Chapter 12

After the second and final round, the house was quieter and less tense. Travis could still feel an anxiety in the air, even without using power, but he realized that this atmosphere was nothing new. He was upset with himself for having accepted his father's selfish belligerence as normal when Travis knew it wasn't. With new determination, he spread out the map of United States on the family room coffee table and invited Anya to study the map with him.

He laid out the compass points, but she made him reorient the map to reflect true direction; north on the map had to be north on the compass. Travis felt like an idiot holding up a corner with one hand while pinning down map with his other to keep it from sliding off of the narrow table.

His father looked in the room and harrumphed, "Why don't you just move the table around, dumbass?"

Without waiting for a reply, the elder Doherty tromped off to his bedroom to get dressed for the first time that day. Travis swore he heard Anya mutter "barbarian" under her breath but she gave his hand a squeeze and that soothed him. They pulled the table around.

After a few moments of meditation Anya gave Travis a direction, which he penciled in with a ruler on the map using Detroit as the anchor. He drew a line down towards the southwest and began reciting the nearby cities and towns: "Fort Wayne, Champagne-Urbana, St. Louis, Springfield, maybe Tulsa. Can you give me a better indication of how far away?"

Anya returned to her concentration. Without opening her eyes, she began to announce her search, "It's far... farther than the trip we took yesterday."

"That is to close for Fort Wayne and Champagne-Urbana, which would have meant a shorter trip," Travis lamented.

"The distance is half-again more," Anya concluded opening her eyes.

"That's about nine hours, which puts us distance-wise in St. Louis, Missouri; home to the Budweiser Beer," Travis explained, "your sister does have good taste, after all."

Anya got an evil little grin on her face, "Beer? Your father has beer in the refrigerator. Why don't you have one now while you are thinking of it."

Travis immediately got his suspicions up, "Why are you encouraging me to have a beer?"

"You had a hard morning and you seem... tense and anxious still. A little beer might make you feel better," she suggested with a sincerity that Travis wanted to doubt but didn't.

"Alright," he agreed and waltzed into the kitchen to pull a cold Lite! out of the fridge. Not his favorite, but it was still his dad's house. He popped the tab and took a long draw of the bitter brew. As he tilted his head back to swallow his first beer in days, he suddenly felt the urge to spit it out, which he did, across the entirely of his mother's spotless linoleum floor.

"Heartless wench!" he hollered, "Foul, faithless harlot! Not only have you tried to poison me, but you have turned my favorite hobby against me. How will I ever be able to hang out and have beer and pizza with my buddies ever again? You have torn my heart and now you rip the life out of my gut. You," he pointed at her bemused face as she leaned against the refrigerator, "are a cruel woman."

"You," declared his mother as she walked into the kitchen dressed and coifed, "are going to clean up that mess from my clean kitchen floor and then you are going to apologize to your friend for calling her names, whatever they were."

"Yes, Mom," Travis whined long and drawn out.

"You are too old to be giving me any attitude," she spoke with her finger, "and pour that beer out if you're not going to drink it. Your father shouldn't even have it in the house anymore."

Turning to Anya she asked, "What would you like for dinner, dear?"

Travis tried to interject a suggestion, but his mother waved him off. He stormed off to the laundry room to get the mop, when his mother reminded him that he had to clean it, not just mop it because she would not tolerate a sticky floor. He felt like a child all over again and he was a bit embarrassed.

"... carnivore," Anya said as Travis trundled the bucket into the kitchen. "We're both having trouble with preservatives and additives though, so plain red meat or fowl is great. We had seafood last night."

Travis was wondering where Anya had learned the phrase 'preservatives and additives' and completely missed his mother's directed question about their dinner last night. Anya launched into a description of the gourmet part of the evening, leaving Travis to listen passively as he mopped up his mess. She described in great detail the composition of the sauces, the décor of the restaurant, and what people were wearing. She remembered much more detail than Travis did, which floored him. He began to get an inkling of just how important last night was to her; something he had not realized before.