Other People We Married by Emma Straub Read Free Book Online

seventy-five modern houses and buildings, including the former gas station where Abigail bought the map. We started at the next nearest destination, a house with a name I didn’t recognize. Abigail slowed down a few blocks away, and we pulled up in front of an address with a gated driveway and a ten-foot-high hedge all the way around it. On the other side of the gate, agardener was using a leaf blower. Abigail and her husband had a gardener, too. I wondered if she watched him work, or just left an envelope of money under the doormat. The only plants I had were plastic.
    “Wait, so this is the tour? Going around to look at houses you can’t even see?” I said. Over the top of the hedge, a flat roof was visible. “It looks like everything else. You can’t even see anything.”
    Abigail shook her head and rolled down her window, as if that was going to help. I stared at her while she stared at the invisible house. Tiny little lines formed a fan around the creases of her eyes.
    “I’m sure we’ll be able to see the next one better. They can’t all be like this. I’m not that crazy about Neutra anyway,” Abigail said, turning back from the house. She hit the button to roll up her window, stabbing it with her pointer finger until the window was all the way up. There were sweaty spots on her cheeks, and she whisked them away with her palm.
    In fact, almost all of the houses on the map where similarly blocked from the street. The fold-out brochure, with its ten or fifteen color photographs of interior shots, held vastly more visual information. We drove by Frank Sinatra’s house and a dozen others, seeing nothing more than gates and fences and hedges and maybe a slip of a house receding into the hillside.
    “One more,” Abigail said. “One more, and then I’m going back to the pool. This is absurd.”
    I nodded in agreement, though she would have called the tour off even if I’d protested. She had had enough. Despite the pumping air-conditioning, Abigail was flustered and sweating even more.
    We picked the one called Elvis’s Honeymoon Hideaway, though it had another name, too, and neither of us knew for sure that it was actually where Elvis and Priscilla had honeymooned. Everything in Palm Springs seemed to be surrounded by quotation marks, all the gas stations that had turned into tourist attractions and the Denny’s that were now dining destinations for vacationing gay guys from San Francisco. Even Abigail and I were playing the part of happy sisters, when we were just two women captive in the desert.
    The house was inside a small park—at least it seemed that way on the map, a green rectangle with fat white lines for streets. It took us a few wrong turns, but finally we were parked in front of the address, on a tiny cul-de-sac, with nothing blocking us but the owners’ electric blue Ford, which seemed far too modest for the house it stood before. The roof was peaked like the gas station’s, with two straight lines pointing high into the sky, only they were orange, and sat on top of a boxy teapot of a house. It was hideous.
    “Elvis lived here?” I asked, checking the map for details I knew it didn’t contain.
    “No, just his honeymoon. At least that’s what it’s called. How am I supposed to know?” Abigail crossed her arms over the steering wheel and rested her chin on her wrists.
    “It’s really fucking ugly, huh,” I said.
    “So is Graceland,” Abigail said, shifting the car into reverse.
    The mustachioed kid at the towel stand not only had weed, he had mushrooms. I’d never taken them before, but it seemed like something Abigail would be impressed by, ifI brought back something more serious. That night, we met in the parking lot of the motel next door while Abigail was talking to her children on the telephone. His name was Justin.
    “You should go to Joshua Tree,” Justin said. “Shrooms and Joshua Tree are like peanut butter and jelly.”
    “Or like peanut butter and bananas,” I said.