They Left Me Behind on the Road Trip, So I Got on a Better Ride novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Thirty-Four Minutes

I didn't say yes.

I didn't say anything at all.

Two days ago I'd have said okay before she finished the sentence. I'd have said it with my whole chest.

That was the problem.

"Dot," I said. "Why?"

"Because you turned around."

"No. Really why." I made myself keep looking at her. "Because I'm the girl you found crying on a bus. Because I got left. You got left too. That's a story, and people love a story."

Sawyer went still in his rocking chair.

Dot didn't look offended. She looked interested.

"Go on."

"I've spent two years being somebody's okay-girl. Brody put his name on my work and told me he was doing me a favor." My voice shook. "I'm not going to be your charity case instead. Even if you mean it nicely. Even if it's a better ride."

Dot looked at me for a long time.

Then she turned her camera around in her hands and held it out to me, the old Leica, with the strap wrapped around it.

"Hold that."

I took it. It was heavier than it looked.

"That camera has been on this road with me twice now," she said. "I have never once let anybody else hold it. Not my son. Not my grandson. Not a single assistant in fifty years."

Sawyer made a small noise. "That's true. I was twelve before I was allowed in the darkroom."

"I don't put my name next to anybody's out of pity," Dot said. "I'm far too vain. If you'd brought me postcards, I'd have paid you three hundred a day and put you back on the bus in Page."

"Promise me."

"I promise you. If a single frame of yours is in that book, it's because it's better than mine." She smiled. "And some of them will be. That's what's going to make me so cross."

I gave her back the Leica.

Then I said yes.

Shay called her aunt and begged two more days with the pickup.

The next day we drove east across the reservation for four hours.

Sawyer and Dot rode in the Audi, and Shay and I followed in the truck with the windows down and the radio loud.

We stopped in Kayenta for the night, at a motel twenty miles from Monument Valley, so I could be at the overlook before dawn.

Dot went to bed at eight.

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