Read Online The End of Eve by Ariel Gore - Free Book Online

waxing romantic about the life we’d finally have. Some perfect queer family under the sun.
    Driving with Sol, we only listened to her music – to Bowie or Dylan or Freakwater or Steely Dan. The first year we were together she simply pushed eject whenever I chose the CD , so I’d given up. I liked Sol’s music well enough, but I wondered what kind of music I might listen to these days if I hadn’t spent eight years deferring. It made me sad to think I didn’t know what I liked anymore, didn’t know what I’d choose.
    We drove a couple hundred miles, then spent a snowy night camped at the edge of a little town full of scruffy mullets, Wrangler jeans, and old hippies waiting for the UFO s.
    Morning and a couple hundred miles of dotted yellow lines and green highway signs. Portobello mushroom burgers with friends in a Sierra mountain town that smelled of pine. We swam in a river and Sol cried on the rocky bank. Sol always cried at clean water. Her father was on trial for his oil company’s genocidal pollution in Latin America. She’d gone to college and veterinary school on the profits of destruction. It was part of the reason she felt morally obliged not to charge people much for her services. Like she was repaying some of her father’s karmic debt by tending parakeet wounds.
    A couple hundred miles then of cowboy bars and neon-lit brothels and here we were now at this glowing lake and clean water had become a precious thing.
    We had to keep going.
    IN A CREEPY motel office in a town of old miners’ graveyards, there was a napkin-lined basket full of muffins and a Post-It note that read “Martha made these. FREE .”
    Free muffins, Maxito decided, could almost make up for along and waterless day driving. “Muffins,” he hummed, swaying in his fuzzy blue pajamas. “I love agua and muffins.”
    Our room smelled like cigarettes.
    Sol read to Maxito from a book about unpolluted rivers and lonely rabbits and the two of them fell asleep on the queen-sized bed. I sat on the toilet because that’s where the wi-fi worked. “Dear Nevada,” I status-updated on Facebook. “I’m lost.” I checked my email.
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Subject: Santa Fe
    Tiniest,
    I’ve been trying to call you all day. You’re either out of range or you’re avoiding me. It is urgent that you contact me. DO NOT COME TO SANTA FE . If you do come, DO NOT PARK YOUR TRAILER ON THE PROPERTY .
    Love,
    Mom
    I READ THE email a couple of times. Surely she was kidding. Do not come to Santa Fe? She had to be kidding. She used to call me on April Fools’ Day mornings to tell me she’d adopted a giant frog she had to walk on a leash or that she was unexpectedly pregnant with Anderson Cooper’s baby. But it was too late for April Fools.
    I crept out of the motel room. The warm night smelled like truck exhaust. I stepped back into the free muffin office and asked the man behind the desk to point me to the nearest bar, but he shook his head.
    â€œNothing like that in this town.” He looked like an aging Anthony Perkins from Psycho with those dark little eyes and cleft chin.
    Do not come to Santa Fe. Sure. Who needed Santa Fe? Whywould we come to Santa Fe? Maybe we could just settle here in this weird little barless town on the edge of a nuclear test site.
    I turned to leave the office, but Anthony Perkins called after me. “I’ll give you a night cap, little lady.” He poured a couple of shots of tequila into two Styrofoam cups, pushed mine across the desk.
    I wasn’t going to refuse. “Thanks.” The drink was warm and rough, but it soothed my throat.
    Anthony Perkins winked at me, lit a menthol cigarette. “You know there’s a whole army base under that lake, don’t you? Yes, Ma’am. You came from the lake didn’t you?” He knocked back his tequila, poured us each another