Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

addressed me. “We were looking for a bar or something. To get a quick drink.”

      “No bar you’d want to go to. Girls don’t go to bars around here. Not good girls anyway.”

      Some small measure of sense and her aunt’s Calvinist expression kept Gina from saying, “Who says we’re good girls, anyway?”

      “You don’t want to be going into no bars around here.”

      “Okay, gotcha.”

      “You’re my sister’s kid,” said Aunt Betty. “I don’t care if you’re forty-seven, you ain’t givin’ up no pooty while you stayin’ in my house.”

      Pooty? Gina stifled a groan. “Allrighty, then. Well, Aunt Betty, we’re feeling kind of tired. I think we’ll have a shower and head on to bed. Get up nice and early tomorrow, set out. Thanks for dinner. Goodnight.”

      “We’re going to bed?” I whispered. It was nine in the evening!

      She pulled me to our room. I told Gina I’d been there a thousand times, when a woman who was not my mother kept me from going out, from having fun.

      “So what’d you do?”

      “Nothing. I stayed in.”

      “Fool. I just lied to my mother.” Gina was looking in her suitcase for clothes. “I told her I was sleeping over a girlfriend’s house. She never checked. She wanted to trust me, and as long as I didn’t get caught, I knew I’d be okay.” We giggled at the gullibility of mothers and Emmas trying to keep their girls from having fun. “Well, don’t just stand there. What are you doing, pulling out a book? Hurry, go have a shower, get dressed.”

      “For bed?”

      Gina grinned. “Whatever you want to call it, girlfriend. Just put on some ‘pooty’ clothes.”

      “We’re going out?”

      “Of course. What do you think? I didn’t let my mother tell me what to do, you think I’m going to let my mother’s enfeebled sister do it?”

      “But she said no!”

      “Oh, well, better tuck ourselves in, then.” She snorted. “Come on. We’re not going to walk out her front door.”

      “How are we going to get to the car in the driveway?”

      Gina pointed to the window.

      “We’re going to sneak out the window like cats?”

      “Cats on the prowl. What, you’ve never done it?”

      “My window was on the second floor above a garage. So—no.”

      “Chicken. I would’ve built a ladder in the trees.”

      “Yes, I suppose you would’ve.” After showering, she put on her jeans, and a cute beige top that came with cleavage. I didn’t have a beige top that came with cleavage, but I had runner’s legs. So after showering I put on a mini-skirt and high heels. We spent extra time on our makeup. Gina was really taking time with hers. Three different eyeliners, two shadows, mucho blusho.

      “Gina … um. What about Eddie?”

      “What about him?”

      I watched her apply another coat of black mascara. “Must be some fun you’re thinking of having with four coats of Great Lash. Didn’t you just say you’re going to California to marry your boyfriend?”

      “Fiancé. He asked me to marry him before he left.” She waved the mascara wand, licked her lips. “I love Eddie. He’s the only one I want. But he’s been up to no good.”

      “How do you know?” And is that how it worked?

      “Oh, he confessed. He didn’t like having the burden of his wrongdoing on his conscience. To make himself feel better, he told me.”

      My throat went kind of numb. I said, “Told you …”

      “His little thing with Teresa. You know Teresa, the county slut? God. He justified it, as he justifies everything, by saying it was my fault. After all, he said, I had a boyfriend I refused to break up with when we first got together.”

      “Huh,” I said carefully, throat less numb. She did actually have a boyfriend she refused to break up with when she and Eddie first got together. He was the tallest jock in school. Eddie was short.

      “I know. But I was in love with Eddie, and he knew it. Still am. I just didn’t know how to break it off with John.”

      “So how’d you break it off?”

      “Don’t you know anything? Agnes isn’t doing her job. I didn’t. He broke up with me. So then Eddie and I were supposed to be exclusive, but now he’s gone back to Bakersfield and I know there’s a girl there he used to, like, date.”

      “How do you know?”

      “He told me. He doesn’t like to keep that stuff to himself.”

      “Really?” I wasn’t looking at her, and she wasn’t looking at me.

      “They’re sitting by streams, on rocks, picking flowers, reciting poetry or some shit. When we talk he tells me they’re hypothetically talking of what it might be like to be married. After all, that’s what they talked about when they were twelve.”

      I didn’t know what to say. “Does he know you’re coming?”

      She nodded. “I called him before I left, told him I’m on my way. He said, please come as soon as you can. Please. Save me from myself. I think I may accidentally end up marrying her.”

      I blinked.

      “I don’t want to talk about it any more with you,” Gina said. “All I’m saying is, he hasn’t been good. And he doesn’t have to know about tonight. Come on, let’s go. Let’s get us some real rowdy.” She smiled. “How do I look?”

      “Great,” I said. “But the dogs are outside. They’ll start barking. They’ll hear my car.”

      “The dogs are already barking.” Gina winked. She messed up the bed and put towels and pillows under the sheets to make it appear as if two sleeping forms were underneath. “I’m sure my aunt’s out by now. It’s eleven; way past her bedtime. Don’t worry. They’re both none too swift. Ready?”

      Dolled up, done up, I hitched my mini-skirt, adjusted my tube top, made sure money and ID were in my pocket, and crawled out the window into the side yard littered with broken lumber. We tip-toed our way to the car; of course the tiny dogs, mistaking themselves for German Shepherds, snarled like we were about to rob the house.

      I put the car into neutral and released the handbrake. In her heels, Gina helped me back it out the drive, I started it on the road, and we drove off, giggling like kids. “Why are you wearing underwear?” she said in the car on the way to South Bend. “I’m not.”

      “I know.”

      “Come on. Trust me, you feel completely different without underwear. Like anything’s possible.”

      “Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But my skirt’s too short. I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure.”

      Gina said her mission was to make out with a cute college guy. She’d never had a college guy. She wanted to test if that thing they said about men and women was true.

      “What thing is that?”

      “That when a woman wakes up she can say to herself, today I will get laid. And have it be true. But when a man wakes up, he can say, I may never get laid again. And have that also be true.”

      I laughed. I hoped it was true. We were wearing shiny lipstick, and had on lots of drugstore perfume, Coty and Jean Naté. Gina’s jeans were tighter than my skirt, but that was only because I was thinner. Too much running, though