Sunday
The turquoise VW bus arrives in front of my house at 7:00 A.M. The rumble of its engine dies down, the front door slams shut, and my mom’s brother shuffles into the kitchen. He’s smiling but bleary-eyed, wearing his usual worn Rolling Stones T-shirt and a bandanna tied around his messy hair.
“Look,” he says, “I dressed for the occasion.”
“Uncle Pete,” I say, “you dress like this every day.”
“True.” He nods solemnly. Then he takes the coffee mug from my hand, sips, places it back in my grasp.
“Any more where that came from?”
I get up and pour coffee into our biggest mug. My uncle sleeps less than anyone I’ve ever met. Whenever someone asks him what keeps him up at night, he leans in close, looks the person in the eye, and says, Just can’t get the music out of my mind.
When I asked Pete if I could take the bus on a road trip, I had no idea what he would say. It’s hard for strangers to fully grasp the connection he has with this vehicle. Pete doesn’t have a wife, but if you knew him only casually, you would assume he did. When someone asks him, Hey, Pete, what did you do this weekend? He’ll say, Melinda and I went to the ocean. Or, Melinda felt like traveling, so I just let her take me wherever she wanted to go. By the time he says something like, Melinda wasn’t feeling so hot, so we laid low and took her for a tune-up, it dawns on most people that Melinda is the bus, and that my uncle Pete is the kind of person who spends a lot of time alone.
I think if I had asked to borrow Melinda to move a piece of furniture, or to go to the grocery store, or for any other brief and practical reason, Pete would have turned me down. But this was about music, and as soon as I used the word tour, Pete’s glassy eyes opened wider and he smiled a nostalgic, faraway smile. I knew then that he would say yes, and for the rest of the night, he and Dad listened to records and talked about the years they spent traveling around the country, living out of the bus, and playing small town shows. This was before Ma showed up at a South of Market bar for a surprise visit to her brother and fell in love with his bandmate who she’d heard about for years but never before met. The story is that Pete was so moved by the love between his sister and his best friend that when my dad told him they were going to buy a house and have a kid, Pete never said another word about the open life they were supposed to have, nothing about the music or the adventure. Instead, he wrote a song for my parents’ wedding that became a hit on many college radio stations and made him briefly famous among a small circle of tenderhearted young fans.
Flash forward twenty years and Dad and Pete are walking me out to Melinda. I throw my duffel bag into the back and take my seat behind the wheel. Pete reminds me of how everything works—unnecessary, considering that he’s been giving me weekly VW driving lessons for the past couple months—and then closes me in. Through the open window, Dad slips me a wad of cash even though I’ve been saving up for this, and then, ceremoniously, he hands me a credit card.
“Are you kidding?” I ask.
Dad and Pete insisted on living like hippies all through the eighties. Even now, Dad hates to charge anything.
“Your mom wants you to have it,” he explains.
This makes more sense. Ma’s the worrier in the family. Of course she would take a break from studying the subjunctive to make sure I was ready for unplanned expenses.
I look out the window at Dad and Pete, standing happily side by side, and I turn the ignition. Dad whoops. Pete flashes a peace sign.
“See you in a week,” I say, and I pull away from the curb.
My first stop is the Sunset. I turn onto Irving Street and see Bev leaning out of her upstairs window.
“Hold on,” she says when I slip out of the driver’s seat.
She leaves the window. I take a couple steps back and lean against the bus to wait for her, and soon she reappears with a blue pinhole camera. A group of hipsters in skinny jeans and sunglasses makes its way toward me. Their dog strains against its leash, starts sniffing at my Nikes.
A guy with a scruffy beard glances at Bev in the window. “Uh-oh,” he says to the dog. “You’re messing with the photo shoot.”
I pat the dog’s wide, white head and tell him it’s cool.
“This is perfect,” Bev shouts down. “Colby, can you hold the dog’s leash? Like, as if it’s ours?”
The girl holding the leash laughs. I can’t see her eyes from behind the lenses of her sunglasses. She hands me the loop to grab onto.
“Her name’s Daisy,” she says, and the group moves a few steps down, out of the frame of the photograph.
“I thought you were capturing the moment,” I shout up to Bev. “Like, the moment as it really is.”
Daisy gazes at me with mournful eyes, then turns to her owners and whines.
Bev calls down to me to move a little to the left, to walk a few steps, to pet the dog, to lean against the bus. When she tells me to open to the passenger-side door and get in again, I lock the door instead and return Daisy to her group. They rub her back and scratch behind her ears and tell her how proud they are of her, and then they continue walking up the street.
The downstairs door swings open and Bev’s mom steps out with her bags.
“Hey, Mary,” I say.
“Hi, Colby,” she says. “Hello, Melinda.”
I laugh. “I’ll tell Uncle Pete you said that. He’ll love it.”
She puts Bev’s bags on the floor of the backseat and returns inside for the guitar, but Bev’s walking down the stairs, saying, “Mom, just don’t worry about it, I got it,” in this tense, annoyed way.