Ride with Me

“Thirty-five. I couldn’t even drive yet when I saw that concert. My brother took me.” The memory stung a little, but he pushed it out of his mind.

“Must have been a good show. You hung on to the shirt long enough.”

“It’s a guy thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and tucked into her dinner. Tom laid back on the bench of the picnic table and studied the clouds, wondering what sort of thirtieth birthday celebration he could pull together in Marshfield, Missouri.

Lexie loved sleeping with Tom, but she sure hated waking up with him.

At home, she liked to snooze her alarm three or four times, nestling in the quiet cocoon of her sleep-warmed bed before finally wandering out to the kitchen in her flannel pajamas. She’d make a cup of tea and settle down in the coziest chair in her living room with a book, reading and sipping while the hot drink warmed her and woke her up.

It wasn’t a routine you could replicate when you were sleeping in a tent. Even if you let yourself drift slowly awake in the comfort of your sleeping bag, sooner or later you had to strip off your clothes and expose your cringing skin to the morning air as you fumbled with zippers in the dark, your tender ears assaulted by the sounds of half a dozen different space-age fabrics swooshing and scrunching against one another. And then there was the necessity of dismantling your bed while you were still in it, stuffing your sleeping bag into the compression sack with fingers that felt fat and stiff with sleep, sitting on the sleeping pad to squeeze all the air out and rolling it up over and over again until you managed to get it small enough to fit into its slippery storage bag. Before you were even fully awake, you were sitting on the bare floor of the tent, surrounded by your packed luggage, tumbling headfirst into the day.

Tom was well aware she hated it, and he only made it worse. He was an early riser, which meant she usually awoke to the sounds of him getting dressed. Once he knew she was conscious, he liked to tease her by pretending they were racing to see who could pack up the fastest, leaning over to tug her sleeping bag back out of the compression sack she was trying to stuff it into, messing up her piles of clothes when she wasn’t looking. He usually managed to get her laughing eventually, but it was the helpless laughter of capitulation.

She’d have much preferred a slower, gentler morning routine.

So it was a pleasant surprise to wake up on the morning of her thirtieth birthday to find Tom beside her, awake but still, propped up on one elbow in the gray light of the dawn.

“Good morning,” she said sleepily.

“Good morning.”

“You’re not moving.”

“Yeah, I thought we could try it your way.”

She snuggled closer to tuck her head against his shoulder. “For my birthday?”

“For your birthday.” He kissed her forehead, and she closed her eyes, breathing him in as she drifted back to sleep.

The morning was hot, the air thick enough to drink. She’d hadn’t been prepared for this much humidity, having only traveled this far east a few times when she was younger. Missouri turned her normally wavy hair into a giant, unruly bush that challenged the staying power of her ponytail holder.

The hills were fun, though. The terrain alternated between flat pastureland and sections of short, steep climbs through shady woods. She and Tom treated the climbs like roller coasters, pedaling as hard as they could on the way down so they could fly up the other side and hammer over the top, standing up on the pedals. Compared to the flat wasteland of Kansas, Missouri was an amusement park.

By the time they hit Marshfield in the early afternoon, Lexie had noodle legs, but she couldn’t stop smiling. Tom mumbled something about secret birthday errands and left her at the post office, promising to return in an hour or so. She retrieved her package, which had come general delivery, and opened it beneath a tree outside. From her mother, there was a silver bicycle pendant on a chain. James had sent Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the classic psychedelic account of the Merry Pranksters’ cross-country bus journey, with a note saying he hoped her trip was just as exciting, even minus the LSD. She leaned back against the tree, contented, and read her new book, pausing now and then to watch people come and go from the post office.

Tom rode up eventually. She could see him coming from a long way off, peering both ways before he zipped across the street, smiling when he finally spotted her. She loved to watch him, the power in his body, the masculine grace of his movements. Somewhere in Kansas, maybe even back in Colorado, without her even realizing it, her whole world had slipped off its axis and reoriented itself around Tom. She could deny it twelve ways to Sunday, and she’d spent a good month doing just that, but it didn’t make it any less true. She was in love with him, deeply and hopelessly in love with her riding companion, and she didn’t even have the good sense to be worried about it. Instead, she pretended it would always be this way, state after state, mile after mile, night after night. No declarations of love, no negotiations about the future, no messy breakups, no fighting, no recriminations. They’d just ride, and be together.

It was her birthday, so she didn’t have to acknowledge what an absurd fantasy that was.

Marshfield was on what used to be U.S. Route 66, the country’s first interstate thoroughfare turned repository of kitsch, which explained the old-fashioned drive-in restaurant where they had an early dinner. She and Tom pulled into the car bay on their bikes, much to the amusement of the folks in the nearby vehicles. Aft

er they’d polished off their cheeseburgers, fries, and milkshakes, Tom led her to the Kit Carson Motel, where an elderly woman named Ramona with a lopsided bouffant winked at him and gave them the key to what she called “the bordello room.”

When Tom unlocked the door, all Lexie could do was stand there and gawk. Two full-size beds covered in shiny pink satin bedspreads dominated the room, flanking a side table that sported a huge lamp with a tasseled red silk shade. The carpet was a marled walnut shag, probably as old as Ramona. At least two dozen framed pictures hung above the headboard of each bed, plus another fifty or so on the remaining walls. Closer inspection revealed them to be photographs of various landmarks along Route 66, each picture carefully labeled with a typewritten slip of paper slid beneath the glass.

While she considered a photo of the barbed wire museum in McLean, Texas, that hung by the door, Tom asked, “What do you think?”

“I’m pretty sure this is the most horrible room I’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said seriously. “This is a vintage American auto court. I’m pretty sure it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.”

“The carpet, maybe. I’m afraid to take off my shoes.”

“Aw, come on. It’s tacky, but it’s clean. Maybe I’m not doing this right—it’s supposed to be romantic. Here, let me set the mood.” He crossed to the bedside table and switched on the lamp, then pulled the blinds over the windows, plunging the room into red-tinted gloom.

“Ooh, that’s much better. Now I’m really feeling the bordello vibe.”