“Goddammit!” she screamed at the tree. “You almost shot me!”
A rifle dropped to the ground. A few seconds later, a man followed. Her father, Ben Easterday. He wore a brown dress shirt and tan slacks, the closest thing he had to camo, though he looked mostly like a wet paper bag. He had to be cold, he had to be hungry, but he didn’t seem to mind any of that as he walked toward Ana. “I needed to see if I could protect you when he comes,” he said, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world. Like he was a little hurt, frankly, by her ingratitude.
Ana pressed the heel of her hand against her eyelid, which wouldn’t stop trembling. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Protect me less.”
“If you left, I wouldn’t have to protect you at all.”
Five months. That’s how long they had been in Morocco. Enough time to settle in, settle down, and reasonably conclude they were hidden and safe. Her father had gone the other direction. It started with patrolling the house at night, checking locks, peering out into the yard. He stashed guns in dark pockets of the house, taped to the back of cabinet doors, under floorboards, inside light fixtures, where they cast weird shadows. A few weeks ago her father announced it was only a matter of time before Zeeshan found him, and when he did, no one could help. That’s when he told Ana to leave, save herself, go back home to her mother.
She refused. He moved into the tree.
His logic—if you could call it that—was to draw the gunfire away from her, and to give himself a good watchtower besides.
Honestly, she hadn’t expected him to last a single night up there. Her father was the consummate indoorsman. Italian loafers and silk pocket squares, not hiking boots and bandannas. But in the last couple of weeks, he’d managed to construct a makeshift tree stand out of broken-up furniture, arrange coffee cups to catch rainwater, and, most stunningly, endure.
Ana pressed harder against her eyelid. “Dad,” she said. “No one knows where we are. No one is coming.”
“You don’t know Zeeshan,” he said. “He does not give up. And when he comes, you do not want to be here.”
She could not have this argument again. Not in bare feet on wet grass. Not after a guerilla production of William Tell. Not with a nut who lived in a tree, who would surely perish if left alone. “Do you think I want to be here?” she said through clenched teeth. “I would love to leave. I would leave your ass in a hot second if Mom hadn’t beat me to it.”
He looked at the tree. Ana could see his throat working. Ah, shit.
“Dad—”
He gave a little shake of his head.
This was her real talent, the skill that never showed up on an aptitude test. Her tongue was a slicing black claw. She could say the worst things; she didn’t even have to try. More like the opposite: she had to keep her mouth in check every waking minute, like the eyes of Medusa.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I truly am. But if you ask me to leave one more time, I will take your gun and shoot off your goddamn face.”
He studied the tree. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking or ignoring her. “I mean it,” she said. “I’m not fucking around.”
He winced. “Language.”
Her old father, the gentleman. He was still in there somewhere. “Sorry,” she said again. “But you need to understand that I’m not leaving you. I won’t.”
He nodded and started back to the tree, picking up the barrel of the rifle and dragging the butt through the wet grass.
Ana went inside the farmhouse and found her shoes. By the time she came back out, he was already up in the tree, hidden in the canopy. As she walked down the driveway, he chambered another round. She shuddered and walked faster.
At the road she looked both ways. Except for the gray hem of dawn, there was little to see. No traffic, no sign of intelligent life anywhere.
Goddammit, she was right. No one was coming.
* * *
Ana was a runner. Not for sport, or health, but as a way to get herself to work by six in the morning. This made her an oddity in a town where fourteen-year-olds drove with farm permits, twelve-year-olds tooled around on motorbikes, and little kids knew how to bum a ride. Even Govert, a regular at Karen’s Kitchen who had lost his license after his fourth DUI, did not resort to self-locomotion. He souped up his John Deere, bungee-corded a boom box behind the seat, and continued to menace the streets and lawns of Morocco.
Ana wasn’t anti-driving; she just hadn’t learned how to do it. Back home she’d enrolled in Driver’s Ed, but the first time she got behind the wheel, she put the car into reverse and promptly flattened a mailbox. The cheerleader in the back seat cried out and grabbed her neck like she’d been whiplashed. Ana rolled her eyes to the instructor. “Old blowjob injury,” she muttered.
The instructor didn’t even smirk. (How was Ana supposed to know the cheerleader was his niece?) As punishment, he made Ana walk up to the house by herself, where a skinny lady with wormy lips leaned against the porch rail, saying, “Bravo. What are you going to do for an encore—plow over my fence?”
Ana asked the lady if she could use her phone to call her father, and the lady fished a cordless out of her housedress and invited Ana to fling it through the bay window. If Ana was lucky, she might knock some figurines off a shelf. Go ahead, treat her whole house like a carnival game.
“What are your prizes?” Ana said before she could stop herself. “I mean, besides a lifetime supply of bitching.”
The woman gave her a look of disgust tinged with respect, then handed over the cordless.
Ben showed up twenty minutes later with a joke for Ana—”I guess we can cross Postal Worker off your list of career options, huh?”—and a soft touch for everyone else. He told the Driver’s Ed instructor to replace the bumper and send him the bill, yes, even if the bumper was just scuffed, go ahead and get a new one. Leave things better than how you found them, that was his motto. After giving the instructor and the cheerleader a handwritten note for a free dinner at the Tip Top Lounge, Ben went up to the house. He talked to the lady on the porch for a long time, and from the end of the driveway Ana watched the lady’s face soften until she was reflecting his smile and absently fiddling with a string of pearls she hadn’t been wearing earlier. When he called in a crew to plant a new mailbox, he told them to ring it with zinnias, the lady’s favorite flower.
That’s who they were back then: Ana was the one who made a mess, and Ben was the one who smoothed it over.
“Don’t make me go back to Driver’s Ed,” she told him as they walked to his car, a white Triumph blushing in the sunset. “I can’t face those people.”
“Bug, you have to learn to drive.”
She caught his elbow. “You can teach me.”
He gave her a look like that was the finest idea he’d heard in months. Ana burst into tears.
The next week, Ben walked into his boss’s warehouse at the wrong time, and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. Now Ana still hasn’t learned to drive, and Ben has forgotten how to make anything better.
* * *
Breakfast, Karen’s Kitchen. A laminated sign that read OLD LIARS dangled from the ceiling over a long table of regulars.
“You can’t have half. Either you get it or you don’t. There is no half-order.”
“I’m trying to lose a few pounds.”
“So get the diet plate.”
The diet plate was a stack of pineapple rings mortared with cottage cheese, served atop a wilted leaf