CHAPTER 71: Driving Penny To LAX
The radio was doing most of the talking.
A 1 AM drive on the 110 South — Los Angeles in that specific pre-dawn state where it forgets it's supposed to be dramatic and just goes quiet. The freeway lights threw orange bars across the dashboard at regular intervals. Stuart had the volume low enough that neither of them had to compete with it, and neither of them was trying to.
Penny's suitcase was in the trunk.
He'd been aware of it since she'd rolled it through the apartment door, that red American Tourister she used for anything longer than a weekend. He'd said nothing. She'd said, "Okay, I think I have everything," and he'd said, "Okay," and they'd gotten in the car, and that had been, apparently, that.
In the passenger seat, she was running lines. He could tell from the barely-voiced murmur, the small movements of her lips. She'd done this before her guest spot in August, back when she'd been terrified and covered it with an hour of talking about whether she'd ordered the wrong coffee. Tonight she wasn't talking. The nerves had gone somewhere interior, which meant she was taking it seriously. Which meant she was good.
He'd known that already. Hadn't needed the three-second System nudge that had settled into his chest somewhere around the 134 interchange — warm, certain, peripheral, like a fact you stopped needing to remember because you'd built a room around it. She was going to nail the audition. He hadn't needed the nudge for that either. Watching her in rehearsal two nights ago would have been enough.
He stayed in the left lane and let the car be quiet.
Susan's text came in at 1:17 AM — Penny's phone, not his — and he saw the screen light up in his peripheral vision without reading it. Penny picked it up, read it, set it face-down in her lap without responding. He didn't ask. The text had done something to her shoulders. Made them more still.
A sign said LAX, 11 miles.
"I think I'm ready," Penny said. She wasn't running lines anymore.
"I know," he said.
She turned to look at him, and he caught it in his side mirror — the expression she made when she was deciding whether to say the real thing. "That was fast," she said instead. "I haven't even talked about it."
"You've been ready since August. The audition just took a while to catch up to you."
She laughed, short and real. He'd known it would land — she liked specificity; she liked when someone had actually been paying attention — and it landed, and then it faded, and the freeway went back to being just the freeway.
He took the exit at Century Boulevard.
The airport at 1:30 AM was a different animal from the airport at noon: the drop-offs sparse, the signage lit and patient, the terminal faces less the usual exhausted-hurry and more a kind of resigned calm. He pulled up to Departures, Terminal 2, and left the hazards on.
She had the door open before he'd fully stopped. He got out, rounded the car, opened the trunk.
The suitcase was well-made. He'd noticed that the first time she'd pulled it out, back in Nebraska when they'd packed to leave — real wheels, good zipper hardware, the kind of bag that was built to travel and not to pretend to be traveling. He extended the handle and set it on the curb.
Penny was already pulling him in before he'd fully straightened. She hugged the way she always did when something mattered — both arms, chin at his shoulder, the kind of hug that didn't have a diplomatic exit. He put his arms around her.
"Sunday," she said, against his jacket. "I'll call you Sunday morning."
"Absolutely," he said. "I'll be up."
"Stuart." She pulled back enough to look at him. "You're going to be fine. In case you were thinking about worrying."
"I wasn't," he said, which was true, technically, and which she accepted with a look that said she knew he was carrying something but was going to let him carry it.
She kissed him once, quick and real.
Then she took the suitcase handle and walked toward the terminal doors.
He watched the automatic doors open — the terminal swallowing her in its fluorescent certainty — and then the doors closed, and there was just the red roof of the American Tourister disappearing around a column.
He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to.
A man in a DELTA AIRLINES vest said, "Sir, you can't park here," and Stuart said, "Sorry, I'm going," and got in the car.
His phone was in the cupholder. Amy's message was still open from the drive out — "Sheldon's RSI study, baseline emotional log, would you be willing to assign a numerical value to your current relational affect on a scale of —" — and he'd been halfway through typing "Sure, I'd say a four, if four means" before he'd caught himself and deleted it.
He deleted it again now. The whole thread.
He pulled away from the curb.
On the 405 heading back north, with no passenger and no murmured lines and no red suitcase in the trunk, he turned the radio up one notch. The song was something he half-recognized — something from a year or two ago, already starting to age. He drove.