Route 66

Hector Morales had been planning the trip for ten years, ever since he had moved from Guadalajara to Chicago for work. Route 66, the old highway from Chicago to Santa Monica, almost four thousand kilometers of motels, diners and desert. He had always imagined doing it with his daughter, Valeria. The problem was that Valeria was now sixteen, and would rather have spent the summer anywhere else.

"Two weeks in a car with my dad," she told her friends before they left. "Pray for me." She spent the first day with her headphones on, looking at her phone while Illinois went past the window. Hector tried to point out the historic gas stations and the old painted signs, but she only looked up when he nearly drove into a ditch while photographing a giant statue of a man holding a hot dog.

The trouble started in Missouri. On the third morning, somewhere outside a small town called Cuba, the car began making a noise like a coffee grinder and then stopped completely. The nearest garage was eleven kilometers away. The mechanic, a calm woman in her sixties, told them the part they needed would not arrive until Monday. It was Friday afternoon.

Hector was furious, mostly with himself. He had planned every day of the trip down to the hour, and now the plan was ruined. Valeria, to his surprise, was the calm one. "Dad, it's fine," she said. "We'll just stay here. It's not as if we're missing a flight." They spent the weekend in a motel with a broken ice machine and a swimming pool shaped like a guitar. On Saturday night they played cards until two in the morning, and Valeria won every game.

In New Mexico, things went wrong again. After lunch at a gas station near Santa Rosa, Hector reached into his pocket and found it empty. His wallet, with his credit cards, his driver's license and most of their cash, was gone. They drove back, searched the parking lot and asked everyone inside. Nothing. Hector sat on the hood of the car with his head in his hands. "I should never have kept everything in one place," he said.

It was Valeria who suggested they stop at the diner across the road to think. The owner, a large, cheerful man called Earl, had been running the place for forty years and had clearly seen every kind of traveler. He listened to their story, made a phone call, and twenty minutes later a sheriff's car arrived with the wallet. A trucker had found it by the gas pumps and handed it in. Nothing was missing.

Earl refused to let them pay for their pie. Instead, he took a paper napkin and drew them a map of everything they ought to see between there and California: a meteor crater, a forest where the trees had turned to stone, a tiny town where wild donkeys walked down the main street, and a place in the desert where, he said, the sunset would make them forget their own names. "Don't hurry," he told them. "The road's been here a hundred years. It'll wait."

They followed the napkin map all the way to the coast. Hector stopped checking the clock. Valeria took off her headphones and started choosing the music, which was mostly terrible, and taking photos, which were mostly of her father pulling faces. Somewhere in Arizona, she asked him about his childhood in Guadalajara, and he talked for three hours without stopping.

When they finally reached the end of the road, at the pier in Santa Monica, they were four days late. They stood at the railing and looked out at the Pacific without saying much. Then Valeria took out her phone and sent a message to her friends: "Best two weeks ever. Don't tell my dad." Hector, who was reading over her shoulder, pretended he had not seen it.