Her brown hair thrashes around in her face, and bread plate-sized sunglasses hide most of her face.
“Do you want me to roll up the windows?” I ask.
“No,” she yells, “I love it like this.”
We drive four-hundred miles, speakers blasting louder than the seventy-five, sometimes ninety mile an hour air. Everything from rock to country, a little bit of rhythm and blues, soul. She never misses a beat, nodding her head, hands drumming on the dashboard. Most girls wouldn’t let go like she does, and if they did, they’d look stupid, but she doesn’t. She looks like she was meant to drive through the country and listen to music, like she’d been doing it her whole life.
At exit sixty-eight, a town called Rhondon, we drive ten miles from the freeway, down a two-laner. We pass tractors as big and slow as barns. They churn their way up the sides of the road, and a farmer sits way up top. I downshift and press the pedal to the floor, speeding past the monsters.
She gives me a look, hard to know what her expression says through the glasses. Was I not supposed to pass the tractor? I shrug at her, turn up the music.
Sheep stand in the hillside, fluffy as little clouds and ready for a sheering.
She has long tan fingers, and when she pats my thigh and leans forward in her seat, I know that we’re almost there.
“It’s just ahead,” she says, and squeals with delight.
The mailbox is a mallard, with wings that rotate as a windmill. She flips up her sunglasses as I pull into the driveway, gravel crunches under the tires. We unload her stuff. The entire trunk is full, but she helps, lifts the heavy stuff as well as I can, and she doesn’t quit until all of it’s unpacked.
“We can take it upstairs later,” she says. “I want to show you something. She winks at me. She has a tremendously sexy wink.
She leads me up stained carpeted stairs into her childhood bed. Afterwards, I try to think about it, whether she’ll be faithful to me. She lies supine, staring off as if looking through the ceiling at something flying above the house.
“Why do you need to be so serious?”
“Because this is serious,” she says. Her face is tan and beautiful in the dark room. The shades are drawn and a blueness sits on her face, her collar bone.
“We have our calling cards,” I say. In truth, we both have about sixty calling cards that we purchased at the first five gas stations we passed on the way up here.
We hug, a long embrace that stretches slowly apart like taffy, ending in the last licks of our finger tips, bent and stiff, a slow, tight release. As I leave, I can only see the foyer with winter boots lined up and out of use; the front porch, green paint like the fresh lawn; the gravel driveway; the inside of my car; the headlights; and the double yellow line winding all of the way back to state S-17.