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I thought for a moment. “Illinois.”
“Hey! Me, too. Where in Illinois?”
I glanced at Elro, but he was off in the trees, his face twisted as far away from me and the man as it could get. “Emerson,” I said. It’s a town not far from Katydid.
“Oh, I know Emerson. A pretty town. We ate at a restaurant there once. What was the name of that place, honey?” He tapped the shoulder of the woman with him. She gave him a bored smile that told him to go away. “Oh, you know,” he said to me. “The famous place. Everybody knows it.”
I hadn’t been in Emerson in three years, and I’d never eaten there.
“You know, the big one, with the porch. It’s got a little statue of a nigger jockey out front.” He was getting excited. “You know.”
“Ahhh.” Nothing came. I was too tired to lie. I glanced again at Elro, looking for help, and the man saw something in my face. His eyes tightened with suspicion.
“The Rose Bush,” said the woman. She had delicate, pointy features.
“Yeah, the Rose Bush,” he said, relaxing again.
“Oh, of course, the Rose Bush,” I said.
The driver flicked on his microphone. “Hold onto your hats,” he announced. “Here’s Suicide Hill.” At the top of a small bluff, the duck wavered for a second, and then dipped and streaked downhill. Children screamed. The duck plunged jarringly along the steep trail. We were all pushed against the backs of our seats.
“Jesus!” said the man in front, grabbing the woman. He spun back around, and I hoped that would be the end of it.
On level ground, we passed some rock formations—cliffs that jutted out to form craggy profiles. “Some people see Abe Lincoln over there,” said the driver.
“I see him, I see him,” squealed a little girl behind me.
The man in front turned to us again. His beaver teeth gnawed at the air. “You two married?” he asked.
I glanced down at my ringless left hand, in full view on my knee. “No.”
“Oh, just up for the day? The Dells is a pretty long way to come on a date, isn’t it?”
Was this the way it was going to be? Endless questions that produced endless lies that curved and twisted and cut back, forming a maze as jumbled as the piles of rocks all around? It seemed so hopeless. Everyone knew—they just looked at us and knew. And Elro wasn’t any help. He was still thrashing his thighs, refusing to talk. Why was it up to me?
“We’re part of a church group that left early this morning and came on a bus,” I said. “We sang hymns all the way up.”
“Oh.” He was quiet for a second. I was exhausted. The lie had taken all my strength.
“What church?” he asked.
“Methodist.”
“Really? That’s our church. Hear that, honey?” The woman nodded her head slowly. Her tiny lips were locked in a perfect straight line. “Who’s the minister there?” the man asked. “Maybe we know him.”
“Jeremiah P. Calhoun.”
“Calhoun, Calhoun.” He scrunched his face to show he was thinking hard. “Don’t really know him, I guess. Calhoun. That’s funny. It sounds like a Catholic name.”
“Oh, he’s completely Methodist.”
“Well, I guess he has to be.”
“Yes.” How could I stop him? What did he want? I felt too tired for this. I couldn’t go on. Better to confess it up, tell him everything. Maybe behind those shiny front teeth there’d be some compassion. Suddenly, from deep inside my weariness, a thought popped up. “Are you two here on a honeymoon?” I asked, smiling.
He tipped his head and pretended to blush. “Hear that?” he said to the woman. “She thinks we’re on our honeymoon.” Again he shifted in his seat, turning around so he almost faced me. “We’ve been married for four years,” he said. “Actually, we’re here as a kind of reward—one I’m giving myself for some work I did in Chicago a few weeks ago. I spent four days there. Can you guess what I was doing?”
“No.”
