Edna in the Desert (7 page)

But this morning a line of dust rose in the distance, which meant a vehicle was coming. The dust moved north along the ridge until it turned and made its way east. It was coming toward the cabin. Edna guessed it was her parents. Maybe this was still a trick! Instead of the whole summer, it was only going to be a week. As the vehicle got closer, Edna could see it was a little red pick-up truck with a cap on the back. Did her parents buy a truck? On the side it said
Bishop’s General
. She didn’t know what that was, and she wasn’t even sure it was coming to the cabin, though she couldn’t think of where else it could be going.

Edna wished it could be Johnny driving the truck. She tried to convince herself that it was too ridiculous a thing to hope for, but her heart beat rapidly as if it knew otherwise. Because it did. It was him. Johnny was driving the truck. He was coming to the cabin. Edna got dizzy for a moment as this sunk in. Her hand forgot about the mug of coffee it was holding and spilled it. The coffee wasn’t hot enough to burn her, but it left her chest covered in an ugly splotch. Emergency. She dashed into the pantry. She emptied her drawers until she found her cutest pink T-shirt at the bottom of one of them. It was tapered and made her look like she had curves. She brushed back her strawberry hair, a horrible, unwashed mess. There was no time to do anything about it, so she threw it in a ponytail.

When Edna’s friends had started liking boys a year or two before, she had been determined not to allow it to happen to her. Girls acted like idiots when they liked boys. How to say “hi” to a boy in school became a stupid preoccupation, considering which hallway to walk down and how many seconds after the bell. It was always a waste of time. Even if Brit liked a boy and got to kiss him, they broke up in a few weeks and each started on the next, most popular person they had a chance with. Edna didn’t want to like boys, or girls, which would have been fine, or so the adults around her went to great lengths to make clear. Edna didn’t want to like anyone, but it was already well underway. She’d just spilled coffee and thrown her clothes all over the place in less than a minute.

When she got back to the porch, the red truck was parked. Johnny approached the cabin with bags of groceries in his arms. It was magical, impossible: he was even cuter than she remembered. He wasn’t dusty this time. There was something energetic and graceful about the way he moved. His hair was wild. Boys at Edna’s school put tons of gel in their hair to get it to look like that, and they never succeeded. He said, “Hi Edna,” as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Hi,” Edna eked out.

“Staying out of trouble, I hope.”

Before she could respond, he went inside. Edna felt somehow special because Johnny knew her name and because he hoped she was not in trouble. She was lightheaded again. She watched as he helped Grandma unpack the bags. He seemed to know his way around Grandma’s kitchen. Edna couldn’t believe it was all happening. When he took some cans to the pantry, she was so hypnotized she forgot she’d left her clothes, including her underwear, scattered all over the place.

“I was doing laundry,” she yelped as she dashed ahead of him, gathering the more humiliating items first.

“Sorry, Edna, I didn’t know this is your room now.”

There was no irony, sarcasm or anything in his voice that would indicate an opinion of the fact that Edna was sleeping in the pantry or hanging her laundry all over it. He put down the cans. Edna dropped her clothes and followed him out. She could smell his T-shirt again, this one navy blue. In the big room Johnny gave Grandma some mail, and Grandma gave Johnny some bills. He told her he’d check the car.

It hadn’t occurred to Edna that Grandma might know Johnny, but apparently he delivered her groceries and mail, and he maintained her car. Anyone else might have mentioned it.

Edna peered around the side of the cabin and watched Johnny open the garage door. He lifted the hood of Grandma and Grandpa’s Bronco, took something out, a stick, and wiped it off with a rag. Edna guessed he was checking the oil. She was impressed; she didn’t know men who knew anything about cars. Men she knew brought them in for repairs and had expensive tool sets at home that were unused.

Johnny started the Bronco and drove away, leaving Edna in one of those desert quiets that came after something big happened. If the red truck wasn’t right in front of her, Edna might doubt that Johnny had been there at all. She could have easily hallucinated the whole scene out of boredom.

She regretted going into the garage to wait for him. She was awkward and inauthentic among the rusty tools and ancient engine parts that lay exactly where they had hit the ground however many years ago. The remains of her grandparents’ lives, their dusty furniture and memories, were neglected here and dominated the space, except for where the Bronco parked. Edna couldn’t imagine a good reason to be standing here, weirdly in wait for Johnny. She was about to leave, but the Bronco was coming back. Walking away would seem cold. This boy just saved her life; she couldn’t exactly ignore him. She did her best to start organizing Grandpa’s old tools with a sense of purpose.

“Where did you go off to?”

Off too?
That sounded forced.

“Down the road. You have to move a car once in a while if you want to keep it running.”

“Uh-huh.”

Edna couldn’t think of a thing to add to this.

“See you next week,” he said, and he went back to the truck.

Edna froze, then followed him. She’d lost any ability to monitor herself and stared after him like a puppy left behind. He got into the truck and waved as he drove off. She waved back. Her heart sank as the truck sped away, but it buoyed again when the brake lights went on. Johnny backed the truck up and got out.

“I forgot to give you this. You’re famous.”

He handed her a copy of
The Desert Weekly
with a picture of the two of them on Johnny’s dirt bike. It was on the front page.

“Oh. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

He smiled and went back to the truck. Edna loved to watch him walk. She didn’t look down at the newspaper or even blink until the red truck was out of sight.

The newspaper’s headline read
Girl Found Safely in Dream Valley
, confirming that absolutely nothing went on around here if this was a top story. The picture was of two helmeted and therefore expressionless people. Edna reflected that if Johnny were not wearing a helmet, she might have a nice picture of him, but she thanked God she was wearing one. She had been shocked at how awful she looked when she finally saw a mirror that night. The flash blew out any detail in Johnny’s white T-shirt, so the shape of his body was indiscernible. It was a terrible photo by any standard, but it was of the two of them, and Edna would keep it forever. She wondered if Johnny would keep one. Probably not. She learned that his last name was Bishop, which was the same as the store he’d delivered the groceries from. He lived in Desert Palms, and he was on the Dirt Bike Response Crew for Search and Rescue, confirming that he was a good person who cared about his community. He was seventeen.

Edna knew he was older, but she was intimidated by that number. She would have felt better if he was fifteen or even sixteen, but she didn’t know why it made such a difference.

Edna would never admit it to her parents, but the pioneer women she read about every evening blew her mind. The logistics of their migrations across the country in the mid-1800s ranged from arduous to impossible. These young women often made the trip alone or with children in covered wagons pulled by oxen, traveling thousands of miles at a pace of ten miles a day. Some traveled on foot, pushing handcarts that carried the only supplies they’d have for many months. Edna couldn’t imagine the afternoon she was lost in the desert going on for any longer than it did, let alone having to push a heavy cart in the dirt for thousands of miles, cooking and feeding children while doing it and tending to oxen in all kinds of weather. She might as likely think she could walk to the moon.

Her favorite pioneer was Mrs. Anderson. At nineteen years old, she had already become a “Mrs.” and she and her husband provided a window into history because they saved their letters in a metal box. The letters were found and eventually published. Edna thought it would be romantic if their lives hadn’t been so difficult. Mr. Anderson had gone West years (yes, years) before Mrs. Anderson in search of gold. He finally found some and could afford for her to join him. A photograph of his handwritten letter was in a sidebar of one of the books, which were all a little too textbook-like to get completely lost in. In any case, Mrs. Anderson’s trip, one she would make across the continent in a covered wagon, was two thousand miles. The list of things to do for the trip was extensive, including engineering a way to haul an eighty-pound sack of flour and keeping writing paper safe and dry from Kentucky to California. There were nearly a hundred tasks on the list. Edna wasn’t sure if it was outrageous that a young woman be expected to acquire and pack so many things for such a rugged journey or if this was normal and expected. If it was normal and expected, Edna was glad she was alive now instead of then. Getting lost and sleeping in Grandma’s pantry was rugged enough, and Edna wasn’t sure any amount of gold could change that. Although being with Johnny might. Edna imagined that most of the pioneer women didn’t make the trip for gold, but for love. Nothing else could explain it. Grandma had a lot in common with these pioneer women. Her whole life was like being on a cross-country wagon trail, except she never went anywhere.

Edna dozed off reading the Andersons’ letters, until she was disturbed by pans rattling around on the shelves above her cot. The whole cabin shook. An earthquake. In the big room, Grandma’s rainbow crochet pillows bounced around her ugly couch. Edna stepped onto the porch. She must have overslept because the sun was high and strong. It was hard to keep her footing with the sudden, jerking motions. The cabin was moving under her, but strangely, it wasn’t an earthquake after all. Or maybe the earthquake was over. The cabin cut through a choppy sea. The distant hills moved past at a clip. The cool ocean wind was heaven. Ahead blue oxen charged through the water up to their shoulders, pulling chains attached to the cabin. Grandma commanded all three of them on a leash. Grandpa stayed in his chair as usual, though it tipped back and forth as the porch hit rough water. When he fell too far back, Edna rushed to him, but she was distracted by a shark’s fin breaking through the water’s surface. She turned around for Grandpa, but he was gone. So was his chair. She had no time to figure out where he went because the shark’s fin emerged as Johnny, speeding along the porch on his dirt bike. Dust kicked up behind him. Edna waved, but he didn’t notice her. The porch seemed longer than it could be as she ran, keeping pace with him. He veered away from the cabin, and Edna tried, like a Hollywood stuntman, to jump from the railing onto his bike. She soared, confident she could make it, but she missed and was left choking in dust.

Edna woke up spitting flour out of her mouth. A sack sat on the floor, most of its contents on her head and pillow. A mouse rummaging the shelves must have knocked it over. The little guy cowered and escaped. If anyone saw a mouse at home, Jill would call the exterminator and they would all go to a hotel for a few days, but here no one was going to do anything about it. Edna swept the floor and changed her sheets.

She still had a flour in her hair when she stepped onto the porch. It was the time of night it was supposed to be, though it was nearly bright enough to read a book. The full moon cast shadows that were almost as hard as the sun’s and displayed a different desert, with a palette of dark greens, browns, and blacks. Night had an even more profound stillness, and Edna let it seep into her as she sat in her chair. There was no chance of falling asleep again.

She was glad her embarrassing jump off the porch wasn’t real. She’d try to have a better dream about Johnny next time. She’d try not to throw herself at him or imagine he was so far away and totally unattainable. He had said “see you next week,” hadn’t he? Edna thought so, but she couldn’t be completely sure she had heard right. His back had been to her, and he had been walking toward the truck.

In any case, Edna couldn’t wait an entire week to see Johnny again. So far she’d given 100% of what was required of her; she shouldn’t be held at the cabin like a prisoner. Nothing outlined in the rules of this punishment should conflict with a trip to a store, if Grandma really could drive. Why shouldn’t she and Grandma go out? The plan was to get Grandma to take her to Bishop’s General, even though Grandma had everything she thought she needed brought to her.

A good way to get her mother to go out was to create a need for baking ingredients. Jill loved doing anything domestic because she could blog about it, so Edna would find recipes for desserts with obscure ingredients and then suggest a shopping trip. On the way, Edna would mention what she really wanted in the first place as if it were an afterthought. If Jill was as distracted as she usually was, Edna could convince her to stop for a phone upgrade or new jeans. It was just so much faster to upgrade a phone than to fight with Edna.

The major downside of the plot was having to do research and actually make desserts, otherwise it wouldn’t work the next time. And Edna hated being a recurring character in videos on Shimmer, but that part mattered less and less. No one remembered anything about anyone’s videos anymore unless they were famous or the videos had sex in them. The other downside was that Edna was becoming a dessert expert, and Jill was so happy about it. Edna would never be able to tell her mother that it was all an act. Baking had become a permanent part of her personality, and Edna had no idea how to stop it.

She found a cookbook in Grandma’s pantry. It had sat in the same spot for years, evident from the mark left on the shelf when Edna took it down that evening. She liked the cracking sound that the book’s dried out spine made when she opened it, and she loved the faded paper’s smell.