On the road

 On the road 

Molly's sister arranged the car, which turned out to be an old Chevy Blazer with, Molly said, a Mercedes diesel engine, his sister, Gloria’s, husband, “my brother-in-law” had put in it. “He’s always doing stuff like that. He gets parts here and bodies there and engines and mixes and mashes them and sells them, too” – with a Mercedes diesel engine and out-of-state plates. It was at the BP station across and three blocks down, parked out front. The keys were in a magnetic box under the rear bumper. The tank was full. There was $1000 in the glove compartment.

     “Where did that come from?” I asked.

     “It’s mine,” Molly said. “I’ve got money.” Then, “Get out,” he said. I was in the passenger seat, looking in the glove box, as he’d told me to. He was behind the wheel. I looked at him. “I forgot,” he said. “ I can’t drive.”

      We walked around the vehicle, and he got in the passenger side, and I got behind the wheel. “I used to could,” he said, “but some time I forgot how.”

At the motel the morning before we headed for elsewhere.

We headed east: across the Blue Ridge, through the Piedmont, and into the Tidewater. We stopped for coffee at a Starbucks. Later we stopped for BBQ – that was somewhere just east of Petersburg after we got on US-460. We followed it quite a ways, then we turned south.

     We stopped before it got dark, because I don’t like driving in the dark. Molly said he didn’t mind, and he thought he could – it was daylight driving that he’d forgotten how to. But I said I was tired and hungry, and we ought to stop now; and he agreed.

     We ate at a local restaurant, the kind of place that features meat loaf, which is what I had, with mashed potatoes and pre-masticated green beans, and chicken tenders, which is what Molly had, with fries and brightly colored coleslaw. We drank Pepsi’s and decided against desert. We’re staying in an old hotel.

     Or motel or “motor inn”: it has twin beds like in our room in Bedlam. We had a little trouble figuring out who was going to sleep where, because there the bed on the left is nearer the door and the bed on the right is nearer the window, but here the bed on the right is nearer the door and the one on the left nearer the window, and Molly wanted to sleep on a bed on the right nearer the window. Finally, he decided he could put the pillow at the foot of the bed, and he’d be all right. I was all right with the way my bed was.

     We’re going to read a while. We couldn’t bring any clothes, but we each put a book in a back pocket. I’m reading Notes from Underground, and Molly has a book about the 1955 Dodgers baseball team. I won’t read long; I’m pretty tired. Molly says he won’t read long either. When he finishes the chapter on Campanella, he’s going to turn out his light.

     All that was yesterday though. This is tomorrow. So, don’t look for us there; we went a different way today.

12.27.16