Fifth stop is when I call Margo just after I cross the Pennsylvania border to tell her I’m four or five hours away.
“Oh, girlie,” she says. “He’s already gone.”
And here I am, some dirty, stinky, hungry, pregnant girl, crying into a truck stop pay phone like a damn country song.
“I drove too slow,” I whisper, two dimes later when I can finally talk again.
“You know that old saying about procrastination on your part doesn’t equal an emergency on mine?” Margo says. “Your father made this an emergency, not you. He had three years to make things better. He had three years to come looking for you.”
She listens to me sob on the phone and there’s something about knowing she’s listening that makes my tears seem less futile. She’s my witness. She always has been.
She asks me to come for the funeral.
“I can’t do it,” I tell her. “I can’t come back. I don’t want to see Irene and the boy and I don’t want to see that baby. I don’t want to. He’s already dead. It’s not like he cares if I’m there.”
“Funerals are for the living,” she says. “To hold up the people who get left behind.”
“I don’t want to hold Irene up. She wouldn’t want me to.”
“I could hold you up,” Margo says.
I feel like I need her.
— Chapter 62 —
I haven’t thrown up since about five months in. But when I get off I-90 and I’m on back roads and everything is familiar, I feel it building. Starts low and gets bigger. I sweat. No matter how hard I grip the steering wheel, I can’t stop shaking, and finally, I have to pull off the road and puke in a drainage ditch. I don’t even feel better after. Just spent and sour. I swish my mouth out with some flat warm Sprite left in the bottom of a bottle that’s been in my car for who knows how long. It’s all I have left.
* * *
Margo’s Diner looks the same, only smaller than I remembered it. Everything about Little River seems smaller than it used to be.
Margo must have been watching out the window, because the second my car pulls into a spot up front, she runs out the door, waving her hands like I might miss her. She looks smaller too. Her hair is washed out and less bubbly than it used to be. Her face is pale and bony. The breakup with Gary was messy. She’s still wearing one of her itty-bitty skirts, but even her killer gams look like they need a bit more oomph.
She tries to open my car door before I’ve even unlocked it. I think about driving away. I’m scared about what she’ll say. What she’ll think of me. But her face in my window and her big, bright smile make me remember that she’s never ever said anything mean to me on purpose. No reason she’d start now.
“Girlie,” she says when I open the door, “you are a sight for— Oh my god!” She sees my belly and looks like you could just about knock her over with a chicken feather.
My legs wobble when I stand up. “This is Max,” I say, resting my hand on top of my bump.
She’s quiet for a sec, staring at me in the glow of the diner lights. I hold my breath.
She reaches out to touch my face like maybe I’m a hallucination. “Now, I know you don’t tell me everything, but how did you go all this time”—she arcs her hand outward from her own belly—“without saying a word about it?”
“I guess I didn’t want to worry you,” I say.
“Didn’t want to worry me? My well of worry for you goes all the way to the core of the Earth, girlie.”
She laughs, but I see how I’ve been a weight she’s carried and I think she sees that I understand that now.
She kisses my forehead.
“If I didn’t love you and this baby so much, I’d strangle you.” She pats my belly and says, “You just wait until Grandma Margo tells you all her stories about your mom.” Then she looks at me, eyes full of tears, like she’s hoping I won’t object to Max having her for a grandma.
I hug her the best I can with my belly in between us.
* * *
The diner is empty. It’s just before closing time. Margo feeds me a burger and fries and a milkshake for calcium and a big plate of spinach because she says I need extra iron. She drowns the spinach in butter because she knows it’s the only way I’ll get it down. We sit in a booth, since I’m way too huge to try and balance on a stool at the counter like we used to.
She stares at my belly a lot. I wonder if she’s trying to picture Max, all curled up and napping in there. Maybe sucking his thumb. Babies do that sometimes, before they’re even born. I try to picture him all the time. I wonder if he’ll be familiar when I get to meet him.