as I started to leave.
I stopped in the doorway.
He shrugged. “Never mind.”
By the time I got out into the hall, Cole was already laid back on the bed, papers spread under him and over him and around him, surrounded by everything that Beck had left behind. He could have so easily looked lost, surrounded by all those memories and words, but instead, he looked buoyed, buffered by the pain that had come before him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
• ISABEL •
There was something about driving with my parents that always made me a worse driver. No matter how much time I’d spent with my hands gripped on a steering wheel, put a parental unit in the passenger seat and instantly I started braking too hard and turning too soon and hitting the wipers when I reached for the radio knob. And though I’d never been one to talk to people who couldn’t hear me (Sam Roth was turning out to be the notable exception to that), with a parent in the car, suddenly I found myself snarling at other drivers’ poor vanity plate choices or grousing about their slowness or commenting on their signal light coming on a full two miles before they planned to turn off.
Which was why, when my headlights illuminated the truck-thing half-pulled off the road, its nose pointing into the ditch, I said, “Oh, stellar parking job there.”
My mother, who’d become drowsy and benevolent from the wine and the hour, came to sudden attention. “Isabel, pull in behind them. They might need help.”
I just wanted to get home so that I could call Sam or Cole and find out what was going on with Grace. We were two miles from the house; this felt a little unfair on the part of the universe. In the far-off edge of my headlights, the stopped vehicle looked a little disreputable. “Mom, you’re the one who said to never stop in case I get raped or picked up by a Democrat.”
Mom shook her head and pulled a compact out of her purse. “I never said that. That sounds like your father.” She flipped down the visor to look at herself in the small, lighted mirror. “I would’ve said Libertarian.”
I slowed to a crawl. The truck — it was turning out to be a truck with one of those tall caps over the bed, the kind that you probably have to show ID proving you’re over fifty to buy — looked like it probably belonged to a drunk who’d stopped to puke.
“What would we do, anyway? We can’t … change a tire.” I struggled to think of what would make someone pull over, other than puking.
“There’s a cop,” Mom said. Sure enough, I saw that a cop car was parked by the side of the road as well; its lights had been blocked by the hulking truck. She added casually, “They might need medical assistance.”
Mom lived in hope of someone needing medical assistance. She was always very eager for someone to get hurt on the playground when I was little. She eyed line cooks at fast-food restaurants, waiting for a kitchen disaster to strike. In California, she used to stop at accidents all the time. As a superhero, her line was: “DOES ANYONE NEED A DOCTOR? I AM A DOCTOR!” My father told me once that I needed to go easy on her; she’d had a hard time getting her degree because of family issues, and she just liked the novelty of being able to tell people she was a doctor. Okay, fine, self-actualize yourself, but really, I thought she’d gotten over it.
Sighing, I pulled in behind the truck. I did a better job than him of getting my vehicle off the road, but that wasn’t saying much. My mother deftly leaped from the SUV, and I followed her more slowly. There were three stickers on the back of the truck: GO ARMY, HANG UP AND DRIVE, and, inexplicably, I’D RATHER BE IN MINNESOTA.
On the other side of the truck, a cop was talking to a red-haired man who was wearing a white T-shirt and suspenders because he had a belly and no ass. More interestingly, I could see a handgun sitting on the driver’s seat through the open door of the truck.
“Dr. Culpeper,” said the officer warmly.
My mother adopted her caramel voice — the one that oozed richly about you so slowly you didn’t realize you were possibly being suffocated. “Officer Heifort. I just stopped to see if you needed me.”
“Well, that’s decent of