The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett Read Free Book Online

me to come alone, but he couldn't get leave to get me."
    He looked at me under the hood. My dress was loose and blew around, there would be no telling for sure. "You're in good shape," he said, touching the spark plugs. "I'll fill up the radiator, but you keep an eye on that. Pull over every hundred miles or so and check it. The water, it's got to be up to here. But don't touch anything. If it overheats, you just stand back and wait." I thanked him. I meant it. When I got back into the car he came back and leaned in my window. "People will tell you your transmission's going to go. But don't listen to them. Your transmission is good."
    There were so many things I needed to know, how to fix a car, how to lie. My mother taught me how to put on eyeliner without smudging it, but life was going to take more than that.
    This driving was not a game. My back ached down into my hips and I tried moving to one side and then another. Only the week before I had thought I wanted nothing more in the world than to drive in one endless direction. Highway 40 was exactly that. East was an endless direction. The radio came in and out in waves. I ran out of songs I knew the words to and then sang them all over again. I played games with myself. At the next town I'll stop. I'll take off a whole day, get a motel room, sleep. But the next town would come and I'd say, You've made it this far, you might as well keep going, one more hour won't make a difference and that will be an hour you won't have to drive tomorrow. When I did stop, it was to get gas, check the oil, fill the radiator. I would walk around the car a couple of times, lift my hands up over my head, stare at the landscape that looked the way it had on the stop before and the stop before that. I did not know how to keep going and I did not know how to stop, so I kept going.
    I had started to doubt my body. When I got so tired that the cars in front of me began to sway on the road, I remembered my mother saying how tired she had been when she was pregnant, and I would think, so you're not really tired. When I felt sick at my stomach, I wondered if I was actually sick, or if that was just part of it, too. Anything I could attribute to this baby I could dismiss, because I'd decided somewhere along the road that I was going to have nothing to do with it. I was following through on my part of it. I would see this pregnancy out, but that was it, no sickness, no side effects. It was enough that I was going so far to have it, and that I would see it delivered into the hands of those decent parents whose complete and wholesome lives I liked to contemplate. There was a difference, I knew, between being pregnant and being a mother. I was pregnant.
    The steering wheel was so hot I couldn't move my hands around. That was one of the worst parts about stopping, making a cool place for your hands again. I tried writing letters to my mother in my head, but they weren't any better than the note I'd left for Thomas. I wanted to do better for her. I knew she'd been a good wife to my father, that she was a good wife to Joe, even if she could never love him in the same way. She took marriage seriously, as she had taken motherhood seriously. She would find a way to love me even if I told her the truth, but I could feel her disappointment like a hot wind on my neck. The truth was something that would have to be mine alone. It was something that receded as I drove east.
    There was a time in my life when I'd wanted to know everything. I wanted to read the brutal details of every local murder. I wanted to know exactly how my father had died, the extent of damage to the car, the very place it happened. Facts had a certain irresistible quality. No matter how deeply they disturbed me, I thought I was better off knowing. But learning is easier than forgetting. The fact that my mother, that Thomas, didn't know where I had gone or the reason, made my life easier, but I liked to think it made things easier for them as well.