When my mother moved to Las Vegas to file for divorce, my father insisted on driving us there. Didn't want his girls alone on the road for all those miles, he said. And didn't he owe us a real family vacation?

He owed us so many things. My mother was from New York and hated to drive. Driving meant wearing her glasses, and that conflicted with her sense of self. In her dreams, she said, she never wore glasses, and she found her way everywhere.

In real life she was like Marilyn Monroe in that movie, walking into walls.

In Las Vegas we would live on an old horse ranch that had been turned into cabins for divorce-seeking women. This, too, was like a Marilyn Monroe movie, the last one she made before she died. It was sad and hard to watch. I didn't want to go to Las Vegas. I didn't want to leave my best friend Stacy or my cat Olly, who hated cars. He was going to live at my aunt's house and I didn't see why I couldn't stay there too.

I couldn't leave you, Sweetie, my mother said. I need my co-pilot.

She liked using aviation metaphors when we were on the road. It was as close as she would come to flying. I wondered if my father would drive us back, too, or if she'd get over her fear of airplanes once she was a divorcee.

People get divorced in Massachusetts, you know, I said. Stacy's parents did.

My mother said it was much harder and took a long time. That's because it's a Puritan state, she said. It's why all the stores are closed on Sundays.

In Las Vegas stores are open on Sundays? I asked.

Everything's open, my mother said. Everything's open all day and all night. Maybe you'll like it there. Maybe you'll want to stay.

I couldn't imagine it. Were there even schools there? I pictured vast stretches of desert, pockets of casinos.

Maybe California, she said. Somewhere on the west coast.

It's a new start for all of us, my father said. Chipper, like a squirrel swishing his tail next to a fat cache of nuts. Maybe for once my parents had told the truth: the divorce would make life happier for all of us. Still I sulked all down the Delmarva Peninsula. My parents sang along to the radio in the front seat, oldies stations with Motown and Elvis, as if they were still their unencumbered, college-age selves. Maybe it was the black-and-red Virginia is for Lovers signs we saw everywhere once we crossed the state line, or maybe it was that the things they fought about at home didn't matter in the car.

In Virginia we stayed in a motel with a blue waterslide pool. They'd promised a full-day stopover so we could go to Busch Gardens. My mother took a migraine nap and my father lounged by the pool with a newspaper, watching me and a girl I'd met swim. She was in seventh grade, one year older and two cup sizes bigger than me, and went to Catholic school, all girls. She said she didn't mind. At least creepers weren't staring at you all the time.

When we got out of the pool, my father pushed his sunglasses up with one finger and said I should invite my new friend to come to Busch Gardens with us.

She stopped drying her hair and wrapped the short, skimpy motel towel around her body as far as it would go. I have to go to a Bicentennial craft fair with my family, she said.

He pulled his green-tinted aviator glasses back down over his eyes, but I knew he was watching her walk away. I wasn't used to seeing him in shorts. His long, bony legs hung off the sides of the saggy plastic chaise longue, white as boiled rice. They looked too big for his body, like praying mantis legs. I half-closed my eyes, squinting through a haze of lashes, until he looked like my father again.

.

Read Kathryn Kulpa's postcard.





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