She smacks the dashboard and laughs. “You better believe it. All the better to haul butt in.”
“Haul butt?”
“You want me to say ass? I don’t want to affect your tender sensibilities.”
Tender sensibilities? I almost laugh, but I can’t quite do it. “Is it new?”
“Yep. Your mom see you off?” she asks.
“She cried.” My finger runs along the edge of where the window meets the door and stops. “I felt awful when she cried.”
I dare to look up into her eyes. They are light amber brown like my dad’s. They tilt at the ends, by her temples, slanting up, just the tiniest of bits. They soften a little as I stare into them. Since I don’t know my biological father, Grandma Betty is the only grandparent I have. My mom’s parents died when she was a teenager. She actually lived here with Betty and her husband, Ben, and my dad, while she finished up high school. Betty was amazing, just taking her in like that, kind of like how she’s taken me in.
Betty nods and turns on the car. “She would. It’s hard on her, letting you go.”
“Then she probably shouldn’t have gotten rid of me.”
“That’s what you think she’s doing?”
I shrug and put my hands back in my lap.
“She’s just trying to keep you . . .”
“What? Sane?” I laugh but it’s hard and bitter and it doesn’t sound like something that should come out of me. It sort of echoes in my chest. “She’s shoving me off to the land of zero population growth to keep me sane?”
“Little bitter there, sweetheart?”
“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry.”
Betty smiles. “Bitter is better than nothing. From what your mom says you’ve been awful depressed, nothing like your normal stubborn, save-the-world self.”
“He died, Betty.”
“I know, sweetie. But he would want us to keep living. God, that’s a cliché, but it’s true.”
Betty’s pretty decent as far as grandmothers go. She used to head up a life insurance company, but then my grandfather died and she retired. She didn’t have anything to do other than play golf or go fishing, so she decided to start some new ventures.
“I’m going to improve myself and then the community,” she told my dad. So she started running, and trained until she could compete in the Boston Marathon at the age of sixty-five. That goal achieved, she got a black belt. Then, she decided to become an EMT. So that’s what she does now. She’s the head EMT for Downeast Ambulance in Bedford, Maine. She doesn’t let them pay her, though.
“I have retirement money. I want them to give it to the young guys with families,” she explained to my dad back when she first started riding ambulances. “It’s only fair.”
Grandma Betty is big on fair.
“I’m not sure how fair it is you being stuck with an old coot like me,” she says as we drive down Route 1A toward Bedford.
I shrug because I don’t want to talk about it.
Grandma Betty notices. “The leaves are beautiful, aren’t they?”
That’s her way of letting me not talk about it.
“They sure are,” I say. We drive past all the trees turning colors. It is a last stand, I know. Soon they’ll be naked and dead looking. They’re beautiful, but they’re barely hanging on to the branches. They’ll plunge off soon. Lots already have. They’ll rot on the ground, get raked up, burned, trampled on. It’s not easy being a leaf in New England.
I shiver again.
“You know we’re all just worried about you?”
I shrug; it’s all I can bring myself to do.
Betty turns up the heat and it blasts in my face. She laughs. “You look like a model with the fan blowing your hair so you look suitably sexy.”
“I wish,” I mumble.
“You’ll adjust to the cold.”
“It’s just so different from Charleston, so cold and bleak . . .” I put my head in my hands and then realize how melodramatic that is. “I’m sorry. I’m so whiny.”
“You’re allowed to whine.”
“No, I’m not. I hate whining. I have nothing to whine about, especially not to you. It’s just the land in Maine isn’t half as lush or alive. It looks like the whole state is getting ready to be buried under snow for winter—a season of death. Even the grass looks likes it’s given up.”
She laughs and makes a creepy voice, “And the trees. They crowd in on you so that you can’t see off in the distance and you can’t see what is on the ground, hiding in the ferns or behind the tree trunks, in the bushes.”
My hand presses against the cold glass window. I make a hand print.
“It’s not a horror movie, Zara.” She smiles at me so I know she’s kind of sympathetic, but also teasing. This is how Betty is.
“I know.”
“Maine is cold compared to Charleston, though. You’re going to have to bundle up here.”
“Yep.”
Cheimaphobia.
“You still chanting phobias?”
“Did I say it out loud?”
“Yep.” Her hand leaves the steering wheel and she pats my leg for a second before adjusting the heat again. “I’ve got a theory about that.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I think you are one of those people who believe that if you can name something, then you can overcome it, conquer it, which is what you’re going to have to do about your dad dying. And I know that it hurts, Zara, but—”
“Betty!” There’s a tall guy standing on the side of the road, not moving, just staring.
Betty jerks the truck across the double yellow line and then puts us back where we belong.
“Crap!” she yells. “Idiot!”
She’s almost panting. My hands clutch my seat belt. She pulls in a couple big breaths and says, “Don’t start talking like me or your mom will kill me.”
I finally manage to speak. “You saw him?”
“Of course I did. Damn fool standing on the side of the road. It’s a good thing I saw him too, or else I’d have run him over.”
I stare at her, trying to figure it out. Then I look behind us, but we’ve gone around a curve, and even if the tall man was still there I wouldn’t be able to see him anymore.