Quaker instant oats: shaken from the cardboard cylinder into an absurdly clunky cobalt World Market bowl. Water twice the volume of oats (eyeballed). Salt from the greasy plastic grinder. Hollow thump of the microwave door, my thumb jamming the touch pad: Two. Zero. Zero. START. No milk. Raisins shaken out of the repurposed Blue Diamond almond can we brought, black plastic spoon bending before the stiff body of mush.
Breakfast on the road: Kansas City Airbnb.
Perry fitted out the car at home in Tucson (he’s genius at that): dog’s bed folded and stuffed in the space behind the driver’s seat, thinner bed on the seat, blanket Mickey can fuss and rearrange with her bite, the way she likes. We left Arizona five days ago, bound for Chicago and a wedding for Perry’s friend from grammar school. Sunday on I-10: two lanes, few trucks. Dipping and rising through a landscape of barely leafed-out ocotillos and dwindling saguaros, clouds dissolving like the wisp ends of a candy floss baton, in a washed-blue glare sky.
Amarillo parking lot packed with high, bulky pickups. Wood tables with captain’s chairs, American flag art. A gift shop near the cashier’s station sells pigs hammered from old license plates, miniature farm windmills, Lone Star flags. I order—scrambled eggs and bacon, huevos rancheros, two orders of untoasted wheat toast (dry) so we can make sandwiches back at the Airbnb to pack for the day’s ride—and wait on a bench, gazing across at a framed signed publicity shot of Adam Richman from Man vs. Food. There’s a steady line of traffic to the cashier’s station: men paying for their breakfasts and sucking their teeth, some with guns strapped to legs, flirting with the cashier training someone new. “Make sure you train her right darlin,” one man says with a wink, “not like you learned,” and turns with a grin to the white-haired owner seated on a stool, spooning yogurt into her mouth with a small spoon . “Oh don’t worry we’re trainin her right,” the yogurt lady says. “Have a real good day, Jim.” The cashier and her trainee disappear, and return with a stuffed plastic handle bag for me: the Styro food boxes squeak as I take it. Back at the Airbnb, with its framed picture of a pig over the range and the saying You Had Me at Bacon I see the two boxes stamped with an outline of the state in imposing relief and remember-the-Alamo lettering: TEXAS TAKE OUT.
Indiana: Michigan City, holiday beach town fused like a gold tooth jammed onto the rusty jaw of an affluence that used to be: unfixed sidewalk slabs heaved up by winter ice and roots; battered playground merry-go-rounds, CBD storefront with a hand-painted sign, backdrop of blackish woods and dense summer gardens. Perry’s brother Phil made sloppy Joe sandwich filling yesterday (a request from our nephew Zach); we’re heating it on the electric range in a copper-bottomed pot too big for it. Two men in a pickup cruise this street of summer cottages tricked out like Victorian cremes, white-trim houses with board siding painted apricot, or delphinium, or lemon chiffon, or creepy doll tea-set pink. The pickup men move down this street of families rolling red wagons back from the beach (floaties, swimmies, hungry-looking teens dragging behind), waving a huge blue black flag with a message in bold white: FUCK BIDEN. This morning Zach and his brother Matty and Phil went to the community basketball court—they weren’t allowed in without the wrist band you’re officially supposed to wear, showing you belong in one of these candy colored houses that Perry’s brother Percy owns. (They didn’t need wristbands yesterday.) Because they’re brown? I wonder it. My white brother in law Jim shrugs, meaning maybe, only we don’t want to think it.