The Gift

On the second day of a three-day road trip, Mona and Grant drove through Guymon, Oklahoma, in search of a clean bathroom and fresh coffee. They were headed from Cedar Rapids to Los Angeles in the minivan Grant had converted into a camper over the holiday break, and, in which, they’d spent New Year’s Eve, watching the sunset at a county park and ringing in 2021 at six p.m. instead of midnight, knowing they’d never stay awake.

Now, they were following a diagonal highway across the country, on the first road trip they’d taken since graduate school.

“I’m sorry I teased you about it,” Mona said, “On New Year’s Eve.”

She closed the small black notebook she’d been writing in for the past hour as Grant drove, listening to the BBC World Service on a scratchy public radio station out of Liberal, Kansas.

“About what?” Grant said. He turned down the radio.

“The camper van,” she said. “And the way you followed those Van Life Girlz on Instagram.”

“I told you it was research,” he said. “I can’t help it if they make all their instructional videos in bikinis.”

“Well, I can’t believe we get to see the ocean in two days. Maybe I’ll break out my bikini?”

“Mmm,” he said. “That would feel good. If we hustle and there’s no snow in Arizona, we can get there by tomorrow night.”

“It doesn’t snow in Arizona,” she said.

“In the mountains?” he said. “In Flagstaff? Of course it does.”

“Huh,” she said. “Have you ever been?”

“No,” he said. “But the Van Life Girlz have.”

He grinned and she squeezed his thigh. “Oh, have they?” she said.

Leaving the house had been a good idea. They’d been home, together, working remotely, for most of the past year. Already, he could feel the old jocular flirtation of their early years together coming back into the space between them. And she was writing again—or at least getting ideas again. The whole drive, she’d been scribbling away in the Moleskin he’d bought her for Christmas. He knew better, by now, to ask what she was working on but he knew that writing anything, for her, was a good sign.

The McDonald’s looked the cleanest and would be the most likely business to require masks, and so Grant pulled the van into the lot and found a place to park far away from other cars.

The van was a basic white work van, that he had once used for his catering company, back when catering—weddings, funerals, graduation parties, corporate retreats— was still a thing.

They put on their masks, sanitized their hands, and got out of the van. The air had a damp warmth and smelled of mud, as if they’d driven out of the snow squalls in Iowa and straight into some kind of spring.

There was a line for the women’s room, but Grant got in and out of the men’s room swiftly, then picked up two coffees with cream. He was headed back out to the parking lot—poor Mona was still in line—when he saw a man inspecting his van. Peering through the windows. Circling it like he had lost something.

He saw the man knock on the van’s back door. Grant walked towards him. The man was not going to give up.

The camper van crowed could be a zealous one, and it was not unheard of, he supposed, for a stranger to ask to see the inside of a van, but this particular stranger seemed a bit too eager. He wondered, for a moment, if he should wait for Mona—she had pepper spray on her keyring—but then decided he would confront the man himself. If he was going to fix anything, the trip needed to be calm, stress-free.

That’s why they were headed to California, to Venice, specifically. To chill the fuck out, as they told their neighbors the week before last.

Mona’s old roommate, Vanessa, had offered the use of her driveway and a garage that had a toilet and shower in it. After college, Mona and Vanessa had gone out to LA for a year to become screenwriters; but only Vanessa had made it. Mona had given up and married Grant, which was a strange way to put it, but it was how she always put it, at parties, a few whiskeys into the evening.

“A writer’s Grant,” she’d say, gesturing to him.

“The booby prize,” he’d say, gesturing to her chest. It was the kind of joke nobody would laugh at sober, or anywhere but an awkward party of anxious Midwesterners that sometimes still dreamed of getting out.

“Stay as long as you want,” Vanessa had said on the Zoom call in mid-January, giving them a tour. “The wi-fi signal is strong out here and we never use this space.”

Mona had moaned in gratitude when she saw the modest accommodations.

“I’m so ready,” she’d said. “You have no idea.”

Grant was thinking of that grateful moan now, as the stranger turned and looked at him.

“This you?” the stranger said. “Iowa plates?”

Grant nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Did you wanna see inside? You’ll need to put on a mask.”

The man was not wearing one. His naked chin and thin mustache seemed almost obscene. He was a small man, in a dirty flannel, with a bloodshot heat in his eyes. Grant went to the driver’s side of the van and the man followed. Grant opened the door and set down his coffee and turned to the man.

He wanted him to leave and was about to say so, but the man spoke first.

“Solidarity,” the man said.

“Forever,” Grant said, the first word that came to him, and the man smiled.

“Close enough,” he said. “Remember. Don’t linger.”

Then he held out a small pouch, a tattered toiletry bag that said “British Airways” on it, and handed it to Grant and walked away. The man got into a pickup truck and Grant tried to remember the license plate, but Arkansas was all he could remember as soon as the truck drove away.

He got into the driver’s seat and started the car and then unzipped the small bag. Inside, there were bills. He had just enough time to count them: two-hundred $100 bills.

Twenty thousand dollars.

Grant looked all around the parking lot. There was no sign of anybody, including Mona.

What he did next, he wouldn’t be able to remember later, but he knows he slid the small bag into a storage compartment on the driver’s side before Mona came back. She was complaining of stomach cramps, and saying she was unwell. He’d gotten her a blanket and some Pepto chewables, and tried to make her comfortable in the bed behind the front seats.

“We can just park somewhere and wait until you feel better,” he said. “Or splurge for a hotel room?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just stress. Keep driving. I want to get there. I’ll try and sleep.”

As he waited to turn out of the parking lot exit, she asked him to hand her the notebook and her pen.

“Shouldn’t you sleep,” he said.

“Just fucking give it to me,” she said. “It’s my journal.”

The car behind him honked, and he tossed the notebook and pen back to her, not gently. As he began to turn onto the desolate highway, a light gray work van, much like his, with Iowa plates turned into the lot.

From a distance, the driver looked a little like him.

He gunned it.

“Jesus,” Mona said. “Slow down.”

He looked in the rearview and he could see her, curled up, writing in a weird twisted posture.

“Why do you think you’re so stressed?” he asked her, after about a half hour in silence.

“Just work stuff,” she said.

“Do you want to talk about anything?” he asked

“No, I want to sleep.”

“Then why are you journaling?”

You’re such a fucking control freak,” Mona said, and he knew then, that she felt too ill to speak. She could get like that when sick. It was not something to take personally, and so he kept the radio off as they drove. She slept intermittently, waking up with a start every so often, and then jotting something down in the notebook.

The intensity of her stomach pain and the sudden coldness she’d shown him had almost made him forget about the twenty-thousand dollars. It had been so long since he had extra money—he’d actually sold a collection of rare first edition novels online in order to buy the plywood and supplies he needed for the van conversion—that he felt a strange elation, almost youthful, a feeling he never thought he’d feel again.

Of course, he had not forgotten about the money. Later, he would understand he had made the decision to keep the money a secret as soon as he finished counting it, even before she came back to the van in a foul mood and clutching her belly and belching corn-chip burps.

In Santa Rosa, she asked if they could stop again. She wanted some ginger ale. Would he get her some while she went to the bathroom?

It was getting dark.

“We should stay at this Hampton Inn,” he said. He pulled into the parking lot.

“How much will it be?” she asked.

“I think we should get a real night’s sleep. And get you a clean bathroom.”

“God, I’d love a shower.”

“We’ll wake up before dawn and hit the road,” he said. “Okay, Sweet Pea?”

She smiled at that. She liked pet names when she was sick.

It didn’t take long for him to get her to the room and soon he could hear the toilet flush the toilet and the shower start. He knocked on the bathroom door and peaked inside. She was naked, waiting for the water to get warm, and tears were in her eyes

“I’m sorry I was like that,” she said. “I feel awful.”

“It’s okay,” he said and walked up to her.

“It stinks in here,” she said, a bit shyly, as if they hadn’t shared a bathroom for a decade.

“You wash your cute little butt and go to bed,” he said, which made her laugh. He kissed her head. He loved her laugh.

“I’m sorry I’m so crazy,” she said.

“Baby,” he said. “I invented crazy. You take a shower. I’ll get our things.”

But he did not get their things; he got her things.

He got her backpack, her laptop, and the rolling back of clothes they’d struggled to fit under the plywood bed. He got the cooler, with the rest of their snacks, and a thousand dollars of his newfound cash, which he set on the nightstand next to a note that said. XOXO –G.

He plugged in her phone, next to the cash, and saw Vanessa had texted her. “Did you tell him?” the text read, but Grant already knew the plan. He had seen the texts last weekend, shamefully checking Mona’s iMessages on the laptop she’d left open before she’d gone to the store. He knew the plan was to get to California, and tell him she was staying there and that he should leave. Vanessa said her boyfriend Bill would make sure he left. He was a giant, apparently, a personal trainer.

The last text he’d read said: “Tell him at sunset. On the beach. Tell him somewhere beautiful, so he will always remember it with something like love.”

Mona had text back: “I’m at the store alone. I’m already so excited to be free.”

And now she was, Grant thought, starting the van again. It wasn’t until the middle of the night, stopping for gas outside Gallup, that he remembered the notebook. Maybe, eventually, when he got to the ocean, he would send it to her. For now, he would consider all of it a gift.