The phone rings at the worst times. I’m in bed with Myrna, halfway through a cigarette, with Leno’s obnoxious openers streaming softly from the television. It brings back this idea I had for a story once, but knew right away wasn’t any good. There were people on a commission who monitored everyone’s thoughts and conversations, but no one was ever thrown in jail or beaten senseless. Every time someone was on the verge of saying anything significant, or on the cusp of some profound idea, a member of the commission would jump in and place a phone call, interrupting whatever was in motion. Of course, it’s not plausible. I know that. Too many people. Too many phones. Imagine how large a commission like that would have to be. Imagine the phone bill.

When she stirs, I pretend I’ve been sleeping. “What time is it?” she asks.

“Leno’s on,” I say.

“I fell asleep early,” she says.

“You did.”

She jerks her head toward the phone. “Am I allowed to answer it?” she says. I reach over and grab it from the cradle. We still have a landline. Personally, I don’t see the point, but Myrna insists.

“Hello?” I say down the little holes on the mouthpiece. I guess I always make the same face when it’s Raymond. Maybe he’s the only one who calls at this hour. Either way, Myrna sees me like that, and she goes off into the bathroom. She shuts the door behind her.

When I’m finished with the call, I get out of bed and cross cool hallway tiles until I reach the door at the end. Inside, the garage stinks like clothes forgotten in the washer, the sides lined with stacks of old Albuquerque Journal papers and flea market books – shit Myrna keeps around for reasons I don’t understand. I swat at the tennis ball hanging over the hood on the way to our Oldsmobile Silhouette, watch it dribble off the windshield a few times. The key-pocked door handle is grainy on the heel of my hand as I rub along its surface, scanning the floor for anything out of place. I know the registration and insurance are current, but I check anyway. I check every time.

After opening all of the doors to the van, I pull a plastic tub from a shelf over Myrna’s stacks. One of the latches doesn’t close, so I open the other and set the lid aside. I walk to a corner of the garage and confront a carefully balanced pyramid of second-hand household items – a haggard coffee table as the base, and on top three boxes of thrift store clothing. Huddled together above that, next to sheets and blankets bundled with a bungee cord, are an old brown blender and a microwave. Once a week, we’re a young couple moving the last of our things to a new city.

I take a vacuum cleaner by the handle and yank it away from the wall. Little bits of cat litter stick to my damp hands when I pull a wad of hair and lint from the vacuum bag. I set both at my feet. I stuff the bag nearly full of small, fat packages from the tub, and arrange the dirt I’d removed before back on top. With motions I’ve memorized, I load the vacuum into the back of the van and surround it with our moving materials.

In the house I hear Myrna up washing dishes. The sound of a saxophone stutter-steps out of the small radio in the kitchen and drifts through the hallway. I grab a pair of jeans and a shirt with a collar, remove the sweatpants I’ve been wearing and dress for tomorrow.

###

I should get them wet, throw them in the dryer for a few minutes. Really, I should iron them. My wilted clothing glares back at me from Myrna’s full-length mirror. I can live with the pants, though they take after one of those eco-friendly potato chip bags. If I keep things looking the way I want, no one important will see my bottom half, but the shirt is a wreck. If I had time, I’d do something about it.

This is always a problem, and I could easily solve it if I wasn’t such a slug in the morning. I try to do everything the night before. I try to keep things simple.

Myrna is in the bathroom, splashing water in her face and hair. She looks heroic, tearing at the compressed curls around the curves of her face with a hairbrush. I’m not sure whether or not to press her if she says she’s not coming. I’m sure it’s her being there that makes this work.

The cat comes by and uses my leg to stretch, chirping and kneading into me. I dig my thumb and forefinger behind his ears and lead him to the kitchen. Sometimes I’m sure he’s too dumb to realize there’s much of a difference between us, as if he wonders why the huge cat can always get through those fucking doors, why it always knows where the food is. I hope that’s not it. I don’t want him to think we’re built for the same purpose, that I’m just better at it, that there’s a hierarchy. He probably doesn’t.

After I’ve fed the cat and left extra for the day in a second bowl, I walk in on Myrna placing little heaps of neatly folded clothing into a suitcase. I trip to a stop but my gut keeps going. A familiar feeling crawls down through what I think are my intestines. I don’t know if it’s a condition that comes with a pill, but when I’m nervous, I have to shit. Things settle – I notice the suitcase is small, built for a weekend trip.

I go to the mirror and act like I’m picking something off my collar. In the reflection, she smooths everything over with her hands and shuts the suitcase, zips it up without having to heave her whole body into it. That’s how I have to do it. I run out of imaginary crud to clean off my front.

“So, the bag.”

“It’ll look like everything else in the car,” she says.

“That’s all we usually bring.”

She brushes past me, into the bathroom. “I’ll be on a flight home a few days after. You don’t have to worry. It’ll be at least a week before Raymond calls.”

“Who said anything about Raymond?

“I’m staying just outside of Dallas. You know my Aunt, Roberta. In Kirkland. We’ve been before.”

“Yeah. Roberta.” I sit on the bed next to her stupid black suitcase with its stupid little zippers. My stomach sounds like a flushing toilet, one of those circular symptoms that doesn’t help. “Why?”

She steps out of the bathroom, wiggling a spinning hoop through the hole in her ear. “I go to Dallas three or four times a month, and I haven’t seen her since we bought -”

“Since we got the house. Ok.” I never use it as ammunition, but this house was her idea. The house put me – us – in this situation to begin with.

“It’s been a long time,” I say. “Why don’t we both go? We’d have the car.”

“I won’t need the car.”

“It’ll give us a chance to spend some time together.”

“Whole reason I’m going is to spend time with Roberta,” she says.

We’re not exactly psyched to be around each other these days, Myrna and I. Not since she decided to get all bent up over what we do. We didn’t have any problems the first year. She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to complain about. But then she finds out her kid brother in San Angelo is smoking pot, just like my kid brother, and yours too, if you’ve got one. They’re all from Texas, her family, and they’ve all got sticks up their asses. Hers dug its way deep up there. She starts telling me what we’re doing is wrong, that we have no idea who this stuff ends up with, and I know she’s thinking of her brother. It’s no use reminding her that we don’t deal with marijuana, or that he’s just doing what kids do. She has her mind fixed that we’ve done something horrible, that I want to keep doing it. I even pointed out that he’s almost three-hundred miles away from Dallas. Nothing we dump over there has anything to do with him. But she just argues that it spreads, that people in Dallas are doing the same thing we are, getting rid of it somewhere else.

I can hear her open the trunk in the garage. Raymond calls and I tell him we’ll be out the door soon. He talks on and on about making sure the tires aren’t low – they’ll wonder what kind of person you are, with low tires. Every time we talk it’s as if I’m being briefed for the first time, like he expects I’ll get jittery and forget something small. I nod for awhile even though I’m alone in the room.

Raymond ends his well-meaning rant and I stop punctuating it with little grunts of agreement. The line dies with a click and I realize I haven’t heard Myrna shut the trunk. She hasn’t tossed in the suitcase and moved on – maybe she’s pausing, maybe that’s a good thing. She could come back inside and unpack, call it a little impulsive morning anger, tell me she was never really going to go through with spending the weekend in Roberta’s Coca-Cola themed living room. We’d be a little late, if she did, but it’s early, we’ll get out of the city quick. She could put it all away and we could drive off and not have that hanging over us.

Of course, the trunk slams shut. She doesn’t come back inside, just shouts from the garage that she’s ready. There, she opens the mechanical door to the dark morning. The outside air glides greedily into the room, the kind that feels clean because it’s cold. We get into the car and I edge it onto the driveway before clamping the brakes.

“Can you go inside?” I say. Myrna gives me a strange look. I don’t forget things.

“For what?” she asks.

“I might have forgotten to put out a second bowl for Dreamer. I’m not going to be home until tomorrow morning.”

“You go.”

“Then I have to put the car in park” I say.

“You’d have to put the car in park? Well, shit, Bailey.”

She flings her door shut and jogs up the driveway. I put the car in park, pop the trunk, and walk around back. The suitcase is on top of scattered plastic water bottles, which I gather up and dump in the backseat. In my head, I’ve counted thirty seconds, which is already too long. I sprint sloppily, Myrna’s suitcase held before me like a serving tray, looking wildly for a solution.

I think the suitcase is polyester. I’m not sure how that does in a compost bin.

###

Myrna and I are late, and still a good three hours outside of Dallas, but running out of gas is particularly nasty for us. I’m talking, gesturing with my fingers over the steering wheel, weighing whether to stop at the next truck-stop town or the one after. Myrna points out one of those monstrosities off the highway,with fleets of diesel pumps and signs on high stalks that break the lengths of auburn roadside. I pull into one of two stations off the exit, craning my neck to see which looks less busy.

She shrugs off her seatbelt and gets out, heads into the convenience store. I take the wheel lock from under the seat and look down at it. I’d be giving up a lot more than the van if it were stolen, but for some reason I start to see this little film in my head of a routine I’ve been through plenty of times. Myrna and I, we’re leaving Raymond’s place, and we’ve got everything ready because he wants us to head out the next morning. We just have to put it in the car and park it at home, keep everything inside, wake up and go. Everything is organized and simple, easy. We’re walking down the stairs from Raymond’s apartment, zigzagging down a couple flights. We can see the car, but then things stop making sense. When Myrna and I get to the bottom of the stairs, five cops pop out from shrubbery at the other end of the complex, sprinting at two people doing the same thing they’ve done mechanically for months, two people carrying bags of styrofoam-clad leftovers from dinner at a friend’s. And I see myself running, I see Myrna running, and we’re getting to the car fast. The cops aren’t gaining any ground. We’re at the car, we have time, I can easily get it started before they get to us. And then I notice the wheel lock through the window.

Inside, Myrna stands before a row of soda fountain nozzles that run on forever. I watch her as my brain bends around basic math, trying to figure out how much gas we need, how quickly we can cover the last two hundred miles without attracting attention. Here in the convenience store we’re inconspicuous, surrounded by other weary and shabby weekday interstate drivers. I wonder how many are passing through for the same reason.

“Grab yourself a coffee,” I say to Myrna. “I want you to drive. I need sleep for the trip home.”

“I don’t drink caffeine after noon anymore.”

“You’re already here, Myrna”

“So,” she says.

I motion for her to move aside. The coffee station is trashed with paper wrappers and dried globs of creamer, and half the items that should be there aren’t. I dump a packet of sugar into the bottom of a cup and fill it with the sludgy shit at the end of the pot. At first I test it with the tip of my finger, then dunk all the way in and stir.

“So,” I say, cramming the cup into a cardboard sleeve. I hand it to her. “You’re not any more or less at fault for doing some driving.” She sulks off and looks at a cork-board near the restrooms. I walk up to the attendant and toss two twenties in front of him along with the change in my pocket for Myrna’s drink. The line parts behind me as I back through it, nodding and apologizing on my way to fetch her. I see the advertisements and pamphlets she’s reading, papers of all colors fastened to the cork-board by grey thumbtacks.

They’re mostly ads for spiritual healing tours through the Southwestern desert, retreat packages led by self-help hippies for those gullible enough to fall for Native American inspired graphic design. She’s staring intently at one of them, where a wild-haired woman smiles from turquoise-studded ear to turquoise-studded ear, superimposed over a craggy red butte.

“We’re late,” I say. “Stop soaking your brain in this shit.”

She turns to me, dumps half her coffee down her throat. “Your problem,” she says, “is you don’t do anything besides this, and thinking about this. It leaves you too much time to hate everything else.”

###

My insides dissolve into an avalanche when I wake up in the passenger seat and the van isn’t moving. She isn’t behind the wheel. My first impulse is to look back, but the shoulder is empty. Ahead, Myrna claps her palms together and laughs with an elderly couple on the side of the road. Next to them, a man in a reflective vest operates the chain pulley of a tow truck, hoisting a little sedan onto the ramp.

“This girl you got, she’s really something,” says the old man as I approach the group

“Same as an angel, except you can see her,” says the woman.

I don’t look at Myrna. “As close as there is to an angel, can’t argue that,” I say. “Where are you kids coming from?” I ask. “Let me guess, you just got married and your headed for a honeymoon in Texas, or else somewhere further east.”

The old woman winds her arm around her husband’s and smiles. “There’s a family values convention in Dallas,” she says. “We left Sun City, Arizona yesterday.”

“Mryna and I always say there’s good people left. Hope this doesn’t make you late.” I gesture to the tow truck. “We’re late too.”

“Oh, stay for just another minute,” says the old man. “We aren’t in any rush. We were just telling your friend how she can help spread the word.”

His wife cuts in. “We run a small church back home, but we also have this hot-line.”

“It’s not really a hot-line,” says the man, handing me a bumper sticker and matching fridge magnet. “People call the number and leave a voice mail when they need to admit sinful behavior. We call back and -”

“Richard makes the calls,” says his wife. “He listens to every single one. Calls back with advice on how to climb right back up on the wagon of righteousness. You put these up and help send the lost our way.”

“Do you have extra?” I ask.

###



“They were stuck,” she says. We’re back in the van.

“How long?”

“They needed a phone,” she says. “And water -”

“From the trunk?” I ask.

“I gave them the ones from the backseat.”

I glance at the clock on the dashboard. “We were stopped for at least an hour. An hour, Myrna.”

She rolls down her window and lights a cigarette with the car lighter, keeping her eyes on the road. I think about calling Raymond, but my stomach is writhing with the uneven highway and I don’t want to deal with it. He’ll call as soon as his phone is harassed.

“And for this,” I say, flapping the thick sheaf of bumper stickers before her face. “We’ll just show them Reverend Retro’s Voicemail Salvation Service and they’ll understand why they had to sit in a fucking parking lot half the evening.”

“They’ll live an extra hour without their chemicals.”

Maybe, for a fraction of a second, I try to remember what it is I’m doing, where I am. I don’t know. There’s no gradual onset. One second i’m clearly anxious and the next I’m enraged. I can’t feel my hands as I smash them around – car door, dashboard, my own legs and torso. Not Myrna, no. Not her. We’re nowhere near that, but still I’m hitting everything else I can reach without any clue how best to strike, because I’m not very good at hitting things and I have no idea what I’m trying to accomplish. When I quit, Myrna’s looking out over the road as if nothing happened, her lips shifting in and out of a small circle as if she’s trying to remember the words to something. I sob once and then slide off into tears and quavering exhalations.

“It’s better this way,” she says. “Me going to Roberta’s. We both need time. Time to…what’s the word, decompress?” She puts out her cigarette in the can we keep up front.

I rest my face against the warm window and look out as we pass a black SUV. “Don’t come again,” I force the words through the stale folds of my throat. “No pressure anymore. Just come back with me. I’ll drive the whole way. We’ll dump the furniture, the clothing.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she says.

“Then how does it work?” I sit up from the window and wipe at my face with the back of my hands. “Because here’s how it looks. You decide we need a house – because god forbid your parents have to visit their thirty year old daughter in a fucking apartment -”

“Bailey, no -”

“Oh, yes” I say. “So I buy a house – we buy a motherfucking house. A house the two of us couldn’t possibly afford, piece of shit or not. That was your idea, Myrna. I said hey, let’s wait. I’d love to buy a house with you Myrna, but let’s wait. You know, until it makes sense.”

She lights another cigarette and starts jabbing the air with it. “Don’t start, you promised you wouldn’t -”

“And you promised you’d figure it out – we’d buy the goddamn house and it would be ours and you’d figure it the fuck out and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Well, who’s fixing everything, Myrna?”

“I’m pulling over,” she says. “I’ll call Roberta to pick me up. I’m not going any further.”

“I did, Myrna. I fucking figured it out, and now you’re going to walk away from me for it. What have you done besides make things more complicated?” I say. I flash the bumper stickers once more and tear off the rubber band keeping them together. I lean over Myrna and toss them out the window, knocking her cigarette into her lap. The stickers explode in the wind just beyond the window, flying off in every direction.

“Good.” I say. “Pull over. Get out. Now. Pull over.”

She scratches at the burnt circle in her pants. “This is pathetic,” she says.

We both tense. I know I lost it, hadn’t been able to keep things rolling along precisely laid rails. Still, I didn’t expect consequence, had always traveled with the expectation that actual danger was only a vague notion, made even flimsier with the right preparation. Behind us, the SUV I’d seen before cuts the distance between us, with three green bumper stickers snug under the windshield wipers, and above them a flashing bulb fixed to the interior roof near the visor.

“Shit,” she says. “Forget this for now. Just forget it.”

My anger vanishes. I stop thinking during panic, and that’s not a bad thing. Everything is as it was before – a set of procedures.

“It’s fine,” I say. “We’re fine.”

She turns to me, and I see that she is now crying. “We’re not fine,” she says.

“No, we’re fine. Just stop crying. Everything will look normal. Everything is ok.”

“We won’t look normal, Bailey,” she says, sobbing. “God, this is so stupid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My license – my wallet,” she sputters. “In the trunk.”

We’re on the side of the road now. I can see the man behind us collect a clipboard with his tickets before he exits the vehicle.

“I put it in my suitcase this morning, in the garage. I – I don’t know, I thought you might do something stupid, take my cards and try to strand me or something. Oh, fuckfuckfuckfuck.”

I stare straight ahead.

“You do shit like that, Bailey.”

She stiffens in her seat, sets her shoulders. “No, this is ok. I’ll tell him I wasn’t thinking and left it in the trunk. I’ll just go get it from the suitcase” she says.

I sit back, burrow deep into the headrest.

“I’ll explain. Everything will look completely normal,” she tells me.

“I’ll get it and he’ll write us up and wave us along” she tells me.