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Palm Springs

November 6, 2022

We parked our new truck between a sign that said NO OUTLET and another that read SIDEWALK ENDS. The universe was telling us that we could go no farther.

In a nearby barren lot I spied a mangy coyote sitting under a date tree watching us wearily as we stood like abandoned orphans in the street.

Suckers, the coyote seemed to say.

When I began researching Palm Springs, I’d seen pictures of tennis courts, swimming pools, palm trees, martinis, caftans, and the Rat Pack, but this rustic corner of town was like a scene from High Noon, all rocks, cacti, and… brownness.

Two men with grizzled white beards sat on the hood of a jalopy drinking blue Gatorade that was the same pure color as the sky above them. I resented the men—not for being unhoused, but for creating a scratch in the cheery fantasy that had been running through my mind of arriving at some sort of sunny utopia.

“Nice truck,” one of the bearded men said.

Grant smiled at me as if to say, I told you so. “Thanks. We just got her.”

The tow truck took us to a town called Barstow, where the mechanic performed last rites on the Prius, and we went to have lunch at a place called Peggy Sue’s ’50s Diner, in a building that had been constructed out of rail ties from the Union Pacific. We retreated into our phones while we waited for our John Wayne and Milton Berle omelets. I texted the girls a video I’d surreptitiously taken of Grant trying to peel the bumper stickers off the car for keepsakes, and I emailed Melody to tell her we’d experienced a delay.

I blew through my omelet and ordered a short stack of pancakes. Grant said, “This is like our first date when you ordered two entrées. I was so happy I’d found a woman with a big appetite.”

He told this story every time we ordered food, and every time I would say, as I did that morning, “I was starving!”

“You said, ‘If you want me, I hope you can afford to feed me.’”

Our moods shifted, and our fight had been reduced to a vapor trail. He was rubbing my forearm with his thumb—Grant always had to touch me. He was desperate for contact, while I found it hard to get used to after growing up with Polly, who shunned physical intimacy. Sometimes, I’d run up behind her and pinch her, just to make that connection.

“I like this place,” he said, staring at a mannequin with a beehive hairdo propped up on one of the barstools in front of the counter. “It hasn’t been packaged and repackaged. It’s what it is, like you.”

“I’m just me.”

“Exactly.”

Not two minutes later, I received a reply from Melody. It had been so long since I’d heard from my former mother-in-law that the email arrived like a voice from the dead. Come to Smoke Tree Ranch for lunch Wednesday. Noon. I’ll leave your name with the boy at the gate.

The boy ? Apparently, Melody hadn’t changed.

I typed a response—a title from one of Basil’s songs, and I wondered if she knew it: Sounds great, can’t wait!

On our way out, Grant was humming along to “Puff, the Magic Dragon” when we saw two cars in the parking lot with sale signs in the windshields: a dune buggy with a stuffed monkey clinging to the antenna, and a burgundy Jeep. Grant wandered over and ran his finger tenderly along the side of the Jeep. “Oh my God, let’s buy it.”

I thought he was joking. “Oh, sure, you can have that one, and the dune buggy can be for me. His and hers.”

His gaze was stuck on the truck. “I’m not kidding.”

I walked to the front windshield, looked at the sticker, and gasped. “This Jeep is almost as old as we are. It looks like it’s from M*A*S*H. ”

“It’s got a Safari Snorkel, Warn winch, ARB bumper, White Knuckle sliders. This isn’t a truck, Kimmy. It’s a rig. A rig with a story.” He kicked a tire and walked around the truck, staring at it appreciatively like a guy checking out a hot girl at a bar. “It’s been rebuilt. OME lift kit. It’s got thirty-threes.”

“I don’t even know what language you’re speaking. Since when are you, like, a regular guy? How on earth do you know so much about trucks?” It was both sexy and disconcerting to discover that he had a deep well of knowledge he’d never shared with me before. What else hadn’t he told me? What else didn’t I know? “We aren’t car people.”

“But don’t you see? This is not a car, my love.” It had stickers all over it that had nothing to do with the ones that he’d peeled off our dead Prius. This car was covered in dust, so I could just make out what a few of them said: IDAHO OFF-ROAD CLUB, RED ROCK 4-WHEELERS MOAB , and a pair of bear-paw decals. A SHIFT HAPPENS bumper sticker. “I want to be friends with whoever owns this. We could take her anywhere. Look at her.”

“She? Her? Who even are you?”

“You don’t understand how special this Jeep is. It has a cult following.”

“So do pimple-popping videos.”

His eyes were filled with want.

“Grant. Snap out of it. Twenty. Thousand. Dollars. ”

“That’s so much less than they normally cost.”

“It has well over a hundred thousand miles on it.”

“That’s nothing. Jeeps don’t die, not if you take care of them.”

“This isn’t even a legit car dealership. Who knows what kinds of problems it could have.”

It didn’t matter what I said; his mind was set. He gave me an ex cited squeeze. “I’ve always wanted a truck like this. Always, always, always.”

“We should get an EV. How could you be okay with driving a car that gets less than twenty miles to the gallon? That’s unconscionable in this day and age. You were the one complaining about this trip being indulgent.”

“I’ll buy carbon offsets. Don’t worry about sullying your reputation with the Go Greeners.”

He still didn’t know about the organization’s already-sullied reputation; I wanted to keep that to myself for a while. “Have you lost your mind?”

He ignored me. “They have great resale value.” He ran his finger along the red stripe on the side and smiled like a little boy on Christmas morning. “You know, George had a Jeep. He took me rock crawling in Bald Mountain a few times. Those were some of the best days of my childhood.”

Grant rarely waxed nostalgic about his youth, considering everything he’d been through. A bright spot was George, a kindly World War II veteran who took care of Grant whenever his parents had problems, and especially in the dark years when it was just Grant and Mitzie and Mitzie barely held it together.

“I know you loved George, but there are other ways to honor him.”

“You don’t understand. That’s the best memory from my entire childhood. Kim, I’ve wanted a rig like this my whole life.”

A rig! Who was I to stand in his way? If he didn’t live out his fantasies now, when would he? And who was I to hold him back from what he wanted, especially if it didn’t involve moving to Omaha?

But then he stiffened. “I’m not asking for your permission, you know.”

What was that tone? He spoke to me not as someone he’d been with for thirty years, but as a stranger.

“I’m buying it with my own money. It’ll be my car.”

He did have his own money, that was true. With the sale of his mother’s house, he was sitting on some cash. Yet at our age, I thought it would be prudent to save every penny. We had been floored by the monthly cost of assisted-living centers and personal caregivers, not to mention the price of Mitzie’s medications. As far as I was concerned, no matter how much we saved, it wouldn’t be enough. Grant, on the other hand, thought of his inheritance as mad money, and it was burning a hole in his pocket.

Our first decade together, we’d both relied on my alimony from Basil. My prenup was structured so that I could collect a monthly sum for a decade—provided I remained single. This, according to Vandyke, was the standard arrangement. Theirs was a world filled with gold diggers; they couldn’t be too careful. I honestly hadn’t paid too much attention to the details at the time because I couldn’t imagine life without Basil, and I’d assumed we’d be together forever. Vandyke insisted we have an agreement in place, and he was the kind of person you didn’t say no to.

I used that money for the down payment on our house. Seeing my name on the mortgage was incredibly empowering after sharing an apartment above an Indian restaurant in Andersonville with Polly. Still, I’d never truly thought of the Madison house as mine alone. More like 80 percent.

What was Grant’s nonsense about his money?

I shrugged, annoyed. “Do what you want.”

That’s how we ended up driving the last leg of our journey from the high desert to the valley in a truck designed for deep-water crossings. I stared at Grant in the driver’s seat and my anger began to wane. He looked good, and happier than he’d been in a while, which was the whole point of the trip, wasn’t it? I wanted to figure out who I was; maybe Grant needed to do the same. Was this the “real” Grant?

“Look how high up we are,” he said. “I can see three cars ahead of the one in front of us.”

“I never knew this was your thing.”

“My ‘thing’ didn’t make sense before.”

“It still makes no sense.”

“We had the girls. And you never would have gone for it.”

“I’m not exactly going for it now.” I leaned forward—there was so much space between my seat and the dash. “I could take a yoga class in here. Do you hear that? That clicking? Is there a knock in the engine?”

“The engine is fine. You know why you don’t recognize that sound? Because you’re not used to hearing raw power.”

“It’s just so… male. This car smells of vinyl and testosterone.”

“Don’t call it a car.” He was grinning from ear to ear. “This feels amazing after driving the patchouli mobile for the last decade.”

I pretended to take umbrage.

We descended the rocky hills into the Coachella Valley, passing an army of giant white windmills, finally encountering civilization: supermarkets, golf courses, the airport, and funky mid-century complexes all tucked into an oasis of green. Beautiful palm trees stretched to the sky everywhere we looked. The streets downtown were all closed off. We could hear thumping dance music. We glimpsed parade floats, rainbow flags, and drag queens and cheering crowds. Traffic had come to a standstill. My heavy thoughts suddenly lifted.

A cop was directing traffic. I rolled down my window. “What’s going on?” I asked him. He didn’t look like the cops back home; he had a Mohawk and a giant diamond stud earring glittered in the bright sun.

He smiled. “It’s the Pride parade.” Crowds filled the sidewalks. There were floats, a sea of rainbow flags, pink tutus, motorcycles, and music. From that point forward, Palm Springs struck me as a place where we were always on the edge of fun.

A few minutes and a few miles later, all was quiet; in the corner of the desert where we’d ended up, you’d never know that just a few miles away the town was packed with people.

Grant had to help me step down because of my ankle. “Do you think he gave me the wrong address?” I asked. The air was hazy, and the mountains appeared to be made of smoke. Everything was so still and so weird that I felt as if I’d wandered into one of the old art films Basil took me to when we were young.

I found it hard to believe that just a few days ago I was covering our rosebushes with burlap to protect them from the coming frost. Here, the bright sun pierced down from on high, like the spotlight an actor stepped into onstage; it made everything else feel irrelevant, as though we hadn’t been anywhere or done anything that mattered until now.

In front of us, behind a row of ficus, stood a tall stucco-brick security wall that revealed only the angles of low-slung terra-cotta roofs in the distance. “Looks like this is the place,” Grant said when he spied the retro cursive sign next to the gate, hidden behind a chubby dwarf palm tree. The top nail in the s had fallen away, so the letter hung upside down like a cedilla indicating a question. Grant flicked it with his finger and set it into a rocking motion. “Le De-ert,” he said, faking a French accent. Grant had been making dad jokes about Le Desert ever since I told him the name of Basil’s complex. He put a le in front of everything: le freeway, le bunion, le road trip. Basil explained that there’s a hotel in Palm Springs called Les Cactus, which he suspected had been a sister property, named after a song by Jacques Dutronc. “It’s got the best lyrics,” Basil had said. “I wish I wrote it myself: ‘The whole world is a cactus / it’s impossible to sit down.’”

I walked over to the large rustic wooden door built under an arch and set deep into a vine-covered wall. Next to it, nailed to the gate, was a Moroccan-style lantern. I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled out the metallic-gold envelope Basil had sent. It still made me feel as if I’d won something.

I held the vintage key chain in my hand. The leather was stamped with the logo of a cactus with a cowboy hat on top and a pair of boots with spurs resting at the base. Below it was the number 1. Basil’s unit.

Grant’s sunglasses were fogged despite the dry heat, and his hair was dripping with sweat. His body was a furnace. He flushed often and easily, but that afternoon his face, still boyishly adorable, was heart-attack red.

“I literally cannot breathe here, Kim.” Grant often used the word literally, pronouncing each syllable distinctly, always emphatically. He reached for his toes but ended up in an L-shape—he had never been flexible and refused to try yoga with me. On instinct, I rubbed his sweaty back and wished that we could just be a “normal” couple and enjoy this moment.

The sun glinted off the key—such a slight object to have so much power. When March was little, she used to walk around with a giant plastic toy key in her chubby little hands. She said it was for her castle. She took it everywhere, always hopeful, believing even as a child that she was meant to live a grand life, while I’d always strived for getting just what I needed and no more. Polly’s worldview could be reduced to two words: make do.

Grant reached for the key. “Want me to try?”

I did not. Grant was even less mechanically inclined than I was, which wasn’t saying much. My hands were shaky.

A group of men walked past and eyed us with our big bags. I overheard one grumble, “Oh, look, the snowbirds are back. There go all the parking spots.”

“And the restaurant reservations.”

“The doctor’s appointments. You should see the line for prescriptions at Walgreens.”

“They’re changing the city.”

“Oh, I like the snowbirds,” the third one said. “Stop complaining about the city changing. Frank Sinatra is dead. ”

I slipped the key into the chunky antique iron lock and turned it counterclockwise. My stomach dropped when the bolt came loose. The hinges whined as they opened. We made a graceless entrance with the wheels of our big rolling bags thundering along the unevenly paved walkway.

The gate slammed shut behind us.