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“That’s a shame,” he said, and he finally wrapped his arms all the way around her, which made her heart speed up at the same time it calmed her down.
She’d got him back from wherever he’d gone.
“I’m never very good,” he said.
“I know, Kalden.”
She let herself pet his head, but only one time. Then she kissed his cheek. “You’ll learn.”
Chapter 17
“I love this song!” Rosemary leaned close behind his headrest and breathed vodka fumes into his ear. “Turn it up.”
“No.”
“Pleeease?”
“Mom’s asleep.”
“She’s snoring. She’ll never know. Turn it up.”
He thumbed the button on the steering wheel twice. Rosemary started singing along to a hair band anthem of the 1990s as the car shot down the back roads of southern Wisconsin in the dark.
Kal wondered if days like this were why his uncle Dorjee had started muttering to himself.
It hadn’t sounded this terrible in theory. Last night, he’d even started to think it could be kind of fun, in a way. For one thing, he’d get to spend time with Rosemary—a prospect that took on additional shine when she’d dropped to her knees in the shower, and he’d returned serve back in bed and kept her at the edge of coming until she finally relented and admitted his penis was perfectly adequate, perhaps more than adequate, although she slightly preferred his tongue.
She made him laugh.
When she wasn’t driving him nuts singing at the top of her lungs with the windows rolled down.
“Put that up,” he said. “It’s too cold.”
“It’s not cold. Everest is cold. This is summer.”
“It won’t be summer for a couple months.”
“In England, this passes for summer. We all strip off our jumpers and lay about in the grass to soak up the sun.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m perfectly aware of that, thank you. Ooh, this is a good song, too.
Turn it up.”
“I already turned it up.”
“Turn it up again.”
Kal gave her one measly click of the volume button and then tuned out her protests. The navigation system said their hotel was two miles away. He’d been awake since his mom started texting at five a.m., and now it was midnight and his lower back hurt and he wanted out of the car and away from people talking.
They’d talked all day, Rosemary and his mom in the backseat, Kal up front like a chauffeur. He’d worried about it at first, thinking he might need to direct the conversation, walk them through the tricky parts, but despite Rosemary’s interviewing his mom being the entire point of this journey, they mostly talked about nothing—the itinerary, the weather, the scenery, whether they ought to stop at various attractions along the way.
No. That was Kal’s opinion every time, but they overruled him repeatedly, forcing him to pull into rest areas to stretch their legs, at gas stations for snacks, at a scenic overlook in Pennsylvania where they snapped cellphone pictures of the landscape so they could paste them in an album someday, souvenirs from Yangchen and Rosemary’s Awesome Vacation.
They’d turned a fourteen-hour drive into sixteen, then capped it off with an endless late dinner at Applebee’s, where both women got lit on signature cocktails.
At least he had a chance to drive the Outback. His mother—who didn’t drive—had bought this Subaru brand-new off a lot, decked out with the most expensive trim package, then parked it in her cousin’s garage in Jersey, only letting it out for a constitutional three or four times a year.
