back and Florin sat eyes closed next to her mother. I wondered if she was praying.
We neared the turnoff for the on-ramp where Wiley Stam was stationed with his shotgun, the orange glow of the tip of his cigarette in the dark. He threw it to the ground as we approached.
I lay down on the floor of the back seat.
“What’s this character doing out here like the goddamn Wild West?”
“Mom, slow down,” Florin said.
“These pigs,” Daisy said. “Think they own this town. Well, they don’t.” She bore toward Wiley, who stood pointing the gun at the car. Florin screamed and ducked and Wiley threw himself out of the way. We sailed under a banner that read: EXIT PEACHES AND ENTER HELL.
“Ride on, motherfuckers!” Daisy whooped out her window into the night.
“You almost killed him,” Florin said, breathless.
“Well, hon,” Daisy replied, “I believe that’s what men like him would call asking for it.”
Chapter 21
The road stretched out ahead. I was glad for the dark of Highway 99. I didn’t have to see Peaches slip from view, didn’t have to see what was beyond the highway, to the side of it. I didn’t want to know everything. I thought about how faith worked. I wondered, looking up at the endless black of starry sky, if God was someone I hadn’t begun to know, but could one day. If God was nothing like Vern. If God was something separate, something not religious at all. And while I imagined the car being swallowed into layers of other realms ending of course in hell, I let it go. While waves of fear tried to consume me, to tell me I couldn’t withstand this, I found myself smooth as stone. I was only a body moving through space. I let it go I let it go.
Daisy decided that to keep herself in forward motion we would have to listen to her affirmations CD on repeat the entire way. My legs are safe, they are on my body. My arms are safe, they are attached and able. My head is a mountain, unmovable, unshakable through any season. Just when it would almost lull me into sleep, the voice would get excited. No snow can defeat me! No wind, rain, or ice! Unshakable I am! It went on and on until I wondered if the voice would drive us all mad, cause Daisy to steer off the road and into a ditch to end it. That’s when I remembered one of my mother’s boyfriends, Boss, a name I was sure he had self-founded, but he claimed his mother chose it. He was one of the nicer ones, wasn’t curious about me, but was obsessed with my mother. He wrote her long letters in tiny crooked script, total mania. She would smoke a million cigarettes while she read them, exasperated by his love. It wasn’t ideal though, because my mother didn’t love him the right way. I heard her tell Cherry that she wanted to be attracted to him, but just couldn’t figure out how. Close your eyes, Cherry had instructed halfheartedly, but my mother said she didn’t have that kind of imagination. When she finally ended it with him, really ended it, he drove off the very highway we were on, the 99, into a ditch, and died, which is how I suppose I knew such a thing could happen.
He killed himself over me, my mother pondered aloud for weeks. Over me. Almost like it made his love finally real. Almost as if he was the love of her life.
WE STOPPED HOURS later in Citrus Heights near the Sunrise Mall where the air was suddenly winter crisp. We piled on the sweaters and coats. I wriggled into the maternity jeans. The cold was nothing I could remember. It was about one in the morning. Daisy didn’t move.
“Go in and pee, girls,” she said.
“What about you?” said Florin, looking at her mother.
“I’ll stay here. I don’t have to go.”
“Mom,” she said.
“Go.”
In the mini-mart Florin bought huge bottles of water and I drank two in what felt like a single gulp, expensive water in a fine blue bottle with a snowcapped mountain on the label. I drank the water, I drank the water. I stood in a strange town I’d never been to and nothing happened.
The man working, old in a fleece sweatshirt, sort of smiled at us, looked at my belly. He handed us hot dogs and said, “Free for you.” I ate mine in three bites and felt