The Blue Boot

Photo by Julie Jordan Scott

Starting out, my mother is excited to be driving. She sings along with the radio. The sunlight is yellow and bright on her left arm. She wears sunglasses and looks like a blonde Jackie O. But as we get closer to my grandmother’s house—past the six-hour mark, maybe seven and a half—after we pass through Iowa and we’re weaving through traffic on the I-280 bypass around the Quad Cities, definitely as we enter Illinois, she becomes visibly more nervous, tapping her nails on her thigh, worrying the cloth of her slacks between two fingers so that the fabric chirps like a cricket. She’s playing her Mother Angelica tapes, and you cannot sing along with a bunch of geriatric nuns who cannot carry a tune in the first place. Listening to their tapes is a form of penance in and of itself, and the fact that my mother has brought the entire set of twelve cassettes angers me. “Why do you have to listen to that?” I snarl. I am nearly eighteen, and snarling comes easily to me.

“Oh, I like them. Don’t you like them?”

“Of course not. They’re so horrible, Mama.”

“Well, we could listen to the radio. . . .” My mother’s voice trails off. But we don’t listen to the radio. The radio makes her nervous.

The trucks are driving too fast. They are menacing. They will try to run us off the road.

My mother chews her fingernail.

“Stop chewing your nails,” I snap, and her fingers fly out of her mouth.

“No need to shout.”

“You told me to tell you to stop. I wouldn’t say anything, but you told me to. You said you wanted to grow them out.”

“Oh, I said that. Yes, I did say that.” My mother’s sunglasses are pushed back over her hair, and she squints at the traffic, biting her lips.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I could read a book—reading makes everything bearable—but I can’t; I get motion sickness, so I’m staring at the highway, the grim eternal asphalt, as the nuns drone on and on. The fields aren’t even rolling and pretty anymore. In late May, Iowa is spring itself, with fluffy white clouds, green tractors on the horizon turning up the black soil, cloud shadows racing across the fields and highway as though a pod of whales is floating in the blue, ocean-like sky above us. But Illinois is flat. The landscape is not prosperous but conquered. The outskirts of unseen cities are dotted with concrete barriers and orange traffic cones, construction that isn’t on the Triple-A map, causing the trucks to slow and belch black exhaust and the highway to clog.

The closer we get to our destination, the more tentative my mother grows.

“Should we stop? I’m tired, but we could drive straight through. Mother will be anxious, she’ll be angry. We could get a hotel room.” My mother chews a nail to the quick. Her finger is bleeding before I can stop her.

“We should stop,” I say. “If we get there at night, Grandma won’t have any food. We’ll have nothing to eat. She’ll talk to you for hours, and we’ll be hungry.”

“Yes.” My mother nods. “We’ll be hungry. She won’t have any food.”

“We should stay the night here.” I consult the TripTik and name the highway exit. “There’s a Howard Johnson’s. You can tell Grandma I made you stop. We can call her from the motel.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s a good idea,” my mother says.

“Remember what happened last time? There was nothing to eat.” My voice is pleading, edging toward desperate.

“Are you hungry? Will you eat something?”

“Yes. I’m hungry.”

My mother has come to a decision, and she zips off the highway, taking the exit fast and hard.

“Well, let’s stop here!” My mother’s...