“How’s Melinda?” Pete asks.
“She’s running great,” I say. “No problems yet.”
“Don’t say ‘yet.’ Why would you say ‘yet’?”
“Did I say that? What I meant was she’s running so smoothly that I have no worries at all.”
“Better,” he says. “Have you been checking her oil?”
“No, should I be?”
“Do it in the morning. Just to be safe. There’s extra oil under the driver’s seat if you need it. Fill her up with that, not any other kind.”
“Okay.”
He goes on for a while, asking me more questions about the bus and how it’s running, and even though he’s worried over nothing it’s sort of calming to answer his questions and to say yes to all of his requests.
“What are you doing?” I ask him once he seems less worried.
“I was looking through some things from the old days. Tour stuff. You’ve got me feeling nostalgic.”
“What kind of tour stuff?”
“Some snapshots. Jesus, I was a good-looking kid. I had almost forgotten. Also, business cards from every place we played a show. Sometimes we played at people’s houses. They didn’t have business cards so we’d have them write their names and addresses on scratch paper to go in the tour journal.”
“I want to see the pictures.”
“Yeah, there are some great ones. I found one of the night your mom and dad met.”
He says this and, for a moment, I feel like I’m sinking. There is a question I need to ask, but I don’t know how to ask it. An uneasy feeling that’s been getting stronger the longer Ma has stayed away.
“Have you heard from her?” I say.
“We talked a few nights ago. I had to keep reminding her that I don’t know French.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Paris, her classes, your trip.”
The sinking gives way to nausea.
“How she’s so proud of you for making your own decisions,” Pete continues. “Living your own life. You know, she was worried at first about you not going straight to college, but we talked about it together. I told her she raised the best kind of person: an independent thinker.”
Pete, I want to say. Something happened.
“Because, like me, you’re a traveler. But unlike me, you have a plan. And unlike your mother, you know what it is you really want. You aren’t going to squander your opportunities.”
“Uh-huh,” I mutter.
“It’s inspiring, you know that? Knowing you’re out there now and soon you’ll be country-hopping with Bev, spending time on those islands you’re crazy about. Your dad and I were talking last night about hitting the road in Melinda for a couple weeks after you go. Visiting the old haunts, seeing how they’ve changed. You make me want to stir up my life a little.”
I want to tell Pete everything, but how can I—especially after this? He never had his own kids, so somehow I’ve become the only child to all three of them, and no matter how great they are, even if they hold secret conferences to discuss my choices and praise me, it’s a lot of pressure to carry their hope and admiration and worry all on my own.
I want to ask Pete to tell me what’s next after all of this. But it’s a question that feels too huge, too impossible. So I let the conversation end, promise a million things about Melinda, and tell Uncle Pete good night.
It’s still warm outside but a breeze has picked up. I browse through song choices and settle on “Modern Girl,” the track Bev listened to on repeat for the entire summer before ninth grade. I choose this song because it’s connected to what I was trying to remember earlier, after Bev didn’t answer the question, and even though I would rather be thinking about anything else, I can’t stop thinking about what else she’s keeping from me.
I close my eyes as the guitar starts.
“Listen to the lyrics,” I remember Bev saying.
“They’re cool. I like the donut part.”
“They’re perfect.”
“Yeah, they’re good,” I said. “They’re simple.”
Bev started the song over again.
“Listen,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve memorized it.”
She looked discouraged, and then I got the feeling that this was about more than how good the lyrics were. We were quiet. Carrie was singing, Hunger makes me a modern girl.
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
She turned up the volume. My whole life was like a picture of a sunny day.
In the other room, her mom and dad were watching TV. I could hear them laughing. There was a line between her eyebrows, her mouth curved down. The lines came again.
I tried to figure out what she meant.
“Has something changed?” I asked.
She didn’t answer me.
I spent the rest of the night trying to get her to tell me what it was, but she didn’t. She just played the song over and over as we talked about other things. I thought about what my mom told me in one of our many awkward conversations about Bev and me now that we were older, about how teenage girls can be complicated and mysterious creatures. My mother had never been so right about anything. Because here was Bev, sitting in the bedroom that was as familiar as my own, looking at me with the same eyes I’d been looking into since we were nine, trying to get me to understand something by just listening to a song. Maybe there was something important that she wanted me to know. But probably Ma was right. Probably all Bev was trying to tell me was that she was now older and therefore complicated and mysterious and so f**king attractive and troubled in the way that all teenagers are troubled.