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Griff didn’t make much conversation after that. We drove a long time in silence, until I realized we were heading the wrong way.
“I thought my dad lived in town,” I said.
“Got a house in town,” Griff said. “But he doesn’t live there. You’ll see.”
“Shouldn’t I know where I’m going?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t mean anything to you,” he said. “I’m taking you to your dad, and that’s what counts.”
“Right.” I looked out the window. The town had petered out. Now there were a few gray-sided houses that looked embarrassed to be interrupting the wilderness. The road was pocked and cracked, and my hand drifted to my leg. The skin on my right leg looked just like that, with red swapped for gray.
It had taken them hours to pick all the glass out of my skin. I had more scars on my shoulder, and on my neck and face. The scars on my face were deep and red, like claw marks. They made people stare.
I liked them. People who stared at my face, I could stare back at. People who stared at my limp, I couldn’t do anything about.
Eventually Griff started singing. He was so off-key and he mumbled so much that I couldn’t tell what he was singing, but he bobbed his head and tapped the wheel in time to something. He jammed a button and the heater came on, rattling and coughing, and the wheels scraped and bumped on the uneven road and something clattered and bounced in the backseat. And then we came around a bend and there was a bear in the road.
Griff pumped the brakes casually, slowing up without stopping, and the bear took off for the woods. We just kept sliding along the road.
“Look at him skeeedaddle,” Griff said, pulling out that syllable with a twangy accent, and I laughed. He gave me a grin and laughed with me, and then both of us were laughing with the gray-blue sky sliding over our heads and the forest growing thick and deep and wild around us. It was the first time I’d laughed since the accident, since Mom died, and it felt like coughing up burrs. It felt good, too, though I only realized that after.
“Skeeedaddle,” he said again, and as we started on the next few hundred miles we were friends.
