She sat back. “Where to start?”
“Well, how about this: can you drive? Do you want to drive? I can do all the driving if necessary, but I remember your enthusiasm about luxury cars in the old days.”
“I can drive. I learned on a stick,” she said. “Well, everybody did, back then. But I, ah, don’t actually have a driver’s license.”
He’d been about to get up from his chair, and paused, surprised. “You don’t?”
She sidled him a guilty look that was so adorable it took everything he had not to grab her up and hug her right there. Instead, as she moved toward the door, he opened it like a gentleman.
They walked out, wind whipping fretfully at them as thunder growled toward the north, though to the south—the direction they were driving in—the sky was completely clear.
She said, “I never had a birth certificate, and after I left Hidalgo, I didn’t keep the same name longer than two or three years at a time, for various reasons.”
She flickered a troubled glance his way, and he knew instinctively that at least one reason had been a fear that he would swoop in and take away their son. After all, when had she been able to trust the men in her life?
But all he said was, “Alejo’s told me about some of the troubles you had.”
“The single mother stigma was so heavy in the fifties, especially if you were poor, and not white. Not that that is news. But I caught a real break when a good-hearted woman hired me as a governess for her four-year-old. She was Spanish—from Madrid—her English minimal, and her husband was away all the time, traveling for his company. I figured out fast what she really needed was company in that huge house. She insisted that our kids play together, learning Spanish and English equally. She’s the one who taught me to drive. But then her husband got transferred to Europe, she up and moved, and I was out looking for work again. New names, new places.”
She paused at the door of her room, the wind teasing the fine strands of her white hair that had escaped her braid. “When I got out west, I had no money for a car. I hitchhiked a lot, if I was with others, and when alone, got used to public transportation.”
Godiva keyed the door open, and there was her suitcase, packed and waiting. She pulled it out as she said, “By the time a friend gave me an old clunker that her boyfriend had given her, well, for a while there I just drove without a license. That old rattletrap had certainly never been registered. For a long time that wasn’t that much of an issue in California, until things got computerized.”
She followed him to his room as he collected his gear. She was still talking. “The last time I drove a long distance was when I took the coast route, looking for a new home. My first thought was to head for Mexico, but I stopped overnight in Playa del Encanto, and somehow I never left.”
“So you’re not street-legal?” he asked over his shoulder as he stowed their stuff in the trunk—he noticed this time she let him heft hers in.
He smothered a laugh. Somehow the idea of her living by her own rules was just so . . . Godiva. Funny, how fast he’d gotten used to her name, even after years of thinking of her as something else. Maybe it was because Shirley had always seemed a borrowed name, or a label, but Godiva was somehow so very her.
“I’ll have you know I am now a perfectly legal, tax-paying citizen of our republic,” she stated in mock pomposity. “Though I did live off the grid until the books started selling, and I got an agent. Sterling woman, and as savvy as they come. She talked me through the vast wasteland of red tape before I could get legal. I pay my taxes, or th
e accountant she turned me onto does. But I never got around to memorizing that booklet of traffic laws and rules, and then age crept up on me and I was convinced that anyone applying for their first license over the age of eighty would get thrown out on her ear. So I decided I’d better not drive except for a few blocks here and back, to keep my hand in. But if you want me to take my share—drive the boring parts, so you can nap—I can do that.”
“A generous offer, but I actually find it relaxing to go on long drives. That Los Angeles traffic, not so much. New York is even worse.”
“Oh, you should try San Francisco,” she said.
“I did. Swore I’d never return, at least to those streets. All of them seemed to be one way, always the opposite way I wanted to go. And the hills!”
They laughed as he pulled onto the highway. A brief spatter of hail tinkled over the car, a spectacular rainbow stretching off toward the mountains. “It looks like the Grand Canyon area is still clear,” he said, and when she assented, he said, “I take it you went back to school?”
“Sort of,” she said. “Since I had no legitimate ID, I couldn’t go to a regular school, but in those days, there was plenty of alternative education everywhere you turned. You pretty much got what you paid for. There was a lot of hippie claptrap and woo as well as people who genuinely loved to teach. You just had to pick and choose.”
“Is that where you started writing?”
“Not right away,” she said. “I always liked telling myself stories in my head. Pretending I wasn’t a throwaway kid slubbing away in a greasy spoon, I was a runaway heiress hiding—I was a spy against a gangster ring—I was anything but what I was. Usually I fantasized about whatever I saw in the latest show at the Odeon.”
“I remember the Odeon. That was our only escape from the Texas heat.” He stopped, wincing. Would the reminder of their time together cause her to clam up?
She chuckled. “Oh, the miracle of air conditioning! Anyway, to avoid nosy questions I used to invent new pasts for myself anytime someone asked. One of my roommates had heard at least three different stories from me. She was pretty cool, actually. Never called me on my crap. She gave me a Solstice present once, a notebook and a fountain pen, and said I should write my stories down. I tried, but I didn’t know how to spell half the words in English, so I’d write in Spanglish, but then nobody could read it. I found it was less fun, just writing for myself. I already knew what had happened. I wanted an audience, and people seemed to like hearing my stories. So I took a remedial English class that was held in People’s Park.”
“I had to do the same,” he said. “Night school, for me. So you started your mysteries then?”
“Nah, that was later. Well, I was writing all along. Even joined a kind of writer’s group, though it was really more of a mutual hoorah group. Criticism not allowed, only praise. That was nice, except when people fought yawns when I read, but then gave me a lot of canned compliments about how great I was, before hustling on to their own reading.”
“Human nature,” he said.
“Yup. Also fake, the way you tell someone who just got a terrible haircut that they are so awesome for trying new things. I couldn’t fool myself I was any good when the same compliments were handed to everybody else. So I took a creative writing class from a guy who was an actual paid teacher, but he liked donating time at the community center. He told me to be a writer I had to be a reader. And handed me a bunch of paperbacks people had left behind. Am I boring yet?”