The bags went in first.
Maya's two bags, one soft and one with the hard edges of someone who'd packed more than necessary and made peace with it. Mine were already in the boot by the time she came down with hers, and we did the brief wordless negotiation of fitting everything in, shifting things around without discussing it, each of us reading the available space and adjusting.
She closed the boot.
"Anything left?" she asked.
"Nah."
We got in.
***
The city on a weekend morning had its particular quality, unhurried, the roads running at half the usual resistance. I pulled out of the parking space and into the street and neither of us said anything. Maya had her bag on her lap for the first minute before she moved it to the footwell. She looked out the window. I looked at the road.
The radio was off. I hadn't reached for it and she hadn't suggested it and the silence sat between us the comfortable kind, not weighted, not requiring anything. We'd done this drive before, or versions of it, and there was a rhythm to it that came back without needing to be relearned.
It was the weekend now and we were heading to our mother's. My father's fifth death anniversary had arrived the way these dates did, quietly and then all at once, and when her message had come it hadn't really been a question. We'd both known we'd go. Neither of us had said so directly. We'd just started packing.
The city thinned as we drove, the density of buildings loosening into wider streets and then into the kind of roads that had more sky in them. Maya rested her elbow on the window ledge and watched the city give way to something with more room in it. I kept my eyes on the road.
We didn't talk and it was fine.
"Stop at the supermarket, will you."
Not a question. The way she said things when she'd already decided.
I signaled and pulled in to the car park of the one coming up on the left, the large one with the wide glass front that was already doing moderate weekend business. Maya had her door open before I'd fully stopped, moving with the purpose of someone who knew exactly what she was getting.
"Won't be long," she said.
I cut the engine and got out.
The air outside was cooler than the car, the morning still carrying the faint freshness of a weekend that hadn't warmed up yet. I stood beside the car and leaned against the door and looked at nothing in particular, the car park and the people moving through it and the sky above the flat roof of the supermarket, pale and wide and offering nothing except space.
There was something specific about this kind of waiting, not unpleasant, the suspension of a moment between two things. The drive behind and the rest of the day still ahead, and just this, the open air and the sound of the car park and my own breathing.
I stayed like that for a while.
Maya came through the automatic doors with a carrier bag that was heavier than it looked and an expression of someone who had completed a mission.
She held it up as she reached the car.
Inside, visible through the thin plastic, a large bag of crisps and a box of chocolates and something else, a small cardboard rectangle I couldn't immediately place.
She opened the passenger door and got in and I came around and got in beside her. She was already pulling things out of the bag, setting them on her lap with a kind of careful ceremony.
The small cardboard rectangle was a Mr. Dino activity box. The kind they put out for children, with a cartoon dinosaur on the front in a yellow hard hat, grinning the specific grin of a mascot who had been designed by committee to appeal to the widest possible demographic.
"They had a Mr. Dino display inside," she said. "Mascot and everything." She set the box on the dashboard with both hands, with the particular gravity of someone presenting evidence. "I remember you used to love it."
I looked at the box. Then at her.
"No way I did," I said.
She turned to look at me with the expression of someone who had been waiting for exactly this response and was not remotely surprised by it.
"Yes you did," she said. "No need to hide it."
"I have no memory of that."
"You had the lunch box. The one with his face on it. You brought it to school for two years."
"I have no memory of that either."
I looked at the Mr. Dino box on the dashboard. His yellow hard hat. His very enthusiastic expression.
"I was a child," I said.
"You were eleven."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Maya was looking at me with the particular expression of someone who had won something and was allowing the other person time to arrive at the same conclusion.
"Fine," I said.
She smiled. The real one, unguarded and immediate, the one that arrived before she'd decided to let it. "I knew it."
"I was eleven," I said again, which was not the defense it had been the first time.
She was already reaching for her phone.
"I'm putting music on," she said.
"Okay."
She found what she was looking for and connected it to the car's Bluetooth with the efficiency of someone who had done this before in other people's cars and knew how it worked. I started the engine. Checked the mirrors.
The first notes came through the speakers.
I recognized it immediately and I think my expression did something involuntary because Maya looked at me at exactly the right moment, catching whatever had moved across my face, and her own expression became a very controlled smirk, the kind that had been ready and waiting.
The Mr. Dino theme. The full opening, with the brass section and the children's choir and the particular melodic hook that had apparently been stored somewhere in the back of my memory for seventeen years without my knowledge or consent.
I pulled out of the car park.
Maya waited approximately four seconds before she started singing.
She knew the lyrics. Of course she knew the lyrics. She sang them with complete commitment, facing forward, looking at the road ahead of us as if this were entirely normal, her voice carrying the melody with zero self-consciousness and a great deal of accuracy.
I didn't say anything. I kept my eyes on the road and I drove and somewhere in the middle of the second verse I started humming, just barely, just enough to be audible.
Maya didn't comment on it.
She just kept singing.
I glanced over at some point, one of those brief sideways looks that the driver takes when they should probably be watching the road, and she was fully in it, both hands now involved in a small choreography that matched the song, her face entirely open, lit up with the particular joy of someone doing something slightly ridiculous and not caring at all.
Her smile was the kind that took up her whole face. The kind that didn't have any of her usual careful management in it, no performance, no edge. Just Maya, in the passenger seat of my car on the way to our mother's house, singing a cartoon dinosaur's theme song at full volume on a Saturday morning.
I looked back at the road.
I was smiling. I didn't try to stop it.
The song kept going and she kept singing and I kept driving and the road opened up ahead of us with the weekend and the anniversary and everything we hadn't said stretching out alongside it, and for this small stretch of it, for exactly this, none of that seemed to matter very much at all.