Page 53 of Anywhere with You
“It’s no trouble,” Mildred said, turning the wheel and getting back on the road. “This thing is built to tow. Honestly, we should’ve been towing my car this whole way. It’s a nightmare to get this whole thing in and out of the Starbucks parking lot.”
“Where are you headed?” Jeffrey asked.
“Muir Woods,” Cara said.
Jeffrey whistled. “That’s still quite a distance. Well, where’s home?”
“Houston,” I said, miserably.
“That’s even worse,” Mildred agreed. “Er, farther, I meant. We like Houston and love Muir Woods. But for now, we’ll get you to the nearest town with a service station, how’s that?”
“That is more than generous,” Cara said. “We can pay you.”
Mildred and Jeffrey laughed so hard that I thought we would crash.
“Mildred invested in Netflix’s IPO,” Jeffrey explained.
“In 2002,” Mildred said with a chortle, “back when they still sent you DVDs in the mail. Took a second mortgage out on the house, sold as much plasma as they’d take, and put all the cash into stocks.”
“Most foolish thing you ever did,” Jeffrey said. “What if it’d failed? Most businesses do, you know. And IPOs are risky as hell.”
Mildred glanced over her shoulder and winked at us. “Twenty-plus years, and he’s still going on about it. True, it took a dip that first year. Scared the bejeezus out of me. But since then…” Mildred whistled and drove her index finger straight up. “Through the roof!” she exclaimed.
Cara did exactly what I did, looking at Mildred and Jeffrey, then turning to look behind us at the interior of the fanciest RV we’d ever seen. There were leather recliners, a wall-sized TV, a full kitchen, and…was that a tiny chandelier? It was absurd. It was also larger than my first apartment.
“The shower has a skylight,” Mildred bragged.
Cara turned back to me, her hair and clothes dripping and plastered flat, makeup obliterated by the heavy rain, and laughed out loud. She must have been thinking of the absurdity of our situation, stranded on the side of the road, rescued by millionaires.
I took my phone out of the Tupperware. “Would you two like to be on our Mesmio?”
Chapter Twenty
After Cara explained Mesmio to Mildred and Jeffrey, much more patiently than I would’ve managed, they were excited to be a part of our road trip video blog, as Cara generously described it. I tended to think of it as proof of life for family members and random crap for our few dozen other followers.
I recorded Cara from my seat as she talked, then recorded Mildred’s reaction, some travel tips from Jeffrey, and ended with a few anecdotes from Mildred.
“I almost got eaten by a moose!” she exclaimed. “But that’s nothing. Jeffrey saw a Bigfoot.”
“It was not Bigfoot,” Jeffrey protested.
“You thought it was.”
“Momentarily.”
“What was it?” Cara asked, fascination in her voice. I glanced at her. No to aliens but yes to Bigfoot? What kind of sense did that make?
Mildred chortled. “A woman with curly hair in a fur coat. Jeffrey was hiding behind a bush taking her picture, and she was trying to relieve herself in privacy.”
Cara and I were both laughing, and poor Jeffrey had the kind of translucent skin that couldn’t conceal a blush.
Mildred started in on a new story before we’d gotten control of our laughter.
I was starting to worry that they would never stop talking when we, Cara’s car included, slowed to a stop outside a shady-looking repair shop in a town whose name I didn’t catch.
I offered to talk to the mechanic because Mildred wanted help putting the videotape app on her phone.
Cara agreed quickly enough that I suspected she, too, thought she was getting the better end of the deal.
