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Show Motherlunge a novel 217 I looked out the window. Billboards, off ramps, blue sky scratched up by contrails. Other cars with other people inside staring elsewhere, inscrutable, their pinkies sometimes tidying the entrance to their nostrils.... I couldn't look at Jack. "Do you know what's wrong with Pavia?" I asked him. It / Is. \wasn't rhetorical. My sister, I had noticed recently, was counting again. Checking, 0 W tr ' repeating, tapping the backs of the chairs, the tops of the fences, the tiles on the walls of the subway stations. "The repeating things, you mean," Jack said. "Yeah. Well. I know what she says." He glanced in the rearview mirror, hit the gas, changed lanes, slowed back down again. "She feels like if she doesn't do these things, someone is going to get hurt." "Xavier?" "Xavier, me, you, somebody. She knows it's crazy, but she worries." "She worries." I repeated it like a child. I thought about it like a child. "She didn't use to worry. She never seemed to. When we were growing up she didn't." "No?" My brother-in-law gave me a skeptical glance. "Well. I guess there's a time and place for everything." The molded black plastic of the dashboard, the spongy rubber of the seal around the window, the smell of car interior. "What are you going to do, then?" Jack shook his head. "Try to watch out for her. Love her. I'll need to be better at these things. What about you?" The green sign with the airplane shape came at us overhead; I pointed at it. My sister's husband steered us toward the exit. |
