gets paid to have people watch him, but I was sick of the task.
Once so optimistically planned, on the morning of departure this road trip felt like a month-long slog of watching Trav, caring for Trav, and participating in a Trav-focused parade of Trav-issues. I felt unequipped for the task.
But our dog had been delivered to my in-laws. Trav’s sister would feed the cats. The contractors intended to use our time away to remodel the rotten bathroom in our 1961 Cape. The basement mold-abatement estimate came in, and the company promised to start work as soon as we returned.
Plans had been made, and Trav packed the van while I shrugged off the quilt.
The drive south from Maine is ugliest in February. Any brief peek of ocean shows it foamy with garbage. Roadside snow is hard packed and covered by sand, ice, and gravel. Rather than offering sun-soaked summer blue-water views, Maine moved through New Hampshire and into Massachusetts via a constant screen of crumbling-brick mill smokestacks with clusters of vinyl-sided houses standing close to the highway.
I wondered about those houses and whether the highway came first and the homeowners received a special incentive to build, or the houses were grandfathered in tight when the highway was made. Apartments were stacked on top of each other in the multiunit structures, and squat ranches and awkward split-levels represented the single-family houses. After taking a mental note to research the highway’s history, I quickly forgot.
To pass the first day of drive time, I made up elaborate stories about the occupants of those homes visible from the highway, imagining torn linoleum kitchen floors, the smell of heavy diapers, and mothers cooking generic boxed macaroni and cheese for a crowd of dirty-faced children. After passing house after house with cracked, mint-colored siding and broken plastic toys strewn across the frozen mud-and-snow-covered yards, I stopped with the character development because all my stories were sad.
We drove past gray-and-brown strip mall backsides, too, in differing states of decay, as well as half-done construction projects with massive piles of dirt and idle yellow equipment.
I wanted to note something beautiful, like stark, bare tree branches resembling lace with their bent limbs and intricate patterns against the clouds, but it was just a gray-and-brown road blur against gray-and-brown structures under a gray-and-brown sky.
A hot-pink Dunkin’ Donuts coffee-mobile car pulled up beside us and broke the view of dull highway, and the driver waved at me from the next lane. I waved back through the window while sipping hot tea and thinking about omens and luck. That bright pink car with its oversized Styrofoam cup-shaped attachment seemed like an omen: frivolous and happy. Trav and I had the entire month of February to check out, move off the grid, and find sun. That felt like the best kind of luck.
We had saved money for this trip, and each Sunday that we shared pizza instead of sitting across a cloth-covered table spread with briny Damariscotta River oysters or a big bowl of savory Tsukimi Udon, I imagined the savings buying us Nashville biscuits and New Orleans beignets. Now that we were officially on the road, I dug into the bag of sliced green apples from the snack box between our seats and balanced my boots on the dashboard.
“You are patient,” I said to Trav on that first day of driving, and I still do not know what prompted that observation. He is, though. It is a trait I do not share. Trav can step back, smile, and assess a situation with a sense of perspective and comfort.
“It is adaptive,” Trav answered, but I disagreed.
“I think it is innate.”
I watched Trav’s face as he drove, and I watched his body, too. Had I not been present, his approach would be more aggressive, and I appreciated his effort to drive slower and with more deliberation, a nod to my comfort, as the traffic got thicker.
He handles vehicles well, and his steady hands rested on the bottom of the steering wheel after pulling a pair of aviator sunglasses from the pocket of his well-worn hooded sweatshirt. The highway billboards—illegal in Maine—popped up in abundance as we sped through Massachusetts. The initial set advertised junk cars for sale, then an Army recruiting station, and when the first religious message appeared, it was a Bible verse.
First Corinthians. “Love is patient.”
Having just noted Trav’s patience, I thought this, too, seemed like an omen.
Trav laughed when I said I preferred the alternative translation of “Love suffers long.”
“Semantics,” he said.
It felt like a good sign.
At the exact moment we left the New England states and diverted onto the New Jersey Turnpike, Trav’s neck stiffened. It was a subtle change, and I doubt another person would have noticed. My feet still rested on the dashboard, and although I had long finished the hot tea from Maine, I continued to fiddle with the empty paper cup.
The New Jersey portion was a blip on our trip’s overall itinerary, but it took up the most mental space. It is a simple marker, the line into New Jersey, but neither of us spoke because there were no good words. New Jersey is loaded with significance.
Trav described his first arrival in Newark at age eleven as one of chaos. An unaccompanied minor in the pre-mobile phone era, he got lost in the airport and, until located, spent his time wandering the terminals alone.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” he said, “but I must have found a pay phone and called someone.”
Photos of the American Boychoir School’s historic Albemarle campus building façade match Trav’s memory: a wide circular driveway, eight portico columns, and five dormered windows on the third floor. Trav described the 1917 estate in remarkable detail, and photos align against his details with an eerie level of accuracy. In one image is the formal staircase where he learned to maintain a military-style formation line before descending at each mealtime. He described the sharp creases in his uniform: navy blue pants, white shirt, and red sweater.
When Trav lived at the Albemarle campus in Princeton, classes were conducted in a series of rooms on the first and third floors. Because the choir traveled often, classes also happened in the tour bus. He learned science and math, social studies and language arts.
When not on tour, Trav practiced choral music every day in a high-ceilinged
