At last, she left the house, closed the door behind her for the last time.
Outside, Barb stood against Frankie’s Mustang, with her arms crossed. In front of her was a FOR SALE sign stuck into the lawn. “Hey,” she said.
Frankie laughed out loud. “Who called you? Mom? Henry? I’m surrounded by snitches.”
“Uh-huh. You didn’t think I’d let you go in search of your life alone, did you?”
“You’re married. With stepkids. You don’t have to sweep in and fill my empty life with your own, you know.”
Barb rolled her eyes. “You’re my best friend, Frankie,” she said.
And that was it.
“Ethel wanted to come, but she’s pregnant again. On bed rest. She said to tell you she’s here in big, fat spirit.”
An ice-cream truck drove past, bells jingling. The neighborhood children wouldn’t be far behind. Frankie turned, tented her eyes; for a split second, she was ten years old again, running along behind her big brother, trying to keep up, both of them gilded in sunlight in her memory.
Frankie laughed and hugged Barb, then jumped in the driver’s seat and started the car. The music came on loudly: “Hooked on a Feeling.”
A few blocks later, Frankie eased her foot off the gas.
Her parents stood in front of the gate, arms around each other, hands in the air. How long had they been there, waiting to catch a glimpse of her as she left town? They’d said goodbye a dozen times and in a dozen ways in the last month.
Frankie waved and honked the horn in goodbye—to her parents, to Coronado, to her childhood, and to Finley. The Mustang rolled through town and onto the bridge, past the boats anchored in the harbor. Frankie saw the postcard beauty of Coronado Island in her rearview mirror.
With no destination in mind, Frankie and Barb drove north, listening to Creedence, Vanilla Fudge, Cream, Janis, the Beatles, the Animals, Dylan, the Doors.
The music of Vietnam.
The music of their generation.
At Dana Point, Frankie turned onto Highway 1 and stayed on the coast, with the endless blue Pacific to her left. In Long Beach there was an accident, so she turned onto a freeway, and then another one, just taking exits when it felt right.
She let the complex web of California freeways become her will; she let them lead her, this way and that. With the new fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, she had to constantly check her speed.
She drove through downtown Los Angeles, with its graffiti and gangs and chain-link fences, and found herself on the glittering Sunset Strip, a world of lights and giant billboards and music clubs.
They drove up the magnificent California Coast, spent a few nights in the Santa Ynez Valley, staring out at the rolling golden hills, and Frankie said, “I like the open spaces, but I need more, and horses, maybe.”
“Northward,” Barb said.
This was how they made decisions; on the fly, by corners turned and roads taken and not taken.
In Carmel, the afternoon fog was too heavy; in San Francisco, there were too many people. The wildness of Mendocino called out to her, but the giant Sequoias hemmed her in somehow.
So, northward.
In Oregon, the green was vibrant and the air was clean, and still there were too many people, even though the towns were few and far between.
They bypassed busy Seattle, listened to radio reports of missing college girls, and turned east, passing through the empty endless wheat fields in the eastern half of Washington, which felt lonely to Frankie, desolate.
Montana.
When they drove into the town of Missoula, singing about time in a bottle, the sky was a vibrant, searing blue that explained the Big Sky Country moniker. A few miles out of town, and the view was stunning: hay fields that stretched toward jagged, snowcapped mountains, their peaks draped in snow, the wide blue Clark Fork river meandering by.
FOR SALE. 27 ACRES.
She and Barb saw the sign at the same time.
It was stuck on a slanted post, looked weathered by time. Behind it: an endless green field, the river running along it, a ragged barbed wire fence in need of tending, a dirt road that led to a stand of tall green trees.
Frankie looked at Barb. “It’s beautiful.”
“And remote,” Barb said.
“A girl could breathe here,” Frankie said. She turned onto the dirt road, followed it into a thicket of trees and out again. Beyond the trees lay another vibrant green field, with the mountains rising behind them into the blue sky.
Frankie stared through the dirty windshield at the peak-roofed farmhouse with a wraparound porch, at the fenced horse fields, at the big old once-red barn in need of a new roof. There were outbuildings, too, some of them collapsed, more barely standing.