I scrolled through it and saw that most of the playlists had very generic titles—“Mix #1,” “Mix #2.” I scrolled up to the top, figuring I would just have to look at them and try and guess what kind of music went with his oddly named bands, when I saw a mix titled “Had to be there … ” Figuring the smiley face was a good sign, I selected it and put the iPod back in the cradle. The first song that started playing was pretty and slow, with lyrics about a love-struck Romeo.
“What mix is that?” Roger asked sharply, and I turned to him, surprised.
“The smiley-face one,” I said. “I thought—”
“Something else,” he said, the edge still in his voice. I noticed his hands were clenching the wheel, and he no longer seemed tired at all.
“Sure,” I murmured. I hit pause, and the song stopped playing, leaving silence in the car. As I scrolled through the other mixes, the clicking of the trackball suddenly seemed very loud. I found one called “Mix #4,” hoped that was safe, and selected it. Some very upbeat horns started playing, and Roger’s hands unclenched. “Better?”
“Much,” he said. “Sorry. I should have deleted that one.”
I figured it had something to do with Hadley—which I now realized was probably part of the title—but I wasn’t about to ask. So I just nodded.
“It was a mix she made me,” he said after a moment. “Hadley.” Her name floated between us in the car for a moment, and I couldn’t help but notice that he’d pronounced her name differently, like her name, and only her name, contained all the good letters. “My ex,” he added unnecessarily. But maybe it was for his own benefit, since he seemed to be having trouble remembering that part.
“Ah,” I murmured, not sure what else to say. Amy! probably would have known exactly what questions to ask. She would have been sympathetic and kind, inviting Roger to talk about his feelings without reservation. She probably would not have sat silently next to him, looking out the window, afraid to ask him anything in case he returned the favor.
“Utah,” Roger said, pointing out the window at the sign. We slowed, and I leaned over and looked at it. WELCOME TO UTAH! it read. And then in smaller letters underneath that, MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME ZONE.
As we drove past it, I thought about the imaginary line we’d just crossed, and how even though I was two states out of California, nothing felt any different. Not that I’d really been expecting it to.
“So!” said Roger, turning to look at me. “You’re falling down on your job here. I need to be kept awake. Ask me questions. Recite poetry. Whatever you’ve got.”
“Is it a person?” I asked, yawning, six rounds of Twenty Questions later.
“Yes,” Roger said. “Nineteen. Stay with me, Curry!”
I smiled at that, and it happened automatically, surprising me enough that I stopped immediately. “Are they alive?” I asked.
“No. Eighteen.”
“Are they male?”
“Yes. Seventeen.”
I looked at Roger, who no longer seemed in danger of falling asleep at the wheel. I had learned the hard way that history majors had a distinct advantage when playing games like Twenty Questions. But I was beginning to get a sense of the kind of answer he was continually choosing. “Is he an explorer?”
Roger glanced over at me, one eyebrow raised, looking maybe a little impressed. “Yes. Sixteen.”
He’d already chosen Drake, Livingstone, and Sir Edmund Hillary. I took a guess and hoped it was right, as I wasn’t sure how many more explorers I knew. “Is it Vasco da Gama?”
He sighed, but seemed happy. “Got it in five,” he said. “Well done. Your turn.”
“What’s with the explorers?” I asked, figuring that four in a row had to be something of a theme, not just a strategy to keep beating me.
Roger shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. He ran his hand through his hair, and it stood up in little tufts all over his head. I had an impulse to reach over and smooth it down. But it was an impulse I immediately squashed. “I’ve always been interested in them. Since I was a kid. I loved the idea that people could discover things. That you could be the person to see something first. Or see something that nobody else had been able to.”
“Is that why you’re a history major?”
He smiled without looking at me. “Probably. I started reading history like an instruction manual when I was a kid, trying to figure out what all these explorers did so that I could do it too. I used to be convinced that I was going to find something really important.”
“But everything’s been found by now,” I said. I turned to face him a little more, pulling out my seat belt to give it some slack and leaning back against my window.
“Well, technically,” he said, not seeming bothered by this. “But I think there are lots of things still to be discovered. You just have to be paying attention.” I pulled one knee up and rested my chin on it, thinking about this. “God, I’ve been talking a lot,” he said with a laugh. “Your turn. Tell me something about you.”
That was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do, now or ever. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t discovered anything.”
“Yet,” Roger said emphatically, and I felt myself smiling again. But I looked over at him, with his substitute math teacher glasses and hopeful expression, and my smile faded. He hadn’t learned yet that things didn’t work out just because you wanted them to.
“Right,” I said, reaching over and turning up the music, a song about a fake empire that, on the second listen, I’d found I really liked.
“But I’m serious,” he said. “Tell me something about you. What is your … biggest regret?”
I hadn’t been expecting that question, but I knew immediately what the answer was, and I closed my eyes against it. The morning in March, carrying my flip-flops, my feet covered in grass clippings. The one thing I really, really didn’t want to think about.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. “No idea.”
Yesterday, when you were young …
—The Weepies
MARCH 8—THREE MONTHS EARLIER
“So then what happened?” Julia asked breathlessly.
“Stop it,” I said, laughing into the phone. I was sitting on the front steps of the house, talking to her while my father mowed the lawn. My mother and I were always teasing him about the lawn. He tended to be kind of a slob with everything else, but about the lawn, he was beyond fastidious. It never looked like it needed mowing, mostly because he spent every Saturday morning doing just that. “There’s an art to it,” he always insisted. “I’d like to see you try!”