Free Around the Bend by Shirley Jump Page A

spades.
    I glanced down the highway, which seemed to stretch to infinity. Miles and miles yet to go. And just maybe…
    An opportunity to prove to my mother I could be the kind of daughter she wanted. And in the process, prove it to myself.

eight
    Nick hid his disappointment well. “You never even made it past the Everly Brothers and Dion?”
    I sat in my car in the parking lot of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and sighed. Poor Nick. “I don’t think my mother realizes anyone made music after 1965.”
    “Not so much as a picture of Hendrix? A bit of dust from his Stratocaster?”
    “I think I glimpsed it from one of the halls, if that helps.” A heavy thud sounded on the other end of the phone. “What was that?”
    “Me. Shooting myself.”
    “You and I can always go sometime. Cleveland’s not that far from Boston.”
    “Yeah,” Nick said, but he didn’t sound convinced. He paused a long moment, and I could hear him walk around the apartment. I pictured him, phone in hand, barefoot, padding across the wide pine floors, scuffed by years of past tenants doing God only knew what, their furniture, their lives, leavingimprints. “That implies a future, Hil. Sticking together down the road. Beyond tomorrow. You up for that?”
    My gut tightened with tension, laid out like wires stretched too long, too far. I glanced out the window, but my mother had yet to emerge from the gift shop to save me from this conversation. “Well, you know, I meant going together to Cleveland in the vague kind of, whenever sense.”
    A sigh weighed down by disappointment and missed expectations traveled across the phone lines. I closed my eyes, wishing I hadn’t heard it, that Nick would take it back, laugh, anything. The thread I’d always counted on between Nick and I, however tenuous it sometimes became, was unraveling one word at a time, and I couldn’t twist it together again.
    Not without giving him the one thing I was incapable of handing over.
    I thought of the conversation I’d had with my mother, about her and my father, and all the things she wished she’d talked to him about. There were words I wished I could say to Nick, too, but I was afraid—afraid that if I told him how I really felt, I’d lose him. Or worse, if I never said them, and we ended up in the same unhappy cage I’d seen my parents inhabit.
    I didn’t want that for either Nick or me. But I didn’t want to lose him, either. Instead, I said simply, “I miss you, Nick.”
    “Yeah, me, too,” was all he said back.
    My mother headed across the parking lot, waving a stack of postcards from the gift shop, all bearing the faces of fifties icons. “I have to go. My mother’s coming and you know her, she’ll want to hit the road immediately and she’ll freak if I’m on the phone while I drive. I’ll call you when we get through Indiana.”
    “I won’t be here.” A pause, a heartbeat. “I’m going out tonight.”
    “Again? You never go out two nights in a row.” Or at least, he didn’t without me.
    “Yeah, well, things are changing around here.” Then he hung up the phone and left me hanging in cell hell.
    The implied message—either I change, or he was going to do it without me. Or even worse, find someone willing to change with him. And here I was, a thousand miles away from being able to do anything about it.
    I stared at my phone, mad at him, mad at the entire situation.
    Reginald perked up when Ma got in the car, moving around on the seat, settling down only when she tickled him behind his ears and cooed at him. Once we were back on the road, she went on for ten minutes straight about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but the only one listening was her pig.
    I drove, nodded my head at appropriate times and places, but all the while, my gut and my mind churned over Nick’s words, looking for an out, a way to make everyone happy.
    And came up empty.
    I was literally standing in the middle of a Robert Frost poem. Two roads in the woods, and