Pete rolled over on the filthy mattress and went back to sleep.
The thing that looked like a car ate Julianne Vernon clothes, boots, and all. The only thing it missed was her phone, which now lay beside Doug Clayton’s. Then it popped back into its station wagon shape with that same racquet-hitting-ball sound.
In the hoss-trailer, DeeDee nickered and stamped an impatient foot. She was hungry.
4. THE LUSSIER FAMILY (’11 Expedition)
Six-year-old Rachel Lussier shouted, “Look, Mommy! Look, Daddy! It’s the horse-lady! See her trailer? See it?”
Carla wasn’t surprised Rache was the first one to spot the trailer, even though she was sitting in the backseat. Rache had the sharpest eyes in the family; no one else even came close. X-ray vision, her father sometimes said. It was one of those jokes that isn’t quite a joke.
Johnny, Carla, and four-year-old Blake all wore glasses; everyone on both sides of their family wore glasses; even Bingo, the family dog, probably needed them. Bing was apt to run into the screen door when he wanted to go out. Only Rache had escaped the curse of myopia. The last time she’d been to the optometrist, she’d read the whole damn eye chart, bottom line and all. Dr. Stratton had been amazed. “She could qualify for jet fighter training,” he told Johnny and Carla.
Johnny said, “Maybe someday she will. She’s certainly got a killer instinct when it comes to her little brother.”
Carla had thrown him an elbow for that, but it was true. She had heard there was less sibling rivalry when the sibs were of different sexes. If so, Rachel and Blake were the exception that proved the rule. Carla sometimes thought the most common two words she heard these days were started it. Only the gender of the pronoun opening the sentence varied.
The two of them had been pretty good for the first hundred miles of this trip, partially because visiting with Johnny’s parents always put them in a good mood and mostly because Carla had been careful to fill up the no-man’s-land between Rachel’s booster seat and Blake’s car seat with toys and coloring books. But after their snack-and-pee stop in Augusta, the squabbling had begun again. Probably because of the ice cream cones. Giving kids sugar on a long car trip was like squirting gasoline on a campfire, Carla knew this, but you couldn’t refuse them everything.
In desperation, Carla had started a game of Plastic Fantastic, serving as judge and awarding points for lawn gnomes, wishing wells, statues of the Blessed Virgin, etc. The problem was the turnpike, where there were lots of trees but very few vulgar roadside displays. Her sharp-eyed six-year-old daughter and her sharp-tongued four-year-old boy were beginning to renew old grudges when Rachel saw the horse-trailer pulled over just a little shy of the old Mile 81 rest stop.
“Want to pet the horsie again!” Blake shouted. He began thrashing in his car seat, the world’s smallest break-dancer. His legs were now just long enough to kick the back of the driver’s seat, which Johnny found très annoying.
Somebody tell me again why I wanted to have kids, he thought. Somebody remind me just what I was thinking. I know it made sense at the time.
“Blakie, don’t kick Daddy’s seat,” Johnny said.
“Want to pet the horrrrsie!” Blake yelled. And fetched the back of the driver’s seat an especially good one.
“You are such a babykins,” Rachel said, safe from brother-kicks on her side of the backseat DMZ. She spoke in her most indulgent big-girl tone, the one always guaranteed to infuriate Blakie.
“I AM AIN’T A BABYKINS!”
“Blakie,” Johnny began, “if you don’t stop kicking Daddy’s seat, Daddy will have to take his trusty butcher knife and amputate Blakie’s little feetsies at the ank—”
“She’s broken down,” Carla said. “See the traffic cones? Pull over.”
“Hon, that’d mean the breakdown lane. Not such a good idea.”
“No, just swing around and park beside those other two cars. On the ramp. There’s room and you won’t be blocking anything because the rest area’s closed.”
“If it’s okay with you, I’d like to get back to Falmouth before d—”