Free Last Ride to Graceland by Kim Wright Page A

looking down at me last night as I was driving into Macon. He’s running for something. School board. State legislature. Governor. Sheriff maybe, and wouldn’t that be a pretty pickle.
    â€œThe dog named himself.” The man snorts, but he scratches Lucy’s ears nonetheless. “And you’re here on a voyage of discovery. Yeah, I’d say you’re Honey’s daughter, all right.”
    â€œHow well did you know her?”
    â€œNot that well. They’d always park the Lisa Marie right over there, in that hangar, whenever Elvis had a gig in town, and he liked our hamburgers . . .”
    The word our is a slip, small but telling. He doesn’t just own the land, he used to own the Juicy Lucy. Or at the very least worked there. I could call him on it, but something about this guy makes me feel like I’ll get further with him by playing dumb.
    â€œSo they’d send some of the band members or singers over to pick up a bag of burgers,” I venture, even though it’s hard to believe such a simple mission would have imprinted my mother on his memory for thirty-seven years. Of course she was traveling with Elvis, and that might have given her some special status, turning a simple burger run into the kind of story that would put the Juicy Lucy on the local map.
    â€œYou know what the secret to a good burger is?” the man asks me suddenly as we begin to make, by silent agreement, our slow way from the car to the restaurant. It looks less menacing in the light of day. The goddess is smiling down at us, and I’m just southern enough to find the curled vines of kudzu pretty. It’s relentless the way it covers everything, turning cabins intofairy cottages and abandoned railroad tracks into leafy green rivers. Kudzu’s forgiving, like memory. It hides what was, allowing just small bits of the past to peek out here and there.
    â€œGrease?” I guess, and the man laughs.
    â€œWell, good for you,” he says. “Not many girls your age understand that.”
    For the first time I notice a FOR SALE sign on the door. “You’re getting rid of the place?”
    â€œTrying to sell it. Sell it or bulldoze it, all the same to me. That’s why I was out here, to see it there was anything worth taking when I go.”
    When I tried the door the night before, I thought it was locked, but this man rattles the knob with confidence, and when it doesn’t immediately obey, he puts his hip into it. The door gives way with a creak, and as it swings open I stoop to look inside. There’s a lot to see. A counter, some stools, a pool table. A big, open area with what looks like the remnants of a beanbag chair and some sort of arcade game, cracked and broken in the corner. Indian bedspread curtains, a woven rug that has been half eaten by mice, and the same sort of pastel bubble graffiti that was on the outside is all over the walls. Flowers mostly, a frog on a lily pad, none of them particularly well drawn. The whole room is festooned in dust, the indoor equivalent of kudzu, with great ribbons of it hanging down from the rafters and windows.
    â€œWhy’d you close down?” I ask the man, pulling Lucy back before he gallops in and does something crazy like pee on what’s left of the pool table.
    â€œTimes change,” the man says with a shrug. He’s made agesture for me to step in and I do, but he doesn’t enter himself. He just stands there in the doorway, blinking, sunlight streaming past him on both sides and making the dust sparkle.
    â€œDid the cops do it? You got raided?”
    It’s the most obvious two questions in the world, but he bristles, takes offense. “What’d you say your name was?”
    â€œI didn’t. Cory Beth Ainsworth.”
    â€œCory?”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œAnd where’d you come from?”
    â€œBeaufort.”
    â€œAnd you say Honey’s dead.”
    â€œA