Chapter 40: Road Trip
Summer arrived the way it always did in the American Midwest — not gradually, but all at once, like a door swinging open onto heat and light and three unstructured months stretching out in every direction.
School let out on a Friday. By Saturday morning, Owen was on the highway.
The car was a 1987 Ford Tempo in a shade of blue that had once been more confident about itself. Jack had given it to him at the end of junior year with the low-key generosity that characterized everything Jack did — no ceremony, just the keys set on the kitchen counter with a note that said needs an oil change, otherwise solid.
It wasn't a car you showed off. It was a car you drove, which was the point. In Chicago, in Illinois, in most of America outside certain zip codes, a car was transportation. You earned something fancier later, with your own money, if you wanted it.
Owen had wanted it the moment he saw it.
He'd gotten his license at sixteen, same as most of his classmates — in a country where public transit outside major cities was more aspiration than infrastructure, a driver's license was less a privilege than a baseline life skill. He'd been driving Jack's second car on weekend errands since the week after he passed the test.
This was different. This was his.
He'd left Chicago with two hundred dollars in cash, another eighteen hundred on his bank card — a thousand from the Math Olympiad regional prize, the rest from two summers of weekend lawn work on a contract basis, which had started as a favor to a neighbor and turned into a small, reliable side income. He'd packed light: a duffel bag, his notebook, his current correspondence with Sheldon, and a road atlas that he'd bought at a gas station outside the city and which he fully intended to use despite having the route memorized.
The drive from Chicago to New York was roughly thirteen hours straight through — I-80 east across Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania, then the long descent into the city. Owen wasn't in a hurry. He had a week before the reason he'd made the trip, and he planned to use it.
The reason was a book signing.
Specifically: Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, whose new book on the relationship between music and the brain Owen had read twice in the past month and had approximately forty questions about that couldn't be adequately addressed through a letter. The signing was in Manhattan. Owen had written it in his calendar in November and had been looking forward to it with the quiet intensity he brought to things that mattered to him.
The Gungnir members had been sent home with a summer practice schedule — Becca had distributed individual arrangement packets before the last rehearsal, each one tailored to the specific vocal work each member needed over the break. Owen trusted them to put the time in. He'd see where they were in September.
He'd been on the highway for about four hours, somewhere in the flat middle distance of Indiana, when the music on the tape deck ran out and he became aware that the landscape had been the same for approximately ninety miles and was going to continue being the same for approximately ninety more.
He was somewhere between drowsy and philosophical about this when he saw them.
A van — the kind that families bought because it was practical and drove until it stopped being practical — pulled over on the shoulder with its hazard lights going. A group of people standing beside it: a man, a woman, a teenage boy, a young man in his twenties, an older man in a wheelchair, and a small girl with thick-framed glasses who was watching the road with the patient hopefulness of someone who believed the right car was coming.
Owen slowed down. Pulled over.
In almost any other situation — any universe he might have ended up in that ran darker — he wouldn't have stopped. The System had confirmed early on that this was a Positive Pole universe, which meant the baseline probability of a roadside stop turning into a horror movie was essentially zero. He stopped because the universe was the kind it was, and because the little girl with the glasses was watching him with the specific expression of someone who had already seen two cars drive past without stopping.
He rolled down the window. "Need a hand?"
The man who stepped forward was in his mid-forties, holding the girl by the hand, with the tightly controlled expression of someone managing stress in front of his family. "Yes — yes, thank you for stopping. Our van broke down. We have to get to New York. My daughter Olive is competing in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant tomorrow. We've been out here forty minutes."
Owen looked at the van. Looked at the group. Looked at the little girl — Olive — who was studying him through her glasses with the unselfconscious curiosity of a seven-year-old who had not yet learned to pretend she wasn't looking at things.
Something about her was familiar in the specific way that things in this universe sometimes were — not a precise memory, more like a frequency he recognized without being able to immediately place.
Little Miss Sunshine, he thought. Right.
He knew the shape of this story. He'd seen the film — not recently, not in any kind of detail, but enough to know the broad outline: the Hoover family, the broken-down van, the pageant, the grandfather, the ending that was uncomfortable and funny and somehow completely right.
He got out of the car.
"I can tow you to the next town," Owen said. "I've got a rope in the trunk. Once we hit a service station you can figure out the van from there."
The man exhaled in a way that contained several minutes of tension. "Thank you. I'm Richard. Richard Hoover." He extended his hand.
"Owen Carter."
They shook. Richard introduced the others — his wife Sheryl, his son Dwayne, his wife's brother Frank, his father Edwin. Edwin, in the wheelchair, looked at Owen with the sharp, appraising eyes of a man who had been around long enough to take an accurate read of people quickly. He gave a slight nod. Owen nodded back.
Olive had moved to stand directly in front of Owen, looking up at him. "Two cars went by before you," she said. "They didn't stop."
"I know," Owen said. "I saw your hazards from pretty far back."
"So you stopped on purpose."
"Yeah."
Olive considered this. Then smiled — the full, uncomplicated smile of a child who had just confirmed something she wanted to be true about the world. "Okay," she said, as though a verdict had been reached.
Owen got the tow rope from the trunk.
They rigged the van to the Tempo — it was not an elegant solution, but it was a functional one — and got moving. Richard and Olive rode up front with Owen; the rest of the family rode in the van.
"Where are you headed?" Richard asked, once they were back on the highway at a responsible towing speed.
"New York," Owen said. "Book signing."
Richard blinked. "You drove from Chicago to New York for a book signing."
"Oliver Sacks," Owen said. "He's a neurologist. He wrote a book on music and the brain — the relationship between auditory processing and memory, how music accesses parts of the brain that other stimuli don't reach. I've been reading it for a month and I have questions I can't answer from the text."
Richard was quiet for a moment. "You drove thirteen hours to ask a neurologist questions about his book."
"He'll only be in New York for two days," Owen said. "It seemed worth it."
Richard processed this. Decided not to push further. "First long road trip?"
"First one solo," Owen said. "There's something about it. The highway doesn't change for a hundred miles and you stop needing it to."
"That's — yeah," Richard said, with the expression of someone who had once felt that way about road trips and had subsequently had too many road trips with children to feel that way anymore.
In the middle seat, Olive had been listening to all of this with close attention. "You said you have a choir," she said.
Owen glanced at her in the rearview mirror. "Yeah. Gungnir. We just finished auditions before summer."
"Are you going to be on TV?"
"That's the plan. We're competing for nationals next spring."
Olive's eyes went wide behind her glasses. "I'm going to be on TV too," she said, with the complete conviction of someone who had fully decided this. "At the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Grandpa and I have been practicing."
"What are you performing?"
Olive tilted her head, thinking about it. "It's a surprise," she said finally, and her expression suggested she meant this both as information and as a warning.
Owen smiled. "Fair enough."
In the rearview mirror, he caught Richard's face — a complicated mixture of love and anxiety and the particular parental helplessness of someone who knew something his child didn't yet and was trying to figure out what to do with that knowledge.
Owen kept his eyes on the road.
He knew how this story ended. The pageant. The performance. The moment that was mortifying and triumphant at the same time, in the way that the best moments in the Hoover family's story tended to be both things at once.
He wasn't going to be there for it. His New York week had its own itinerary. But he'd get them to a service station, and they'd get themselves to the pageant, and Olive Hoover would do whatever Olive Hoover was going to do in front of that audience.
Some timelines ran on their own rails.
You helped where you could. You got people to the next town. The rest was theirs.
The Indiana highway stretched out ahead, flat and wide and patient, and Owen drove.
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