word for a mile, two miles. Then Audrey says, “I’m sorry, Caroline,” and Caroline says, “Screw it. Screw him. Are we going to listen to these tunes or what?”
They are just a few miles into Missouri when the first text comes, a two-note chime, and Caroline’s heart jumps to it like a trained animal.
But she defies the chime, her heart’s response to it. Eyes on the road, hands at ten and two. They’ve been listening to an old Radiohead CD—the RAV4 is pre-Bluetooth by, like, one year—each in her separate thoughts, and Caroline waits for the end of the song before she fishes up the phone from her tote bag, reads the message, places the phone in her lap and takes the wheel two-handed again. Now it begins.
The phone chimes and vibrates on her upper thigh, sending its hum, its message, deep. The times when he would text at night and she would hold it there, waiting, her heartbeat beneath it, in her belly, everywhere . . .
A full minute passes without a third text and she lifts the phone, and the car drifts and she corrects with a jerk. She holds the phone at the crown of the wheel, as if she’s going to text back, and Audrey, reaching, says, “Here, let me,” and takes the phone from her. “What do you want to say?”
The first yellow speech balloon reads: WTF, C? Where r u? The second reads: U don’t know what u think u know. In class, will call u in 1 hr.
Caroline tosses her hair and says, “Tell him, ‘You don’t know what I know. Don’t call me, I’m driving.’”
Audrey thumbs it in and sends the message and places the phone in her own lap, and Caroline eyes the phone there, her phone, in a lap not hers, before looking away.
She turns up the music and taps at the wheel and bobs her head to the beat, but it’s no use; it’s as if there’s a third person in the cab now, as if they’ve picked up a hitchhiker. They wait to see what he’ll say.
The phone chimes and vibrates on Audrey’s thigh. She reads aloud: “‘Please please be cool, C’—C as in the letter C,” Audrey says. “‘Gotta talk to you.’”
“Tell him, ‘Talk to Phil,’” Caroline says. “Tell him, ‘Ask Phil how he liked it this a.m.’”
Audrey looks over. “Liked what?”
“Just type it.”
She types and sends the message, and Caroline tells her what happened with Phil, and Audrey sits holding the phone. Silent for a long while.
“What did it feel like?” she says at last, and Caroline gives her a look.
“What do you think it felt like?”
“I mean,” Audrey says, “in that context. The fact that it was Phil.”
Caroline sputters her lips and turns back to the road. “The usual, Audrey. Nothing to write home about.”
The sun is going down; the swaying beads catch its light and throw prisms on the girls’ legs. Music pulses in the speakers.
“Phil,” Audrey says after a while, as if to herself. “I hope you washed your hand.”
And Caroline laughs then, deeply and truly, and the laugh releases the Georgia in her chest like walking into her memaw’s house, like the drug-strong smell of hot pecan pie, and she says in the voice of home, “Oh, Audrey, sometimes I just love you.”
And Audrey—who loves this voice, who has always loved this voice—says, “I know. It’s the same with me.”
They drive out of day into night, out of cotton country into wheat and then into corn, all such fields indistinguishable in the dead of winter, all brown and empty, increasingly drifted in dunes of snow. Off to their right somewhere the wide Mississippi slugs along through its turnings, back the way they’ve come, south as the girls drive north. The girls talking and talking until, in the midst of a lull, Audrey works her head into a pillow stuffed up against the passenger window and sleeps.
Caroline drives on, alone now and aware of the car around her—the road beneath it, the four small dashes of rubber that connect car to road—in a way she hadn’t been just a moment before, and soon enough she puts it together: that this awareness, this alertness, comes with the surrendering of the same thing in her passenger, and that this is an intimacy, this exchange, modern in its specifics and yet ancient to the species, old as blood: the deep, unthinking trust of children who slept in open caves, who sleep now in cars piloted by