“What were we thinking to come here like this?” Martha says with a sigh.
They both know that she doesn’t just mean here, to Virginia, to these caves, but rather the way they packed up his Dodge and drove out of town, meandering for almost two weeks now, sleeping at Motel 6s and eating breakfasts of 7-Eleven coffee and doughnuts. Every day they drive and drive, choosing their routes at random—he likes the name of a particular town, she wants to see something she’d heard about once, a lifetime ago. He has left behind a congregation of Unitarians who think he’s spending his vacation in Michigan with his parents. She has left behind her longest lover—drinking. If she had not woken up one afternoon and realized that she had lost three whole days of her life—three days! she still thinks in amazement, and no matter how hard she tries she can not retrieve a single minute of them—she would still be at her mother’s condo waiting for her first vodka of the day.
“Hey,” the Reverend says, “it’s been almost two weeks. You haven’t had even one drop in two whole weeks.”
“Some treatment you devised,” Martha snaps because she wants a drink so bad that the mention of her meager accomplishment embarrasses her. “Take a drunk, withhold liquor, drive her around all day, and sleep with her every night. Wow. You might even get a write-up in Cosmopolitan. ‘How I Cure Alcoholics’ by Reverend Dave.”
He looks so wounded that Martha almost reaches out to touch his cheek. But instead she whirls around and marches across the parking lot on wobbly legs to the fireworks store. She expects him to follow her but he doesn’t. Martha stands in the middle of the store, alone, surrounded by country hams and a dizzying array of fireworks.
“Do you sell . . . uh . . . like microbrewery beers? Something local?” she asks the woman at the cash register. Martha hopes she sounds like a tourist instead of like someone desperate for a drink.
The woman points to a cooler in the corner. “We got some from up in Maryland.”
Martha’s fingers tremble as she opens the cooler and lifts a beer from a six-pack carton. Its label is colorful, happy. Martha presses the cool amber bottle to her cheek.
The woman frowns. “You want just the one?”
She looks out at the parking lot, where the air ripples with heat and Reverend Dave kicks at stones, sending them flying past cars with license plates from Utah, Texas, Pennsylvania. Martha is flushed with guilt and excitement both. Like the winner on Supermarket Sweepstakes she begins to pull fireworks from the shelves around her, until she settles on a Roman candle and a box of sparklers.
“And these,” Martha says.
THE REVEREND LOOKS like a little boy out there, kicking stones, sulking. Nine years between them is really a lot of years, Martha thinks, not for the first time. Last week they drove to a county fair somewhere in Pennsylvania to hear Paul Revere and the Raiders. Reverend Dave had never heard of them, even after Martha sang “Let Me Take You Where the Action Is” to him naked in their motel room.
“I have no idea who they are,” he told her, “but I’m sure I like your rendition better than theirs.”
“I wanted to marry Mark Lindsay,” she said. When he shrugged, she added, “Their lead singer.”
Even though the Reverend had danced with her, the Swim and the Jerk and the Twist, not one of their songs was remotely familiar to him. He had looked like a child, jumping up and down beside her, his hair flopping into his eyes. When they’d sung a ballad, “Hungry,” he took Martha into his bearish grasp and danced close and slow, smoothing her hair and not at all childlike.
“Nine years,” she whispers. “It’s too much.” But then she remembers something: back at the pay phone, the song he was humming—it was “Hungry.” And this small gesture from him sends her running toward him.
“I got fireworks!” she yells.
He looks up, and what she sees in his eyes almost breaks her heart. The Reverend has fallen in love with her. She doesn’t know whether to turn and run the other way or keep going into his open arms. What she does is stop, a few feet from him, and hold up the bag.
“Sparklers and everything,” she says. She imagines the beer bottle nestled among all the explosives, everything ticking away, ready to go off at any minute.
“We can light them later,” she says.
Reverend Dave nods and begins to walk toward the caverns. Knowing the beer is so close—that after the tour she can duck into the ladies’ room and drink it down, or later back at the motel while he’s in the shower—just having it makes Martha feel lighthearted.
“I’m sorry I was so mean,” she tells him.
“I know,” he says.
ON THE FOURTH of July they found themselves in Gettysburg, unable to get a room.