The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Art Taylor Rearview Mirror

From On the Road with Del & Louise

I hadn’t been thinking about killing Delwood. Not really. But you know how people sometimes have just had enough. That’s what I’d meant when I said it to him, “I could just kill you,” the two of us sitting in his old Nova in front of a cheap motel on Route 66 — meaning it figurative, even if that might seem at odds with me sliding his pistol into my purse right after I said it.

And even though I was indeed thinking hard about taking my half of the money and maybe a little more — literal now, literally taking it — I would not call it a double-cross. Just kind of a divorce and a divorce settlement. Even though we weren’t married. But that’s not the point.

Sometimes people are too far apart in their wants — that’s what Mama told me. Sometimes things don’t work out.

That was the point.

“Why don’t we take the day off?” I’d asked Del earlier that morning up in Taos, a Saturday, the sun creeping up, the boil not yet on the day, and everything still mostly quiet in the mobile home park where we’d been renting on the biweekly. “We could go buy you a suit, and I could get a new dress. Maybe we’d go out to dinner. To Joseph’s Table maybe. Celebrate a little.”

He snorted. “Louise,” he said, the way he does. “What’s it gonna look like, the two of us, staying out here, paycheck to paycheck, economical to say the least” — he put emphasis on economical, always liking the sound of anything above three syllables — “and suddenly going out all spiffed up to the nicest restaurant in town?” He looked at me for a while, then shook his head.

“We don’t have to go to the nicest restaurant,” I said, trying to compromise, which is the mark of a good relationship. “We could just go down to the bar at the Taos Inn and splurge on some high-dollar bourbon and nice steaks.” I knew he liked steaks, and I could picture him smiling over it, chewing, both of us fat and happy. So to speak, I mean, the fat part being figurative again, of course.

“We told Hal we’d vacate the premises by this morning. We agreed.”

Hal was the man who ran the mobile home park. A week before, Del had told him he’d finally gotten his degree and then this whole other story about how we’d be moving out to California, where Del’s sister lived, and how we were gonna buy a house over there.

“Sister?” I had wanted to say when I overheard it. “House?” But then I realized he was just laying the groundwork, planning ahead so our leaving wouldn’t look sudden or suspicious. Concocting a story — I imagine that’s the way he would have explained it, except he didn’t explain it to me but just did it.

That’s the way he was sometimes: a planner, not a communicator. Taciturn, he called it. Somewhere in there, in his not explaining and my not asking, he had us agreeing. And now he had us leaving.

“Okay,” I told Del. “We’ll just go then. But how ’bout we rent a fancy car? A convertible maybe. A nice blue one.” And I could see it — us cruising through the Sangre de Christos on a sunny afternoon, the top tipped back and me sliding across the seat, leaning over toward him, maybe kicking my heels up and out the window. My head would be laid on his shoulder and the wind would slip through my toes and the air conditioner would be blowing full-blast since June in the Southwest is already hot as blazes.

Now that would be nice.

“No need to waste this windfall on some extravagance,” he said. “No need to call attention to ourselves unnecessarily. Our car works fine.”

He headed for it then — that old Nova. Flecks of rust ran underneath the doors and up inside the wheel well. A bad spring in the seat always bit into my behind. Lately the rearview mirror had started to hang a little loose — not so that Delwood couldn’t see in it, but enough that it rattled against the windshield whenever the road got rough.

He’d jury-rigged a hitch under the bumper and hooked up a flat-as-a-pancake trailer he’d rented to carry some of the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the trunk. A tarp covered it now.

I stood on the steps with my hip cocked and my arms crossed, so that when he turned and looked at me in that rearview mirror, he’d know I was serious. But he just climbed in the car, then sat there staring ahead. Nothing to look back at, I guess. He’d already packed the trunk and the trailer both while I slept. The mobile home behind us was empty of the few things we owned.

“A new day for us,” he’d whispered an hour before, when he woke me up, but already it seemed like same old, same old to me. When I climbed in beside him, I slammed the passenger-side door extra hard and heard a bolt come loose somewhere inside it.

“It figures,” I said, listening to it rattle down. The spring had immediately dug into my left rump.

Del didn’t answer. Just put the car in gear and drove ahead.

When I first met Del, he was robbing the 7-Eleven over in Eagle Nest, where I worked at that time. This was about a year ago. I’d been sitting behind the counter, reading one of the Cosmos off the shelf, when in comes this fellow in jeans and a white T-shirt and a ski mask, pointing a pistol.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said. “I’m not a bad man. I just need an occasional boost in my income.”

I laid the Cosmo face-down on the counter. I didn’t want to lose my place.

“You’re robbing me?” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I bit my lip and shook my head — no no no — just slightly.

“I’m only twenty-eight,” I said.

He looked over toward the Doritos display — not looking at it, but pointing his head in that direction the way some people stare into space whenever they’re thinking. He had a mustache and a beard. I could see the stray hairs poking out around the bottom of the ski mask and near the hole where his mouth was.

“Excuse me?” he said finally, turning back to face me. His eyes were this piney green.

“I’m not a ma’am.”

He held up his free hand, the one without the pistol, and made to run it through his hair — another sign of thinking — but with the ski mask, it just slid across the wool. “Either way, could you hurry it up? I’m on a schedule.”

Many reasons for him to be frustrated, I knew. Not the least of which was having to wear wool in New Mexico in the summer.

He glanced outside. The gas pumps were empty. Nothing but darkness on the other side of the road. This time of night, we didn’t get much traffic. I shrugged, opened the cash register.

“You know,” I said, as I bent down for a bag to put his money in, “you have picked the one solitary hour that I’m alone in the store, between the time that Pete has to head home for his mom’s curfew and the time that our night manager strolls in for his midnight to six.”

“I know. I’ve been watching you.” Then there was a nervous catch in his voice. “Not in a bad way, I mean. Not voyeuristically.” He enunciated both that word and the next. “Surveillance, you know. I’m not a pervert.”

I kept loading the register into the bag. “You don’t think I’m worth watching?”

Again, with the ski mask, I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed to blush.

“No. I mean, yes,” he said. “You’re very pretty.”

I nodded. “There’s not much money here we have access to, you know? A lot of it goes straight to the safe. That’s procedure.”

“I’m a fairly frugal man,” he said. “Sometimes I need extra for... tuition.”

“Tuition?”

“And other academic expenses.”

“Academic expenses,” I repeated, not a question this time. I thought that he had a nice voice, and then I told him so. “You have a nice voice,” I said. “And pretty eyes.” I gave him my phone number, not writing it down because the security camera would have picked that up, but just told him to call, repeating the number twice so he would remember it. “And my name is Louise.”

“Thanks,” he said, “Louise.”

“Good luck with your education,” I called after him, but the door had already swung closed. I watched him run out toward the pumps and beyond, admired the way his body moved, the curve of his jeans, for as long as I could make him out against the darkness. I gave him a head start before I dialed 911.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I was some bored, bubblegum-popping, Cosmo-reading girl, disillusioned with the real world and tired already of being a grownup, and along comes this bad boy and, more than that, literally a criminal and... Sure, there’s some truth there. But here again you’d be missing the point.

It wasn’t exciting that he robbed convenience stores.

It was exciting that he was brave enough to call me afterward, especially in this age of caller ID, when I had his phone number and name immediately — Grayson, Delwood — and could have sent the police after him in a minute.

That Cosmo article? The one I was reading when he showed up in the ski mask? “Romantic Gestures Gone Good: Strange but True Stories of How He Wooed and Won Me.”

Not a one of those stories held a candle to hearing Del’s voice on the other end of the phone: “Hello, Louise? I, um... robbed your 7-Eleven the other night, and I’ve been percolating on our conversation ever since. Are you free to talk?”

That takes a real man, I thought. And — don’t forget those academic expenses — a man who might be going somewhere.

But it had been a long time since I believed we were going anywhere fast. Or anywhere at all.

We took the High Road down from Taos. That figured: two lanes, forty-five miles per hour.

“Afraid they’ll get you for speeding?” I asked.

“One thing might lead to another,” he said. “And anyway, the rental place stressed that it was dangerous to exceed the speed limit while pulling the trailer here.”

As we drove, he kept looking up into the rearview mirror nervously, staring back across the sweep of that trailer, as if any second a patrol car really was gonna come tearing around the bend, sirens wailing, guns blasting. He had put his own pistol in the glove compartment. I saw it when I went for a Kleenex.

“If we get pulled, are you gonna use it?”

He didn’t answer, but just glanced up again at the mirror, which rattled against the windshield with every bump and curve.

I was doing a little rearview looking myself.

Here’s the thing. Even if I had become disillusioned with Del, I don’t believe I had become disappointed in him — not yet.

I mean, like I said, he was a planner. I’d seen my mama date men who couldn’t think beyond which channel they were gonna turn to next, unless there was a big game coming up, and then their idea of planning was to ask her to pick up an extra bag of chips and dip for their friends. I myself had dated men who would pick me up and give me a kiss and ask, “So, what do you want to do tonight?” — none of them having thought about it themselves except to hope that we might end up in the back seat or even back at their apartment. I’m sorry to admit it with some of those men, but most times we did.

On the other hand, take Del. When he picked me up for our first date, I asked him straight out, “Where’s the desperate criminal planning to take the sole witness to his crime on their first date?” I was admiring how he looked out from under that ski mask — his beard not straggly like I’d been afraid, but groomed nice and tight, and chiseled features, you’d call them, underneath that. Those green eyes looked even better set in such a handsome face. He’d dressed up: a button-down shirt, a nice pair of khakis. He was older than I’d expected, older than me. Thirties maybe. Maybe even late thirties. A touch of gray in his beard. But I kind of liked all that.

“A surprise,” said Del, and didn’t elaborate, but just drove out of Eagle Nest and out along 64, and all of a sudden I thought, Oh, wait, desperate criminal, sole witness. My heart started racing and not in a good way. But then he pulled into Angel Fire and we went to Our Place for dinner. (Our Place! That’s really the name.) My heart started racing in a better way after that.

Then there’s the fact that he did indeed finish his degree at the community college, which shows discipline and dedication. And coming up with that story about his sister and why we were moving, laying out a cover story in advance, always thinking ahead. And planning for the heist itself — the “big one,” he said, “the last one,” though I knew better. Over the last year, whenever tuition came due, he’d hit another 7-Eleven or a gas station or a DVD store — “shaking up the modus operandi,” he said, which seemed smart to me, but maybe he just got that from the movies he watched on our DVD player. He’d stolen that too.

That was how we spent most of our nights together, watching movies. I’d quit the 7-Eleven job at that point. It was dangerous, Del said — ironically, he said — and I’d got a job at one of the gift stores in town, keeping me home nights. Home meaning Del’s mobile home, because it wasn’t long before I’d moved in with him.

We’d make dinner — something out of a box because I’m not much of a cook, I’ll admit — and I’d watch Court TV, which I love, while he did some of his homework for the business classes he was taking over at the college or read through the day’s newspaper, scouring the world for opportunities, he said, balancing work and school and me. Later we’d watch a movie, usually something with a crime element like Bank Job or Mission: Impossible or some old movie like The Sting or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or all those Godfather movies like every man I’ve ever been with. I suggested Bonnie and Clyde, for obvious reasons, but he said it would be disadvantageous for us to see it and so we never did.

“Is that all you do, sit around and watch movies?” Mama asked on the phone, more than once.

“We go out some,” I told her.

“Out out?” she asked, and I didn’t know quite what she meant and I told her that.

“He surprises me sometimes,” I said. “Taking me out for dinner.”

(Which was true. “Let’s go out for a surprise dinner,” he’d say sometimes, even though the surprise was always the same, that we were just going to Our Place. But that was still good because it really was our place — both literally and figuratively — and there’s romance in that.)

“He loves me,” I’d tell Mama. “He holds me close at night and tells me how much he loves me, how much he can’t live without me.”

Mama grunted. She was in North Carolina. Two hours’ time difference and almost a full country away, but still you could feel her disappointment like she was standing right there in the same room.

“That’s how it starts,” Mama would tell me, “ ‘I can’t live without you,’ ” mimicking the voice. “Then pretty soon ‘I can’t live without you’ starts to turn stifling and sour and...”

Her voice trailed off. And violent, I knew she’d wanted to say.

And I knew where she was coming from, knew how her last boyfriend had treated her. I’d seen it myself, one of the reasons I finally just moved away, anywhere but there.

“I thought you were going to start a new life,” she said, a different kind of disappointment in her voice then. “You could watch the tube and drink beer anywhere. You could date a loser here if that’s all you’re doing.”

I twirled the phone cord in my hand, wanting just to be done with the conversation but not daring to hang up. Not yet.

“Frugal,” Mama said, making me regret again some of the things I’d told her about him. “Frugal’s just a big word for cheap.”

“Are things gonna be different someday?” I’d asked Del one night, the two of us lying in bed, him with his back to me. I ran my fingers across his shoulder when I asked it.

“Different?” he asked.

“Different from this.”

He didn’t answer at first. I kept rubbing his shoulder and let my hand sneak over and rub the top of his chest, caressing it real light, because I knew he liked that. The window was slid open and a breeze rustled the edge of those thin curtains. Just outside stood a short streetlight, one that the mobile home park had put up, and sometimes it kept me awake, shining all night, like it was aiming right for my face, leaving me sleepless.

After a while I realized Del wasn’t gonna answer at all, and I stopped rubbing his chest and turned over.

That night when I couldn’t sleep, I knew it wasn’t the streetlight at all.

For that big one, that last last one, Del had roamed those art galleries in downtown Taos after work at the garage. He watched the ads for gallery openings, finding a place that stressed cash only, real snooty because you know a lot of people would have to buy that artwork on time and not pay straight out for it all at once, but those weren’t the type of people they were after. He’d looked up the address of the gallery owner, the home address, and we’d driven past that too.

I liked watching his mind work: the way he’d suddenly nod just slightly when we were walking across the plaza or down the walkway between the John Dunn Shops, like he’d seen something important. Or the way his eyes narrowed and darted as we rode through the neighborhood where the gallery owner lived, keeping a steady speed, not turning his head, not looking as if he was looking.

We had a nice time at the gallery opening itself. At least at the beginning. Delwood looked smart in his blue blazer, even though it was old enough that it had gotten some shine at the elbows. And you could see how happy he was each time he saw a red dot on one of the labels — just more money added to the take — even if he first had to ask what each of those red dots meant.

I hated the gallery owner’s tone when he answered that one, as if he didn’t want Del or me there drinking from those plastic cups of wine or eating the cheese. He had a sleek suit, and his thin hair was gelled back dramatically, and he wore these square purple spectacles that he looked over when he was answering Del. I couldn’t help but feel a little resentful toward him. But then I thought, Square Specs will get his, if you know what I mean. And of course he did.

“I like this one,” I said in front of one of the pictures. It was a simple picture — this painting stuck in the back corner. A big stretch of blue sky and beneath it the different-colored blue of the ocean, and a mistiness to it, like the waves were kicking up spray. Two people sat on the beach, a man and a woman. They sort of leaned into one another, watching the water, and I thought about Del and me and began to feel nostalgic for something that we’d never had. The painting didn’t have a red dot on it, but it did have a price: three thousand dollars. “With the money,” I whispered to Delwood, “we could come back here and buy one of them, huh? Wouldn’t that be ballsy? Wouldn’t that be ironic?”

“Louise,” he said, that tone again, telling me everything.

“I’m just saying,” I said. “Can’t you picture the two of us at the ocean like that? Maybe with the money we could take a big trip, huh?”

“Can’t you just enjoy your wine?” he whispered, and moved on to the next picture, not looking at it really, just at the label.

“Fine,” I said after him, deciding I’d just stay there and let him finish casing out the joint, but then a couple came up behind me.

“Let’s try s on this one,” the woman whispered.

“S,” said the man. “Okay. S.” They looked at the picture of the beach, and I looked with them, wondering what they meant by “trying s.” The man wrinkled his brow, squinted his eye, scratched his chin — like Del when’s he’s thinking, but this man seemed to be only playing at thinking. “Sappy,” he said finally.

“Sentimental,” said the woman, quick as she could.

“Um... Sugary.”

“Saccharine.”

“No fair,” said the man. “You’re just playing off my words.”

The woman smirked at him. She had a pretty face, I thought. Bright blue eyes and high cheekbones with freckles across them. She had on a gauzy top, some sort of linen, and even though it was just a thin swath of fabric, you could tell from the texture of it and the way she wore it that it was something fine. I knew, just knew suddenly, that it had probably cost more than the money Del had stolen from the 7-Eleven the night I first met him. And I knew too that I wanted a top just like it.

“Fine,” she said, pretending to pout. “Here’s another one. Schmaltzy.”

“Better! Um... sad.”

“No, this is sad,” she said, holding up her own plastic wineglass.

“Agreed.” He laughed.

“Swill,” she whispered, dragging out the s sound, just touching his hand with her fingers, and they both giggled as they moved on to the next picture. And the next letter, it turned out.

T was for tarnished, for trashy, for tragic.

Del had made the full circuit. Even from across the room I could see the elbows shining on his blazer. Then he turned and saw me and made a short side-nod with his head, motioning toward the door. Time to head back home.

I looked once more at the painting of the couple on the beach. I’d thought it was pretty. Still did.

I’d thought the wine had tasted pretty good too.

But suddenly it all left a bad taste in my mouth.

A bad taste still as we continued south now.

The steep turns and drop-offs that had taken us out of Taos had given way to villages, small homes on shaded roads, people up and about, going about their lives. I saw the signs for the Santuario de Chimayó, which I’d visited when I first moved out this way, picking northern New Mexico just because it seemed different, in every way, from where I’d grown up. I’d found out about the church in Chimayó from a guidebook I’d ordered off the Internet, learned about the holy earth there and how it healed the sick. When I’d visited it myself, I gathered up some of the earth and mailed it off to Mama — not that she was sick, but just unhappy. I don’t know what I’d imagined she’d do with it, rub it on her heart or something. “Thanks for the dirt,” she told me when she got it.

“Do you think they’ve found Square Specs yet?” I asked Del.

“Square Specs?”

“The gallery owner,” I said. “Do you think the cleaning lady found him, or a customer?”

We were nearing another curve and Del eased the Nova around it slowly, carefully.

“Probably somebody will have found him by now. Like I told you last night, I tied him up pretty good. I don’t think he’d have gotten loose on his own. But by now...”

He sped up a little bit. I don’t think he did it consciously, but I noticed.

A while later I asked, “Are we gonna do anything fun with the money?”

“What kind of fun?”

“I don’t know. Clothes, jewelry... a big-screen TV, a vacation. Something fun.”

He scratched his beard. “That’s just extravagance.”

“Are you gonna make all the decisions?”

“All the good ones,” he said. He gave a tense chuckle. “Don’t you ever consider the future?”

But again he missed what I was saying. The future is exactly what I was thinking about.

After we bypassed Santa Fe proper, Del had us two-laning it again on a long road toward Albuquerque: miles and miles of dirt hills and scrubby little bushes, some homes that looked like people still lived there and others that were just crumbling down to nothing. The Ortiz Mountains stood way out in the distance. We got stuck for a while behind a dusty old pickup going even slower than we were, but Del was still afraid to pass, especially with that trailer stretched out behind us. We just poked along behind the truck until it decided to turn down some even dustier old road, and every mile we spent behind it, my blood began to boil up more.

I know Del was picturing roadblocks out on the interstate, and helicopters swooping low, waiting for some rattling old Nova like ours to do something out of the ordinary, tip our hand — picturing it even more after I asked about that gallery owner getting loose. But after a while I just wanted to scream, “Go! Go! Go!” or else reach over and grab the wheel myself, stretch my leg over and press down on the gas, hurl us ahead somehow and out of all this. And then there was all the money in the trunk and all the things I thought we could have done with it but clearly weren’t going to do.

Once or twice I even thought about pulling out that pistol myself and pointing it at him. “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” I might say, just like he would. “Just do like I ask, okay?” That was the first time I thought about it — not even serious about it then.

Still, it was all I could do to hide all that impatience, all that restlessness and nervous energy. None of it helped by that tap tap tap tap tap of the mirror against the windshield. I felt like my skin was turning inside out.

“I need to pee,” I said finally.

“Next place I see,” said Del, a glance at me, one more glance in the rearview. I looked in the side mirror. Nothing behind us but road. I looked ahead of us. Nothing but road. I looked around the car. Just me and him and that damn mirror tapping seconds into minutes and hours and more.

We stopped in Madrid, which isn’t pronounced like the city in Spain but with the emphasis on the first syllable: MAD-rid. It used to be a mining town back in the Gold Rush days, but then dried up and became a ghost town. Now it’s a big artists’ community. I didn’t know all that when we pulled in, but there was a brochure.

We parked lengthwise along the road by one of the rest stops at one end of the town — outhouse, more like it. Del waited in the car, but after I was done, I tapped on his window. “I’m gonna stretch my legs,” I said, and strolled off down the street before he could answer. I didn’t care whether he followed, but pretty soon I heard the scuff scuff of his feet on the gravel behind me. I really did need a break, just a minute or two out of the car, and it did help some, even with him following. We walked on like that, him silent behind me except for his footsteps as I picked up that brochure and looked in the store windows at antiques and pottery and vintage cowboy boots. Fine arts in the mix as well. “Wanna make one last last job?” I wanted to joke. Half joke. “Get something for me this time?”

I walked in one store. Del followed. I just browsed the shelves. The sign outside had advertised “local artisans and craftspeople,” and the store had quirky stuff the way those kinds of places do: big sculptures of comical-looking cowboys made out of recycled bike parts, close-up photographs of rusted gas pumps and bramblebush, hand-dipped soy candles, gauzy-looking scarves that reminded me of the woman at the gallery the night before. I browsed through it all, taking my time, knowing that Del was right up on me, almost feeling his breath on my back.

One shelf had a bowl full of sock-monkey key chains. A cardboard sign in front of the bowl said, HANDCRAFTED. $30.

“Excuse me,” I called over to the man behind the counter. He’d been polishing something and held a red rag in his hand. “Is this the price of the bowl or of the monkeys?”

“Oh,” he said, surprised, as if he’d never imagined someone might misunderstand that. “The monkeys,” he said, then corrected himself. “Each monkey,” he said. “The bowl’s not for sale at all.”

I turned to Del. “Why don’t you get me one of these?” I asked him, holding up a little monkey.

I tried to say it casual-like, but it was a challenge. I felt like both of us could hear it in my voice. Even the man behind the register heard it, I imagine, even though he’d made a show of going back to his polishing.

“What would you want with a thing like that?” Del said.

“Sometimes a girl likes a present. It makes her feel special.” I dangled the sock monkey on my finger in front of him, and Del watched it sway, like he was mesmerized or suspicious. “Or is the romance gone here?”

“It’s kind of pricy for a key chain.”

I leaned in close for just a second, whispered, “Why don’t you just slip it in your pocket then?”

Del cut his eyes toward the man behind the counter, then turned back to me. His look said hush. “I told you last night was the last time,” he said, a low growl.

I just swayed that monkey back and forth.

A woman in a green dress jingled through the door then and went up to the counter. “You were holding something for me,” she said, and the man put down his polish rag, and they started talking.

You could tell that Del was relieved not to have a witness anymore. “C’mon, Louise,” he said. “Be serious.”

But me? For better or worse, I just upped the ante.

“Suppose I said to you that this monkey” — I jerked my finger to make his little monkey body bounce — “this monkey represents love to me.”

“Love?” he said.

“The potential for love,” I clarified. “The possibility of it.”

“How’s that?”

“Suppose I told you that my daddy, the last time I saw him, me only six years old, he comes into my bedroom to tuck me in and he gives me a sock-puppet monkey, bigger than this one, but looking pretty much the same” — because the truth is they all do, handcrafted or not — “and he says to me, ‘Hon, Daddy’s going away for a while, but while I’m gone, this little monkey is gonna take care of you, and any time you find yourself thinking of me or wondering about me, I want you to hug this monkey close to you, and I’ll be there with you. Wherever I am, I’ll be here with you.’ And he touched his heart.”

I wasn’t talking loud, but the man behind the counter and the customer had grown quiet, listening to me now even as they pretended not to. It was a small store, they couldn’t help it. Del wasn’t sweating, not really, but with all the attention — two witnesses to our argument now — he looked like he might break out in one any second.

“And Mama was behind him, leaned against the door watching us,” I went on. “Anyone probably could have seen from her face that he wasn’t coming back and that it was her fault and she felt guilty, but I was too young to know that then. And I dragged that monkey around with me every day and slept with it every night and hugged it close. And finally Mama threw it away, which told me the truth. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me when I cried about it, because she’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend and had her own heart broken. ‘Men always let you down,’ she told me. ‘Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting that.’ And I stopped crying. But still, whatever Mama told me and whether my daddy came back or not, I believed — I knew — that there had been love there, there in that moment, in that memory, you know?”

Del looked over at the wall, away from the shopkeeper and his customer, and stared at this sculpture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco — an iron silhouette. The tilt of his head and the nervous look in his eyes reminded me of the first night we’d met, at the 7-Eleven, when he’d called me “ma’am” and I’d told him my age. Seemed like here was another conversation where he was playing catch-up, but this time he seemed fearful for different reasons.

“And maybe,” I said, helping him along, “just maybe if you bought this for me, I’d know you really loved me, for always and truly. Now,” I said, “would that get it through your thick skull?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an embarrassed look on the storekeeper’s face — embarrassed for Del and maybe embarrassed for me too. His customer, the woman in green, cleared her throat, and the shopkeeper said to her, “Yes, just let me find that for you.”

Del shifted his lower jaw to the side — another indication, I’d learned, that his mind was working on something, weighing things. He really was sweating now, and still staring at that bucking bronco sculpture like he felt some kinship with the cowboy on top, like staring at it might give him an answer somehow.

“What was your monkey’s name?” he asked me.

I gave out a long sigh, with an extra dose of irritation in it. He was missing the whole point, just like always. “I don’t know,” I told him. I sighed again. “Murphy,” I said.

His look changed then, just a thin crease of the forehead, a tiny raise of the eyebrow. “Murphy the monkey?” he said. He wasn’t looking at the sculpture now, wasn’t looking afraid anymore. “Louise,” he began, “I don’t really think that this monkey represents the love we share, and the truth is that thirty dollars seems like quite a bit for—”

But I didn’t hear the rest of it. I just put that monkey down, then turned and walked out the door, slamming it behind me the way I’d slammed the Nova’s door that morning.

I can’t say whether I wanted him to call for me to come back or rush out after me, something dramatic like that, but if I did, I was indeed fooling myself, just like Mama had warned. That wasn’t Delwood. When I got in the car, I saw him through the window, slowly coming back — those sad footsteps, scuff scuff scuff. No hurry at all, like he knew I’d be waiting.

We rode on in silence after that — a heavy silence, you know what I mean. More ghost towns where people used to have hopes and dreams and now there was nothing but rubble and a long stretch of empty land. I wasn’t even angry now, but just deflated, disappointed.

“Men will do that to you,” my mama told me another time. “After a while you feel like it’s not even worth trying.” I’d known what she meant, theoretically. Now I knew in a different way.

Soon the two-lane widened, and the strip malls started up, and fast-food restaurants — civilization. I saw a Wendy’s and asked if it was okay to stop.

“I’ll pick from the dollar menu,” I said, sarcastic-like.

Del didn’t say anything, just pulled through the drive-thru and ordered what I wanted. He didn’t get anything for himself. I think it was just out of spite.

Late afternoon, we cruised through Winslow, Arizona, which I guess would get most people in the mind of that Eagles song. Standing on a corner and all that. But it had me thinking of the past and my old high school flame. Winslow was his name — Win, everybody called him — and I couldn’t help but start indulging those what-ifs about everything I’d left behind. It was a fleeting moment; Win and I had had our own troubles, of course, but it struck me hard, discontented as I was with things and people — thinking myself about running down the road and trying to loosen my own load.

Then toward evening we stopped at a motel in Kingman, one of those cheap ones that have been there since Route 66 was an interesting road and not just a tourist novelty — the ones that now looked like they’d be rented for the hour by people who didn’t much care what the accommodations were like.

Del checked us in, pulled the Nova around to the stairwell closest our room, and parked sideways across several spaces, since that was the only way we’d fit.

“Get your kicks,” I said.

“Kicks?” he said, baffled.

“Route 66,” I said, pointing to a sign. “Guess we couldn’t afford the Holiday Inn either, huh?”

He stared straight ahead, drummed his fingers light against the steering wheel. He curled up his bottom lip a little and chewed on his beard.

“You know those court shows you watch on TV?” Del said finally. “And how you tell me some of those people are so stupid? You listen to their stories and you laugh and you tell me, ‘That’s where they went wrong’ or ‘They should’ve known better than that.’ ”

“Do you mean,” I said, “something like a man who robs a convenience store, then calls up the clerk he’s held at gunpoint and asks her out for a date?” I felt bad about it as soon as I said it. Part of why I fell in love with him and now I was complaining about it.

“There were extenuating circumstances in that instance,” he said, and this warning sound had crept into his tone, one that I hadn’t heard before. “I’m just saying that we need to be fairly circumspect now about whatever we do. Any misstep might put us in front of a real judge, and it won’t be a laughing matter, I can guarantee you that.” He turned to face me. “Louise,” he said, again that way he does. “I love you, Louise, but sometimes... well, little girl, sometimes you just don’t seem to be thinking ahead.”

It was the little girl that got me, or maybe the extenuating or the circumspect, or maybe just him implying that I was being stupid, or maybe all of it, the whole day.

“Del,” I said through clenched teeth, putting some bite into his name, same as he always did me. “I love you, and when I say that, I mean it. But sometimes, Del, sometimes, I could just kill you.”

He nodded. “You’d go to jail for that too,” he said, slow and even as always, but still with that edge of warning to it. He handed the room key across to me. “You go on in. I want to check that things haven’t shifted back in the trailer.”

“Fine,” I said, toughening the word up to let him hear how I felt. He stared at me for a second, then went back to get our bags. In the rearview, I watched him bending open the tarp covering the trailer, but still I just sat there.

I don’t know how to describe what I was feeling. Anger? Sadness? I don’t know what was running through my head, either. What to do next, maybe. Whether to go up to the room and carry on like we’d planned, like he seemed to expect I’d do, or to step out of all this, literally just step out of the car and start walking in another direction.

But then I knew if I really did leave, he’d come after me. Not dramatic, not begging, but I knew he wouldn’t let me go. Can’t live without you, that’s what he’d said, and like Mama said, sometimes that kind of love could turn ugly fast. I’d seen it before.

“You just gonna sit there?” Del called out.

He’d opened the trunk now, blocking my view, just a voice behind me. More rearranging.

“No. I’m going up,” I called back. Then just before I stepped out of the car, I opened up the glove compartment and slipped the gun into my purse.

In the motel room, I locked the door to the bathroom, set down my purse, and turned the water on real hot before climbing in. I stood there in the steam and rubbed that little bitty bar of soap over me, washing like I had layers of dust from those two-lane roads and that truck we’d followed for so long.

I thought about what would happen after I got out. “Sometimes people are too far apart in their wants,” I could say. “I do love you, Del, but sometimes a person needs to move on.” It was just a matter of saying it. It would be easy to do, I knew. I’d done it before, back with Win all those years ago, and I hadn’t needed a gun then. But the gun showed I was serious in a different way. More than that, it was protection. “I’m not taking all the money, Del,” I might say. “That’s not what’s going on here. That’s not the point.” As if he had ever got the point.

I took both towels when I got out of the shower. The steam swirled around me while I stood there drying myself off — one towel wrapped around me and one towel for my hair, leaving him none.

Would he try to talk me out of it? Would he try to take the gun away? Would I have to tie him up the way he’d left that gallery owner back in Taos? Even thinking about it made me sad.

He was sitting there when I came out of the bathroom, sitting on the one chair in the room, staring at the blank television, the screen of it covered in a light layer of dust. I hadn’t taken the gun out but just held my purse in my hand, feeling the weight of it. Thinking that I might have to use it. I suddenly wished I’d gotten dressed first. I mean, picture it: me wrapped in two towels and holding a gun? Hardly a smooth getaway.

Del’s face was... well, pensive was the word that came to mind. He taught me that word, I thought. I wouldn’t have known it without him. And that kept me from saying immediately what I needed to say. I just stood there, feeling a single drip of water sneak past the towel around my head, race down my back.

“You never talked much about your daddy,” he said, breaking the silence. “He really leave you when you were six?”

“Yes,” I said, and I realized then that I felt like I was owed something for that.

Del stared at the blank television. I turned my own head that way, toward the gray curve of the screen. I could see his face there, reflected toward me, kind of distorted, distant.

“He really give you a sock monkey when he left?”

I thought about that, but I was thinking now about what I owed Del.

“No,” I told him, and I could hear the steel in my own voice. “But what Mama said, she did say that.”

I stared hard at the dusty TV screen, at his reflection there. I saw then that his fists were clenched, and that he clenched them even tighter at my answer. I could feel myself tighten. I knew then that he knew the pistol was gone. I didn’t take my eyes off that reflection as I pulled up the strap of my pocketbook, just in case he stood up quick and rushed me. But he dropped his head down a little, and I saw his profile in the reflection, which meant he’d turned to see me straight on.

“You lied to me, then?” He was clenching his hand hard, so much that if I’d been closer, I might have backed away. But there was a bed between us. And the pocketbook was open now.

“If that’s what you want to take from it.”

His eyes watched me hard. Those green eyes. First thing I’d really noticed about him up close.

“Do you believe Cora was right?” — meaning Mama. That’s her name.

“I don’t know. Do you?

Those eyes narrowed. Thinking again. And it struck me that I could just about list every little thing he did when he was pondering over something: how he sometimes stared hard at the wall or other times stared off into space with this faraway gaze, running his fingers through his hair or through the tip of his beard, biting at his bottom lip or chewing on that beard or just shifting his jaw one way or the other. Usually left, I corrected myself. Always to the left. And sure enough, just as I thought it, he shifted his jaw just that way, setting it in place.

I almost laughed despite myself. Men always let you down, Mama had said, but Del had come through with his jaw jut exactly like expected. At least you could count on him for that. And all of a sudden I felt embarrassed for having taken that gun from the glove compartment, just wanted to run out in my towel and put it back.

“Do you want a surprise?” he asked, and I almost laughed again.

“It’s a long drive back to Our Place.”

“A new surprise.”

“Sure,” I said.

“The story we told back at the mobile home park, about me having a sister out in Victorville,” he said then. “I really do. Haven’t talked to her in a while. We were estranged.” He stretched out the word. “She’s in real estate. Got us a deal she worked out on a foreclosure. A house. Said she’d let me do some work for her, at her company, now that I have a degree. It’s all worked out. I needed to get the down payment on it, so I figured, one more job. One big one and that’d be it.” He tapped his hand on the side of the chair, like you would tap your fingers, but his whole hand because it was still clenched. I think it was the most words he’d ever said in one breath. “That’s my surprise.”

Part of me wanted to go over to him, but I didn’t. Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting, I heard Mama saying. I stood right in the doorway, still dripping all over the floor, all over myself.

“I stole that painting you wanted too,” he said, as if he was embarrassed to admit it. “We can’t hang it in the house, at least not the living room, not yet, not where anyone might see, but you can take it out and look at it sometimes, maybe, if you want. It’s out in the trunk now if you want me to get it.” He gave a big sigh, the kind he might give late at night when he was done with talking to me, done with the day. But something else in his face this time, some kind of struggle, like he wanted to go quiet but still had more to tell. “But I was serious about that being the last one,” he said finally. “This is a fresh start and I want to do it right. That’s why I paid for this.”

He opened his fist then. The sock-monkey key chain was in it. Crushed a little in his grip, but there it was.

“I knew that story wasn’t true, about your daddy,” he said. “I knew it while you were telling it. But it being true or not, that wasn’t the point, was it?”

I smiled and shook my head. No no no, that wasn’t the point. And yes yes yes too, of course.

Needless to say, I didn’t kill him. And I didn’t take my half and hit the highway.

When we got in the car the next day, I almost didn’t see the rust along the wheel well, and I closed the door so soft that I almost didn’t hear that loose metal rolling around inside. While Delwood packed the trunk and rearranged stuff one more time under that tarp, I slipped that pistol into the glove compartment, just like it had been in the first place. I didn’t touch it again.

As Delwood drove us along 66 and out of town, I rolled down the window and kicked up my heels, leaned over against him.

You might imagine that I was stuck on that three-thousand-dollar painting in the trunk and that house ahead, and partly I was, but again you’d be missing the point. It was the sock monkey that meant the most to me. Light as a trinket but with a different kind of weight to it. When I hung it from the rearview mirror, the rattle there died down almost to a whisper, and it all seemed like a smoother ride ahead for a while.