of iceberg lettuce into chunks and spooned tuna on top.
“Delicious,” Bethie said mildly. “Is there any bread?”
Sarah started to cry.
“What?” asked Bethie, even though she knew. Sarah just shook her head, pulled a tissue out of the box near the sink, and wiped her eyes. Bethie ate her lemon-juice-doused tuna and every bit of lettuce on her plate. When she pulled a package of Gitanes out of her leather pocketbook, Sarah set out an ashtray, and when Bethie went to the bedroom, she could tell that her sheets had been freshly washed and ironed. So there’s that, she thought, rolling onto her side as the mattress creaked a protest. She’d get tears, and criticism, and probably nothing more than dry tuna and lettuce to eat. Sarah would never say I love you. She would let Bethie know what a disappointment she’d become in a hundred different ways . . . but there would be fresh sheets and pillowcases on her bed. A dentist appointment, a hairdresser appointment, and a new dress, in a size larger than Sarah would ever wear, hanging in her closet in time for Barbara’s wedding on Saturday morning.
It had been a long road back home. After she’d stolen her boss’s money, she’d bought a bus ticket to San Francisco, but she’d ended up in New Mexico. There’d been a guy on the bus who’d gotten aboard in Chicago and had taken the seat next to Bethie. For the first hundred miles she’d ignored him, shaking her head in refusal when he offered his flask, pretending to sleep while he read a Raymond Chandler paperback. At some point she’d dozed off, and when she’d woken up, she’d been humming “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Hey, you’re good,” the guy had said.
“I was at the Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan sang it live.” The dream was returning to Bethie in snatches, the way she’d seen slivers of the glittering ocean when they’d driven into Rhode Island. “In Newport. With Joan Baez.”
“Well, aren’t you a lucky duck.” The guy had introduced himself as Drew van Leer, and said he was meeting some friends in New Mexico, and that they were going to put together a band and that, as it happened, they were looking for a singer. He spent five hundred miles convincing her, and, finally, she got off the bus with him in Albuquerque, which was flat and beige, arid and empty. Bethie felt like she’d landed on the moon.
Drew lived in Santa Fe, and while they waited for the rest of the band, Bethie got a job cleaning up in a fancy Japanese-style bathhouse, and she slept in Drew’s parents’ guest room. Two weeks later, when the drummer still hadn’t turned up, two of the other cleaning ladies proposed a camping trip in the high desert of Taos, Bethie packed Jo’s backpack and tagged along . . . and instead of going back for her scheduled shift on Wednesday, she stayed in Taos, sharing a rented room with a girl she’d met on the camping trip, washing dishes and waiting tables in a diner that sold pupusas and chiles rellenos. Three weeks later when a group of college students came through en route to Vegas, Bethie joined them and moved along.
In Las Vegas Bethie sang sometimes, in bars, with bands, or in parks, with a hat out for money, and when she decided she’d had enough of the heat, she followed a guy to Portland, Oregon. She sang, and he played the violin, and they put together a set of Pete Seeger songs that they performed in Pioneer Courthouse Square. She cleaned houses and hotel rooms. She waited tables. She did the low-pay, low-status jobs that a young woman with no college degree and no fixed address could do. She did acid and mushrooms, smoked pot and hash, but only when she felt safe, usually when she was alone, and never so much that she’d have to worry about losing control. She earned money and sometimes, when she was feeling especially low or especially angry, she stole it. There were always men around, some of them mean and some of them gullible, men who’d fall asleep after the fucking was done, with their wallets on the nightstand, or in the pocket of their pants, discarded on the floor.
After Portland was Seattle. After Seattle were Barcelona and Paris. Sometimes, in spite of her best efforts, Bethie would catch sight of her reflection, in a bus window or a bathroom,