Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

would Agnes know about Ned?”

      “Agnes often speaks of things she knows absolutely nothing about.”

      “You think?” said Gina, with a breath, then another. “But sometimes Agnes speaks of things she knows something about. No?”

      After the briefest of pauses, I said, “No. Tell me about Ned.” See, this is when we needed Molly! No wonder Gina had brought her. If it wasn’t for crazy Ned, she’d still be with us.

      “Once I overheard my mom say he was out on parole.”

      “Parole?” My head jerked. “For what?”

      Gina hesitated. “Look, he was falsely accused. He didn’t mean any harm. But some young girl, about fourteen, who’d run away, claimed Ned took her into his home where he was living with his mother and wouldn’t let her go. Kept her there like a slave or something. I mean, that’s preposterous, isn’t it?”

      My heart was in my stomach. “Gina,” I said, because I couldn’t keep quiet, “why would you go visit your aunt when the man she’s with has accusations like that hanging over him?”

      “He was innocent! They’re just accusations. He was living with his mother, for God’s sake. The girl should’ve just told his mother on him, if she didn’t want to stay. He probably thought he was being hospitable. It was all a big misunderstanding. He makes Betty happy.”

      “Was he arrested?”

      “Arrested, tried, convicted, but the charges were dismissed on appeal. Why the sudden interest in Ned, Sloane? You’ve seen him before at the house.”

      I didn’t remember him. I barely remembered Betty, I’d seen her only a couple of times. She’d always been silent and watchful.

      “You really think Aunt Betty shepherding us out with such exquisite haste was because of the dogs?” I asked skeptically.

      “Why else?”

      “Oh, Gina.”

      “Oh, Gina what?”

      Clearly she didn’t want to talk about it. In front of us rose an enormous concrete structure that looked like the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. Instead of talking about why she would agree to stay in the secluded home of a convicted child assailant, we had a nice long discussion on whether Three Mile Island was in Pennsylvania or Michigan—like right in front of us. Gina kept saying, “Can’t you see this isn’t an island?”

      “People who live on an island don’t know it’s an island!”

      “Oh, Jesus. It’s in Pennsylvania!”

      I retreated. “Tell me this doesn’t look exactly like Three Mile Island.” The near-nuclear-reactor-meltdown accident happened just a year or two ago. It was still fresh in my paranoid mind. We’d never seen a nuclear power plant before; we gawked, we rubbernecked at a stone tank. Adjacent to it was Lighthouse Place, an outlet mall. That made us laugh.

      Ladies will shop even under the volcano, we said. Girls must shop. Were we two of those girls? Should we stop? Shop? I’d taken an aspirin for my head, was tired and didn’t feel like driving. I wished Gina could drive so I could close my eyes. “If we stop,” I said, “we’ll be forced to buy things. Do we need things?”

      “We might. We won’t know till we stop.”

      “But do we really need things?” I wanted to look into my notebook at the list of my expenses.

      “I think we do.”

      “Like what?”

      “I don’t know yet,” she said cheerily. “We’ll know when we shop.”

      “I’m tired.”

      “I’m hungry.”

      “We just ate.”

      “Toast doesn’t count. I’m hungry for something else.”

      “Like a pair of jeans?”

      Gina beamed.

      “I didn’t budget for a nuclear shopping spree.” I allowed twenty dollars for a gift for Emma, that was all. Aside from some flat tire money. Was I really willing to spend it now on a bathing suit I didn’t need?

      “We just made some extra,” said Gina, “but the question is, do we want to be girls who shop under a nuclear cloud?”

      We giggled; we thought we would like to be those girls. Okay, I said, pulling into the mall parking lot, we’ll shop, but let’s look at a map first.

      Gina groaned.

      We spread the map out onto the steaming hood, too hot to touch. “Go ahead, tell me. How far is St. Louis?”

      She looked, not too close. “About six inches.”

      “How many miles is that?”

      “I don’t—”

      “Look at the legend!” I was too hot to stand in the parking lot.

      “Hard to tell. Maybe seventy miles. Eighty?”

      “Maybe we shouldn’t stop.”

      “Of course we should. Besides, we’re already stopped.”

      I started to protest; she raised her eyebrows and gave me a look that said I wasn’t being adventurous enough.

      “Come on, we made some extra. Let’s go spend it.”

      “What, all 300 dollars? Get out!”

      She pulled on me. The reactor noisily emitted a plume of white smoke. She pulled me again, by the wrist, toward the walking mall. “We’ll be in St. Louis in about three hours. It’s fine. First we’ll swim, though.”

      “You mean, first we’ll shop?”

      “Yes, then cool off in the water. Let’s go.”

      It was three in the afternoon, the worst time for me to drive, I was so low-energy. The alcohol had sucked the oxygen out of my veins. “Okay, let’s go,” I said, allowing myself to be pulled. To the left of us was a road with four churches in a row, like last night’s bars. Another religious experience, Gina said, wondering out loud if church was a good place to meet guys. “Nice choir-singing boys. Maybe we should stay till Sunday.”

      “As a Buddhist are you even allowed to go to church?” I said, glancing at the white sign outside the Prince of Peace Lutheran church. “TWO GREAT TRUTHS: 1. THERE IS A GOD. 2. YOU ARE NOT HIM.”

      “You’re a fool,” said Gina. “The Christians allow everyone in.”

      “Even Buddhists?”

      “You think they discriminate? They don’t care. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses for five minutes, and we still went to a Catholic church once on Christmas. It was the Jehovahs that got mad.”

      “Huh.” I was dull like bouillon.

      “That’s when my mom stopped being a Jehovah. She liked Christmas too much.”

      “Are they mutually exclusive, those two things?”

      “Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate Christmas. Don’t you know anything?”

      “Nothing,” I said. “But the French Jewish family who lived in our house celebrated Christmas.”

      “Are Jews and Christmas mutually exclusive?” asked Gina and we laughed. We turned to each other, and she took my hand for a moment. “Three Jewish families on our block have a tree and exchange presents,” she said. “They tell my mother, why should Christians have all the fun?”

      Lazily we moseyed through the deserted outlet mall, bought a horrific hot dog, looked inside Ralph Lauren, BCBG, where we asked the shopkeeper how many miles it was