. I’m not sure what to say.
“Does your mom like movies?” she asks, after a while.
“No.”
“Does your uncle?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Do you have any plans this weekend?”
“No.” I want to cry. I want to say something true. I can’t seem to do either. “Just work.”
She gives me a look and doesn’t try again.
The rain starts up as we cross back through Tonopah. Big fat drops, beating down on the windshield like drumbeats. Veer smacks the windshield wipers awake. We haven’t said a word to each other in forty-five minutes.
Veer brakes too hard at the red light. My seat belt bites in my shoulder.
“Motherfucker,” she spits.
She slaps the wheel with the butt of her palm, cutting through the background noise of rain and rubber on asphalt like a gunshot.
“So, what did I do to piss you off?” Rage simmers just below her words.
“Nothing.” She’s read me all wrong. I’m not pissed off, I’m knotted up. I’m a clogged drain, I’m a dead end.
“Bullshit. You’ve been weird ever since you picked me up. Do you have a problem with me? Is my shit, I don’t know, too shitty for you?”
“No.” I try to find the right words. They all seem to come to me at the wrong angles. “I had a…” A conversation I didn’t want. A debt I don’t need. One more person trying to convince me my mom isn’t worth caring about. “I had a weird encounter. With a friend of my uncle’s.”
“Well, I had a weird fucking encounter too. With my goddamn brother. Ever consider that?” She grabs my wrist and pulls it toward her, shaking me like a dog shakes a small animal it’s caught. “And by the way, I didn’t have to. Nobody’s forcing me to see him, it’s not like I owe him a visit. I don’t owe him shit.”
My pulse flutters against her grip. Debts are supposed to be repaid, aren’t they?
“Right, Ellis?”
“Right,” I mumble.
The light turns green. Cars jerk forward.
We rumble past a teenage girl perched lonesome on the curb of an empty driveway, swallowed up by a sweatshirt with its hood up. I remember Veer folded onto the prison curb, her sharpest parts unsheathed.
“Tell me,” I say.
A long second, her nails nipping my wrist. I feel her weigh her options: Throw my hand away. Snap my bones in two. Open the car door and hurl me into the roiling ocean of pavement at sixty miles per hour.
Her shoulders slump. She relaxes her grip on me, sits back, eases off the gas.
