He answered with a shrug.
‘I need another beer,’ Jilly said as the waitress arrived with Dylan’s dinner.
‘I’m driving,’ he said, declining a second round.
‘Yeah, but the way you’ve been driving tonight, another beer could only help.’
Maybe she had a point, maybe she didn’t, but he decided to live with uncharacteristic abandon. ‘Two,’ he told the waitress.
As Dylan began to eat chicken and waffles in anarchic disregard for the shape and size of each bite, Jilly said, ‘So let’s say we go north a couple hundred miles, find a place to hole up and think. What exactly do we think about – other than how totally screwed we are?’
‘Don’t be so negative all the time.’
She bristled better than a wire brush. ‘I’m not negative.’
‘You aren’t exactly as cheerful as the Dalai Lama.’
‘For your information, I was a nothing once, a wadded-up-thrown-away-Kleenex of a kid. Shy, shaky shy, rubbed so thin by life I half believed sunlight passed through me. Could’ve given timid lessons to a mouse.’
‘Must’ve been a long time ago.’
‘You wouldn’t have bet a dollar against a million bucks I’d ever get up on a stage, or join a choir before that. But I had hope, great hope, had this dream of me as a something, a somebody, this positive dream of me as a performer, for God’s sake, and I dragged myself up out of shaky-shy nothing until I started to live that dream.’
As she drained the last of the beer, she glared at Dylan over the upturned bottle.
He said, ‘No argument – you’ve got good self-esteem. I never said different. It’s not you that you’re negative about. It’s the rest of the world.’
She looked as if she might hit him with the empty bottle, but then she put it down, slid it aside, and surprised him: ‘That’s fair enough. It’s a hard world. And most people are hard, too. If you call that negative thinking, I call it realism.’
‘Lots of people are hard, but not most. Most are just scared or lonely, or lost. They don’t know why they’re here or what’s the purpose, the reason, so they wind up half dead inside.’
‘I suppose you know the purpose, the reason,’ she said.
‘You make me sound smug.’
‘Don’t mean to. Just curious what you think it is.’
‘Everyone has to figure it out for himself,’ he said, which was in truth how he felt. ‘And you’re one who will because you want to.’
‘Now you sound smug.’ She looked as if she might whack him with the bottle, after all.
Shepherd picked up one of the three pats of unwrapped butter and popped it in his mouth.
When Jilly grimaced, Dylan said, ‘Shep likes bread and butter, but not in the same bite. You don’t want to see him eat a mayonnaise-and-bologna sandwich.’
‘We’re doomed,’ she said.
Dylan sighed, shook his head, said nothing.
‘Get real, okay? They start shooting at us, what rules will Shep have about how we’re allowed to dodge the bullets? Always dodge left, never right. You can weave but you can’t duck – unless it’s a day of the week that has the letter u in it, in which case you can duck, but you can’t weave. How fast can he run while reading, and what happens when you try to take the book away from him?’
‘It won’t be that way,’ Dylan said, but he knew she was right.
Jilly leaned toward him, her voice lowering, but gaining in intensity what it lost in volume: ‘Why won’t it? Listen, you’ve got to admit, even if it were just you and me in this mess together, we’d be on a greased slope in glass shoes. So then hang a hundred-sixty-pound, butter-munching millstone around our necks, and what chance do we have?’
‘He’s not a millstone,’ Dylan said stubbornly.
To Shep, she said, ‘Sweetie, no offense, but if we have any hope of getting through this, the three of us, we’ve got to face facts, speak the truth. We lie to ourselves, we’re dead. Maybe you can’t help being a millstone, but maybe you can, and if you can, then you’ve got to work with us.’