“You always interview people like this?”
“Only when I’m planning to trust them with my future.”
His laughter faded.
For a moment the service bay light caught something young and bruised in his eyes.
“Then I got one rule too,” he said.
“What is it?”
“You don’t lie to me about what this is.”
Vivian clasped her purse tighter.
“This is me refusing to disappear quietly.”
Leo held her gaze.
Then he nodded toward the RV.
“Guess we’d better fuel up.”
The paperwork took another hour.
Carl kept looking as though he expected either a relative or a moral crisis to arrive any minute.
Vivian signed everything with steady hands.
The money transferred.
Keys changed hands.
The title folder sat in her lap like a declaration of independence.
When she stepped into the RV for the first
official time as its owner, Leo climbed into the driver’s seat and
adjusted the mirrors like he had been born suspicious of blind spots.
He looked back at her.
“You got a name for it?”
“For the RV?”
“People name boats. This thing’s basically a land boat.”
Vivian settled at the dinette.
She thought of Dean’s careful schedules.
Melissa’s sympathetic frowns.
The locked guest room.
The porch she wasn’t meant to sit on.
Then she looked around at the blue-leaf curtains and the tiny kitchen and the terrible upholstery.
“Yes,” she said. “Its name is Absolutely Not.”
Leo barked out a laugh and started the engine.
They rolled onto the highway just after midnight.
Vivian expected terror.
Instead she felt something brighter.
Not youth.
Youth was wasted on energy and bad judgment.
This was older than that.
This was relief so sharp it almost felt like joy.
For the first hour they spoke little.
The highway unspooled under the headlights.
Rest stop signs flashed by.
Leo drove one-handed sometimes, light on the wheel, as if machines made more sense to him than people.
Finally he said, “You gonna tell me about him?”
Vivian did not pretend not to understand.
“My son thinks he’s saving me from myself.”
“That the official version?”
“Yes.”
“And the real one?”
She watched trucks pass like dark whales.
“The real one is that my husband died, and my son decided grief made me easy to rearrange.”
Leo nodded as if checking a private suspicion against the evidence.
“My dad used to do that.”
Vivian glanced up.
He kept his eyes on the road.“Talk like everything was concern. Like
every decision he made was for everybody else’s good. If you pushed
back, you were crazy, selfish, disrespectful, ungrateful. Pick one.”
Vivian said softly, “Dean prefers confused.”
Leo snorted.
“Yeah. That tracks.”
She waited.
