Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues (12 page)

We’ll catch up
, Nana had said.
You kids have fun
.

Fun
wasn’t exactly the right word for these slow-moving hours in the cab of the Escalade, with the smells and sounds of the world blowing in one open window only to fly out the other and leave the space between him and Ashley clean and empty, ready to be filled with their clasped hands, the brilliance of her smile, the juicy squeaking of her gum.

He didn’t have words for the comfort of Ashley’s presence as they cut through this landscape that flayed him open.

She turned toward him, folding her legs and tucking up her feet so she could give him her full attention. “Tell me about Heberto,” she said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Why do you say his name like … like when you say ‘That depends on Heberto,’ you could be saying,
That depends on the will of the Lord
?”

Roman considered before he replied. Resisted, then gave in to the tug of the past.

“When I was sixteen, seventeen, I went through this hard-core Cuban nationalist phase. I think now it was about seventy percent ordinary teenager rebellion, thirty percent a response to growing up in a place where nobody looked like me. I’d go around praising Fidel and talking about the universal brotherhood of man. It drove Patrick apeshit. He’d just about make himself cross-eyed trying to explain why I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

“Did you?”

“No. I was seventeen, and Cuba is fucking complicated. It’s a lot easier not to know what you’re talking about than to educate yourself on the different stages of the Revolution—I didn’t have the patience to tease all that apart back then. I just wanted to grow my Fidel beard and wear a fatigue jacket and stomp around downtown.”

“You had a beard?”

“I tried to have a beard.”

“Was it sad and patchy? God, I’d love to see pictures of your sad, patchy Fidel beard.”

“I doubt there are any.”

“Patrick didn’t take pictures?”

“If he did, he wouldn’t have kept them.” And Roman didn’t want to think about that. “So my senior year of high school I entered an essay contest sponsored by this Cuban group. These
are mostly rich exile businessmen, the kind of people who hate Castro and want Cuba cut off and left to suffocate. I send them this twenty-page tract full of exactly the kind of thing they hate. You know, pages and pages about racial progress on the island and sugar productivity and the glories of the free public school system. I was so dumb about all of it, I didn’t even know it was an insult. I thought I’d win.”

“Did you?”

He exhaled a laugh. “No. But I got a phone call from Heberto Zumbado the week after the contest results were announced.”

“Because he liked your essay?”

“Because he wanted to explain to me, in painstaking detail, what a jackass I’d made of myself.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. He reamed me. But then, after an hour of that, he started asking me questions. Where was I from, where were my people from, had I been to the island, did I speak Spanish? At first, it was like a police interrogation, except I started to realize that he genuinely wanted to know. He was listening to me.”

“How come?”

“I think at first because I was Cuban, and he felt a sense of responsibility. Like,
Hey, a missing Cuban kid randomly living with white people in Wisconsin, let’s figure out what the deal is here
. But after that he called me again, more than once. My senior year, he checked in every month or two. He found out about my father, asked me about that, asked how Patrick treated me, was I going to college, that kind of stuff.”

Roman hadn’t thought about those phone calls in years. How much time Heberto had carved out of his busy schedule—hours, sometimes entire afternoons. They had talked about what Roman was reading. What he thought of college, Cuba, Patrick, the Catholic Church, girls. What he thought the world should be like.

“He liked you.”

“I don’t know if he liked me. It’s impossible to know if Heberto likes you. But he was
interested
in me, and that meant a lot to me back then.”

“I bet it meant the world.”

He looked over. Her blue eyes were clear and full of understanding, and Roman
remembered that Ashley had found someone, too. Ashley’s grandmother had given her a home, listened to her, bought her tap shoes, told her she had a spark of starlight in her.

“Patrick fucking
hated
it.”

“I’m sure.”

They were quiet for a minute. Roman waited for Ashley to put together all the pieces. Earlier in the trip, she’d heard him on the phone, saying Heberto paid for him to go to Princeton and gave him a place to stay over break. She knew he didn’t go home to Heraly anymore, that he didn’t speak to Patrick, that he’d been to visit his father at the prison and wouldn’t talk about it.

“I’ll tell you sometime,” he said. “But not today. These towns …”

“It’s all right.”

He tried a smile. “Thanks.”

Ashley reached over the console and laid her hand on his shoulder. He placed his own hand on top of hers, then picked up her fingers and brushed a kiss over her knuckles. She tucked her hand back into her lap, looking down at the spot he’d kissed.

A moment later, she straightened her legs out and propped them on the dash.

“I think I kind of like Heberto,” she said.

“You wouldn’t if you met him.”

She sank farther down into the seat, tipped her head back, and turned it to the side enough to smile at him. “We’ll find out, huh?”

“We just might.”

“Do you think we should give up? Go home and … whatever? Because, I don’t know, I think maybe it’s not going to get easier.”

“Probably not.”

“And I’ve already cried more in the past week and a half than I have in, like, five years.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s not your fault. I mean, a lot of it is
my
fault. I guess I want to believe that maybe there’s something to look forward to at the end of this. Other than, you know, whatever wisdom I acquire from having fucked up so many things.”

Roman laughed.

“I’m serious!”

But she was smiling at herself, relaxed in the seat, slumped and bare-legged and so much
more alive than anyone Roman knew.

“I’m the wrong person to ask,” he said. “Until I met you I had the next five years of my life all planned out. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen five minutes from now. And
you
told me I should enjoy it.”

“You should.”

“I am.”

Ashley’s head jerked. “You didn’t just admit that.”

“I did.”

“Roman Díaz, I never thought I’d see the day.”

“Me neither. But you know what Heberto would say?”

“What would
He-berrr-to
say?” She gave the name depth, rolling the
r
for extra emphasis.

“He’d say we make our own luck.”

“Huh.”

“Huh,” Roman agreed.

“Okay,” she said. “I can work with that.” Ashley poked her tongue through her gum.

“When you do that, the gum looks like a tongue condom.”

She flipped down the vanity mirror and pushed her tongue through again. Orange gum. Pointy red tongue. She slurped it back into her mouth. “Have you ever done it with a flavored condom?”

“Done what, exactly?”

Ashley flipped the mirror up and pushed her sunglasses low on her nose. She made vamp eyes at him and lowered her husky voice. “
Anything
, baby.”

Roman chuckled. “No.”

“Let’s buy some at a gas station. Then we can park by one of these rivers we keep driving over and do four hundred dirty flavored-condom things in your car. Smear secretions everywhere.”

“Ash.”

“And we’ll be so busy desecrating your traveling sanctuary, here, we won’t even hear our phones, and Nana and Stanley will wonder where we are, and they’ll probably call the police, but it’s just that we’re, like, rimming each other in the Escalade.”

Roman started to laugh, so naturally she kept going, listing dirty sex acts until she ran out and had to look them up on her phone.

“Seriously, Roman. We’re going to do five of these at the next gas station. I’ll pick ten, and then you can choose the least-threatening options. How do you feel about the ‘Christmas turkey carver’ ”?

“Which one was that again?”

She told him. He suffered some kind of lung collapse. It felt so good and so bad—he’d forgotten what it was like to laugh until you wished you could die.

“You all right?” she asked. “Need me to read that to you again?”

His eyes were streaming. “I’m trying to drive here.”

“You’re doing great, though. Plus, the road is totally straight. So, Christmas turkey carver? I’m worried about carpal tunnel if you did it too long, but—oh, wait—oh my God, this one is
terrible
. Who would
do
that?”

“What?”

“I can’t say.”

“Ash!” He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and tried to get his breathing under control.

“No, you should thank me.” She tossed her phone in the direction of her open purse. “I’m doing you a favor by not telling you. I’m not sure I can even have regular sex now. The Internet has ruined sex forever.”

“The Internet has a knack for that.”

She grinned. “Just so you know, I’m sleeping in the Airstream with Stanley tonight.”

They were in the middle of nowhere. Roman signaled and slowed to a crawl. When he’d pulled the truck off the side of the road, he punched on the hazards, released his seat belt and Ashley’s, and yanked her across the console into his lap.

His breathing was still broken, his grin maniacal, his heart sore. But it was worth it just to see her face, bright and beaming up at him when he kissed her. She tasted like gum, and then she
passed
him the gum, tongue to tongue, and he felt young, innocent, as though the future really was his to lay claim to.

He pulled away, spat out the gum into his fingertips, and stuck it in the well behind the wheel.

“Roman
Díaz
,” she said, scandalized.

“Ashley
Bowman
,” he muttered against her neck. “I’m going to do every single one of those things to you tonight, and—”

“Except the last one,” she interrupted.

“Every single one
except
the last one, whatever it was, and you’re going to love it.”

She wound her arms around his neck, kissed her way from his jawline to the base of his throat, and said, “Okay.”

They stayed there like that, happily intertwined, until the third time Ashley accidentally honked the horn with her ass.

“
Madre de Díos
, woman.”

“Oh, say more Spanish things.”

“All I know are swearwords and some random nouns from the eighth grade.”

“Does that mean you could tell me you spit on my whore of a mother, but you can’t whisper sweet nothings?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s a disappointment.”

“So is the size of this seat.”

“I guess Cadillac men don’t fuck in their trucks,” she said.

“Cadillac men fuck wherever they like.”

“As long as they don’t want to do it in the front seat. Because, as we have just proven, it’s basically impossible.”

“It’s certainly not
impossible
. If you turned around and kind of draped yourself over the wheel—”

“Cadillac men have sex in bed,” she stated. “With the lights off. And probably one of those expensive noise-making machines to drown out any unfortunate moaning.”

He kissed behind her ear. “I like it when you moan.”

“I know, right? I like it when you grunt. Let’s get back on the road so we can arrive somewhere and moan and grunt all over each other before the old people in our traveling circus show up and make judge-y eyes at us.”

“It’s a deal.”

Ashley bit his earlobe, climbed off his lap, and buckled herself back into her seat.

When he pulled out onto the highway, she propped her bare feet on his dashboard again, unwrapped a new piece of gum, and held out the wrapper.

Roman picked her used wad of gum off the speedometer well and stuck it on the paper. She folded the edges shut, pinched it into a little ball, and placed it in her cup holder.

“I’ll throw it away later,” she said.

Roman looked out the window and smiled, because he didn’t care.

He wasn’t a Cadillac man.

Roman sat on the upholstered bench in Ashley’s Airstream trailer, his feet propped on a stack of boxes, and watched her through the propped-open window.

They were parked for the night at a campground located on a spit that stuck out into a lake in Coldwater, Michigan, just over the border from Indiana.

The trailer door stood open. He heard her voice, the rasp of her laugh like a cat’s tongue licking up his spine.

She stood by the flames with her hands sunk into her back pockets, chatting with Jamie and Carly, who perched on a log by the campfire. They’d tucked their daughter into bed hours ago, after Roman got the fire started. He’d also found forked sticks to roast hot dogs, whittled the tips until they were green-white and sharp, and handed them out to the community Ashley had collected around herself.

It fascinated him the way she collected people. Without even trying hard, she’d brought together a troupe of six companions to travel to Wisconsin with her on the spur of the moment.

He thought if he asked her, she’d call it an accident. She would tell him that every one of the people who’d joined her had reasons of their own.

She’d deny they’d come
for
her, that this trip was really
about
her, and in a way that was true—no one was here precisely for Ashley. Stanley wanted to see Esther, and Nana didn’t want to miss the fun. Long past retirement age, financially secure, both of them could afford to leave home on a whim.

So could Nana’s granddaughter, Carly, and Carly’s new husband, Jamie. Roman had overheard Carly telling Ashley that the week and change since she and Jamie eloped had been overwhelming—the crush of paparazzi, planning the wedding shower, dealing with the avalanche of well-wishers and gifts. She and Jamie had jumped at the chance to spend a few days nowhere in particular, with no agenda and no demands on them. Dora, of course, went wherever they went.