Page 15 of Just Come Over
Oh. He tended to ignore meals when he had something more important to do. He guessed you couldn’t do that with kids. “Right,” he said. “We’ll go to the hotel first, drop off your things, and have lunch. We could even order room service. You’ll like that. Afterwards, we’ll go shopping. Good, eh.”
He sounded like that music Jada had been playing, like any minute, he was going to jump up, clap his hands, and shout, “Let’s havefun!”He was going to have to find a happy medium between his Game Face and his Nearly-Dad Face, because that level of cheerfulness wasn’t sustainable. He told the driver, “Another change of plan. Hilton first.”
She muttered something and scrutinized him in the mirror again, and he said, “Charge me what you’d have charged for driving to the airport, then.” He’d probably lose his own New Zealand citizenship for that kind of rash spending, but there you were.
“I could go to my school,” Casey said. “And get my lunchbox. Then I could have my lunch that my mommy made me. I don’t want to go to a hotel. My mommy said I shouldn’t go places without her, and I already went to Tiana’s house.”
The driver looked in the mirror again. He wished she’d watch the road, which was bound to be icy, because it had started to snow, huge, wet flakes smacking the windscreen and sticking there. He considered telling Casey that her lunch, if it had still existed, would have grown an entire bacterial colony over the past weeks and probably forced the evacuation of the school, but he didn’t. She was missing familiarity, that was all, like a nineteen-year-old rugby player from the wop-wops, away from home for the first time. What did those boys miss most? Food. Always, it was food. “What’s your favorite thing to eat?” he asked. “We’ll have that. Uh...” He tried to think what his favorite had been, at six. They probably didn’t have whitebait fritters in Chicago. “Hamburger. Hot dog. Ice cream. You’d like an ice cream, surely.” They had ice cream cones everywhere in the States, didn’t they? That was one cultural advantage the country had over New Zealand.
Wait. In winter? Maybe not.
The driver hit the brakes hard enough to jolt them against their seatbelts, then swung into a service station and pulled up to the pumps with a screech of tires and announced, “I need gas.”
He thought,Shouldn’t you have considered that before you picked up a ride?She was out of the car and on her phone now, and she hadn’t even got the nozzle in the pump yet. He was regretting the “airport fare” idea already.
Never mind. They’d spend a few minutes of their six hours here, which was fine.Stay centered,he told himself.Keep your focus. You can only live through one minute at a time. There’s no speeding it up.
Casey said, “We could have pizza for lunch. That’s my favorite. It’s very expensive to eat it at a restaurant, though. It’s better to cook things at home. That way they have more flavor.”
Huh. He was beginning to like India Hawk, even though she’d complicated his life. She’d clearly done her best, which was all you could ask. “You’re right,” he said. “But we’re not at home yet, so we’ll eat in a restaurant today. Pizza it is.” His nutrition plan was another thing, apparently, that was going out the window. Just for today, until he got this sorted. Then it would be back to normal. “We’ll get some lunch, and then we’ll make a plan. Life’s always easier with a plan.”
Which all sounded solid enough, but the journey was taking forever, even after the driver got back into the car. She kept taking turns that surely weren’t necessary. At least, they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He told her, “We weren’t this far from downtown. We were nearly there when we started.”
“Road construction,” she said. “Alternate route.”
“I don’t think so.” He held on tight to his temper. “I already told you I’d pay the airport fare. The little girl’s hungry, and if you don’t have us at the hotel in five minutes, I’ll be filing a complaint.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, making another turn. “I don’t think you’ll be filing anything today. I’d say you’redone.Uh-huh. I’d say so.”
He considered sniffing at his armpits. Either he smelled, or he’d lost all his Influence Factor on the way over the Pacific, because he certainly wasn’t impressing anybody in Chicago so far. He’dgrowledthat, and she hadn’t cared a bit.
The thought flew from his mind in an instant when the woman pulled abruptly across three lanes of traffic as if she were trying out as a stunt driver. Rhys shoved his arm out to brace himself and threw the other across Casey, who stiffened, said, “Hey!” and was drowned out by a chorus of angry hoots from behind them.
“What thehell?”he was saying just as the driver slammed on the brakes again, making his and Casey’s heads rock forward and slam back against the headrests. When that stopped, he asked Casey, “You OK?”
“Yeah.” She clutched her doll closer and stage-whispered, “She drives really fast.”
To top it off, the woman had stopped in a “No Parking” zone, which looked to be a very bad idea, as it was already occupied by an idling police car, its revolving lights painting the gloomy day with flashes of red and blue. It was also, though, not his car and not his problem. “We’re here,” she said. “The Hilton. That’ll be twenty-four dollars.”
Rhys pulled out his credit card and handed it over. Yes, it was too much, but as far as he was concerned, he couldn’t get out of this mad city fast enough. The pizza had better be good, that was all he had to say.
The driver ran his card and handed it back as a cop got out of the car ahead, plodded forward through the gathering storm, and rapped on Rhys’s window.
“Yeah, yeah, buddy,” the driver muttered. “Least you could do is make sure I get paid.”
Rhys signed the slip, then handed it and the pen back. “I’ve found my Chicago visitor experience lacking, so far,” he told the woman. “You could pass that on to the tourist board for me.”
She didn’t say anything, possibly because the cop was tapping on the window again with a black-gloved hand, beckoning to him, and a second cop was coming to join him. Rhys said, “Thanks heaps for parking here, too. Extremely convenient. Don’t bother to get out, please.” He opened the door and told Casey, “Let’s go. Pizza ahead.” Sounding jolly again, but what could you do. He’d get his suitcase and Casey’s rubbish bags out of the boot, and...
The cop took a step closer, put his hand on the butt of his weapon, and said, “Sir, can we have a word with you?”
Rhys said, “We’ll be out of your way in a minute. Just checking into the hotel.”
The driver leaned across the seat and buzzed the window down. “Ask him why he calls her ‘the little girl’ instead of her name,” she yelled. “Ain’t no man in the world would say that, if he’s talking about his daughter. Ask her about her school, too.Ask her about her mom.”
“Thanks, ma’am,” the cop said. “We’ve got it. We appreciate the call.”
Forty minutes later, the server slid twelve inches of high-calorie heaven onto a table that was fortunately now serving only two. At least the cops had let him order Casey’s pizza before the interrogation had started, although probably only because she’d looked at them with those mountain-stream eyes and said, in a tiny voice, “I’m really, really hungry.” They hadn’t been any more resistant to those eyes than Rhys himself, which was why they were in this overheated, tomato-scented space, down the street from the Hilton and bustling with midday diners. It was wide enough for only two rows of booths, and had also turned out to be an excellent place to imprison an overlarge, irate Kiwi.
