4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

C lark pulled off at the next exit to fill up the gas tank. It felt good to get out and stretch. At five foot six Cleo was completely average, but she still felt like she had to fold herself into her seat in that car. She peeked at Clark, whose arms were stretched above his head, making him look like one of those gummies you could pull apart like taffy. He had to have at least half a foot on her, so she couldn’t imagine how uncomfortable he must be.

Everyone used the restroom and Cleo traded places with Dottie. Clark told Cleo when she got back to the car that she had a text from the number she’d written earlier. Cleo was relieved to see that Bea understood her message and knew how she could contact her. She was probably dying to know where Cleo was, but Cleo couldn’t risk telling her more just yet.

Dottie had initially objected to the radio being on as she tried to fall asleep, but Clark overruled that decision by promising they’d keep it low.

Oldies music streamed softly through the speakers while the trees whizzed by outside the passenger window. Cleo’s eyes started to droop, so she tried to lay back in her seat to rest. As she leaned the seat back a couple notches, Dottie kicked it with her foot. “I cain’t sleep if your seat is lyin’ on my legs!” she shouted, even though the seat was nowhere near Dottie’s legs.

“No closing your eyes over there,” Clark added. “Between you and Dr. P here, I need you to keep me from falling asleep.” He tapped his giant soda in the cupholder. Cleo was officially outvoted. No rest for the wicked.

Cleo yawned and stretched. “The only way I’m staying up is if you keep me up, so you’d better start talking.”

“What should I talk about?” he asked.

“I don’t even care. Tell me about your first pet, your favorite pizza toppings, why the Jets are better than the Giants–”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you did not just say the Jets are better than the Giants.”

“Oh, but I did.”

He sniffed. “I must assume, then, that your knowledge of football is limited. You’ve probably seen the Jets play a couple times, right?”

“We have box seats. I never miss a game.”

The occasional oncoming car lit up the interior enough to catch Clark’s big, round saucer eyes bugging out. She’d rendered him speechless.

She changed the thread slightly. “You follow sports, but do you play any?”

He cleared his throat. “I played football in college,” he recovered.

“Where?”

“West Point.”

“You went to West Point?”

“I started at West Point, but I graduated elsewhere.”

“Why didn’t you finish?”

Clark ran his hands through his hair. “My dad’s in the army and he always wanted me to follow in the family business. It wasn’t for me, though. I did two years and then transferred to Columbia.”

“How did he take that?”

“About as you can imagine. We didn’t talk for a long time.”

“And what did you study at Columbia?”

Clark paused for much longer than was necessary before saying, “Creative writing.”

Whoa. That did not fit with the picture she had of him in her head. She kind of liked being wrong about him. “That’s cool. Have you been published?”

“Mmhmm.”

He changed the radio station and Steve Perry’s dulcet tones washed over Cleo. As he sang, the poignancy of this Journey song as she headed into her midnight sun was not lost on her.

Cleo couldn’t stop herself from singing along to one of her favorite songs, though she hoped her performance wasn’t so loud as to assault the ears of everyone, unlike the person currently snoring in the backseat.

“You’ve…got a great voice,” Clark commented.

“Thanks. This is one of my favorite bands.” She stared out the window. “It makes me think of my dad.” Cleo could name half a dozen moments when she and her dad had belted Journey songs together. A pit formed in her stomach as she thought again about what he must be feeling right now. She and her dad had a complicated relationship, but she didn’t mean to cause him worry or stress, though she was sure he felt both right now.

Reading her thoughts, Clark asked, “Was your father at the wedding today?”

“Yes.”

“And does he know where you’re headed?”

“Nope.”

“Is that why you took a car instead of a flight?”

“Yep.”

“Where exactly are you going in Texas?”

Cleo pondered the harm in divulging so much information. She couldn’t see what he could possibly do with it, so she told him, “San Antonio.”

“I love San Antonio. One of the prettiest cities in the U.S. as far as I’m concerned.”

“I’ve never been there.”

Clark’s eyebrows raised for a moment but lowered again quickly. “You’ll love it. You’ve gotta go to the river walk. You’ll feel like you’re on the French Riviera.”

The French Riviera was one place Cleo had been to, and she doubted anywhere in Texas could mimic it well.

Clark proceeded to list all the places Cleo needed to make sure to eat, and she noticed more than half of them seemed to be BBQ joints. It was Texas, after all.

“Are you from San Antonio?” she finally asked as he seemed to be running out of steam.

“My dad was stationed there for a couple years.” Oh, right, he was an army brat, so he didn’t really have a hometown. He had twenty.

“Are you headed there, too?” She knew he’d said he was going to Texas, but that was a big state.

“Around there,” he answered vaguely.

Cleo picked at a nail that had already chipped, despite the manicure she’d gotten yesterday. As she’d bolted from her wedding this morning she’d only been able to think far enough ahead to get out of New York and on the road to Texas. She hadn’t taken the time to wonder what would happen once she actually made it to San Antonio.

Now that she was headed in that direction, though, she pondered what she would do once she arrived. The address she had memorized after reading it many, many times was seared into her brain. She knew she could find it without much trouble. The problem was, Cleo had no way of knowing what would happen once she knocked on the door.

Was the person she was looking for still living there? Would that person recognize Cleo? Would she be allowed inside the house? Cleo had so many questions; she’d also known since she’d learned about this person’s existence that she wouldn’t have any answers until she tried to get them. She’d realized as she stood looking into that bridal mirror this morning that she owed it to herself to at least try. And it had to be now. She didn’t know why this felt like her only chance, but it did.

“What are you thinking about so seriously over there?” Clark interrupted her thoughts. “How gross your salad was at dinner and how you should’ve gotten a burger like me?”

“Shockingly, my mind isn’t always centered around food like some people’s in this car.” She sent a pointed look toward Clark’s snacks that he immediately scooped up and popped in his mouth.

As he chewed he said, “That’s not a very nice accusation to make about Dottie. We don’t know that she’s always thinking about food.”

“No, I’d be willing to put money on her mind being occupied ninety-nine percent of the time on her ‘ladies.’”

Clark grinned. “What do you think she’d do if I started squawking right now? Would she respond to me in her sleep?” Without waiting for an answer, Clark quietly began clucking, sounding more like poultry than a human should be able to. His elbows moved in and out like a chicken’s and Cleo had to bite her lip to hold in the laughter.

Dottie mumbled, “Settle down, Peck-a-dilly. There’s enough food for all of you,” and then rolled over.

“That did not just happen,” Cleo said, stifling another giggle.

“Oh, it did,” Clark said. “Your turn.”

Cleo startled and waved her hands in front of her. “There is no way on God’s green earth that I’m going to bock like a chicken for your entertainment.”

“But it’s so diverting. I couldn’t possibly become drowsy at the wheel with that racket going on.”

Cleo rolled her eyes.

Clark’s grin was diverting. Maybe she should take a picture of that and put it up on the dash for him to look at anytime he started to drift off. Or maybe it only diverted her, likely because it was so rarely seen. Cleo enjoyed sneaking peeks of Clark’s profile any chance she thought he wasn’t looking.

“Fine, you’ll just have to do something else to divert me.”

“Such as…?”

“Such as, telling me what would make a rational woman leave her own wedding.”

A knot tightened again in her stomach.

Clark continued, “And, if that’s too personal, then I want to hear your most embarrassing moment.” The knot loosened marginally. This wasn’t a topic she liked to dwell on, either, but it was definitely preferable to talking about today.

“Okay, but only if you agree to share yours after.” Clark agreed, which was how Cleo found herself divulging the worst day of her life–before today, that is. She needed to edit it a bit, though.

“I was a guest on a friend’s…boat one summer a few years ago. There were a bunch of us, both girls and guys.” Cleo could still perfectly picture the color of the cerulean blue water in Greece where she’d spent the summer on a yacht. It had been a magical two months, surrounded by cliffs with white houses and blue roofs on them.

“I swam all day and decided that before dinner I’d shower and clean up. We pranked each other all week, so I wasn’t too surprised when my towel was missing after my shower. I figured someone had put it in my room or something, but when I couldn’t find it there, I started to panic. Knowing I’d just have to air dry, I made my way to my closet to get some clothes, when I realized they were missing, too.”

Clark guffawed, or what Cleo had always suspected a guffaw to sound like. She wasn’t exactly certain what that word meant.

“Yeah. Someone had snuck into my room during my shower and removed everything from it. They’d taken the clothes from my closet and my drawers, including my underwear. There was nothing there for me to use, not even the bathing suit I’d been wearing, or my dirty clothes.” Cleo had been furious. None of her pranks were that mean, just spaghetti noodles in toothpaste and plastic wrap on toilet seats.

“They’d also taken my phone, so I couldn’t call anyone for help. I was meant to wear my ‘birthday suit’ to hunt for my clothing. The only things they hadn’t taken were the face and hand towels in the bathroom, which would’ve covered very little.”

“So, what did you do?” Clark asked.

“My first hope was to use the shower curtain, but of course there was only a door on the shower, no curtain. So I wrapped myself in the bed sheet and went room to room throughout the boat, tripping over the sheet–it nearly came off once–until I found the clothes.”

Clark chuckled dryly. “Where were they hidden?”

“In a closet full of life vests. The shirts were wrapped around the vests, the pants dangling from the bottom of them. It looked like a closet full of dead people hanging from a rack.”

“Wow, great imagery.”

“Yes, especially since they’d put my bras, underwear, and bikinis on the outside of the clothing, too. It was humiliating to the extreme.”

“Did you ever figure out who’d done it?”

“It was a group effort by about half the people there. Only my best friend Bea and a few others hadn’t known about it, or refused to participate.” Coincidentally, her fiance? had been the ringleader of the pranksters, back before they’d even dated. He’d targeted her because, like a second grader, he had a crush and was trying to get her attention. She should’ve known right then that he was bad news and kept far away from him. His jokes were always borderline cruel.

They were both silent for a minute, lost in thought. Cleo finally said, “Your turn.”

Clark sighed. “My most embarrassing moment doesn’t hold a candle to yours, but here goes.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “I waited tables while I was in college at a fancy-ish restaurant. I had to wear a penguin suit and everything. One night I had a party of ten or so, all dressed to the nines, headed to the ballet or opera after….I can’t remember which. One woman was…I mean, she had the biggest…” Clark was floundering, but his gestures toward his chest area gave him away.

“She was well-endowed?” Cleo guessed.

“Sure, yeah, let’s say that. Anyway, I was serving oysters, and somehow one of them slid right off my tray and down her dress. Plop ! I mean, it didn’t circle the drain or anything, it was a total hole in one. I couldn’t have made that shot had I been trying, but it–”

“Okay, I get the point. It went straight down.”

Clark nodded. “Well, she looked at me, and I looked at her, and I didn’t look at the…drain. And nobody said anything for the longest ten seconds of my life. Finally, the man next to her said, ‘It’s gone now, my boy. Nothing that goes down there ever comes out,’ in a nasally voice. The woman turned pink, everyone else laughed, I served the rest of the oysters, and we all went on with our business. I noticed the woman didn’t take one, though.”

Cleo laughed. “That is just like that scene in To Catch a Thief !”

“In what?”

“Only one of the greatest movies of all time!” Cleo sat up in her seat, animated now. “Cary Grant is gambling, and he drops one of his chips down this woman’s dress and then tries to get her to give it back to him. Instead, she gives him some of her own chips. He did it to get this other lady’s attention at the table, and he definitely gets it. She bursts out laughing and decides she likes him and that he should date her daughter.”

One side of Clark’s mouth lifted. “Well, I wasn’t trying to get anyone’s attention. I was just trying to blend in with the scenery. But I got it. Another woman in the group slipped her number into my pocket before they left.”

“Did you call it?”

“What do you think I am, crazy? Of course I didn’t call it. Anyway, my friend who’d been serving with me told every one of our coworkers, and I heard about that little incident the rest of the time I worked there. They nicknamed me ‘Cleavage Clark’ and everything.”

“That’s a pretty unfortunate nickname, I’ll give you that,” Cleo agreed.

“Especially when you have no cleavage.”

Cleo chuckled as she pictured Clark trying to figure out what to do about the lost oyster, his embarrassment obvious but nothing compared to the poor woman’s.

Clark was almost smiling, tapping his fingers to the beat on the steering wheel. He had a great smile, if only he’d let it out more often; it completely transformed his face. She liked that he wasn’t as serious and ill-tempered as earlier. As the sun had gone down, so it appeared had his guard. Cleo could get used to this version of not-as-grumpy Clark.

Five minutes and about thirty yawns later Clark said, “I think I’d better find somewhere to pull over. I’m going to start nodding off if I don’t.”

“But, we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“We’ll find something,” he said.

At the next exit, Clark navigated toward a very small, very old-looking motel. When he parked the car Dottie sat up in the back.

“What’s goin’ on? Where are we?” she asked.

“We’re stopping for the night,” Clark replied. “I’ll go get us some rooms.”