Gas Station

My favorite thing about walking the interstate was the view, especially in winter. I loved the way I could look out at the mountains and see through all the trees right to the leafy ground. I liked how I could see the real shapes of the hills in winter, the ripples along their sides, the little hidden ridges normally smoothed over by summer green.

I wondered why I never saw any animals, though, no deer or bear or whatever running around on the slopes. Everything seemed so obscenely open, like when you’re out at night and accidentally get a view right into someone’s uncurtained window. I imagined that if I looked hard enough I’d catch a glimpse of the secret things animals do when they think they’re not being watched, things people only see if they have the time to sit quietly and wait for hours, while hunting or something. 

Mama hated the fact that I always walked along the Interstate, and would leave printouts of news stories she’d find about traffic accidents and pedestrian deaths on my bed for me to find. I didn’t mind the walk, though: it was only for one mile, and it saved me an hour compared to the meandering side roads. I only had to walk home, anyway, now that Tanya was living at home again with my baby nephew. She said she was already awake at 3 AM to feed him, but I didn’t believe her. I was pretty sure she only drove me in exchange for Mama watching the baby all day. She never grumbled about it, though, and I always offered her coffee from the gas station, which she always declined. By the time I got off work at noon, she was in the middle of her shift at the hospital in Asheville, the car sitting miles away in that big parking garage for the rest of the afternoon. 

Walking also saved me from having to call Travis to beg for a ride, trading stolen six-packs from the walk-in cooler at the gas station when we were dating or blowjobs when we weren’t. There were a few icy days each year when I’d give in and ask him, or in summer when the asphalt got hot enough that the soles of my shoes turned gummy. 

Once every so often, drivers thought I was trying to hitchhike and they’d pull over ahead of me.  My heart would pound in time with their emergency blinkers as I approached, feeling trapped. My mile of highway was bounded by metal guardrail and cement barrier, and there was nowhere to go except down into the creek. I’d usually pull into myself and ignore them as I walked by, which worked sometimes. Sometimes they’d call out to me, anger in their voices when I didn’t answer. I’d have to explain myself, fake grins while I turned down rides, hope they wouldn’t insist or follow me or run me down.

A few months ago, wild and bold after a fight with Darlene at work, I made eye contact with the driver of this shiny BMW, feeling myself the kind of crazy highway-roamer anyone would run from. I guess that’s what the guy was hoping to catch, though, because he stared right back, his eyes hot and penetrative. I bared my teeth at him as I passed, and he grabbed for me, banging my head hard on the door of his car and digging his fingers into my sides. I screamed and his hand clamped on my mouth, his smooth fingertips feeling like they were going to pierce through my cheeks. I tried to bite his hand but my teeth couldn’t move. I jammed a tongueful of spit into his palm and he laughed, pressing his thumb down harder on my cheekbone and pushing me into the frame of his car. At that moment, we felt and then heard the rumble of a semi truck coming up the hill. “Shit!” he barked, then he pushed me backward onto the road, slammed the door, and accelerated off towards Tennessee. Gasping, I moved to my hands and knees as the blast of wind from the truck’s passing washed over me, devouring my scream. I crawled through the sand and gravel on the shoulder, pulling my head over the guardrail to gulp grateful breaths. “Thank you, thank you,” I whispered out to no one, sure that I had just gotten a second chance bordering on miraculous. I knew the truck driver wouldn’t have stopped. 

After that, I got back with Travis for a while, mostly for the guarantee of safety provided by his car. My renewed appreciation for being alive made it easier to tolerate his menthol tongue thrusting into my mouth and his bedroom littered with crumpled tissues and bottles quarter-full of sour beer dregs. For a while, he’d pick me up at noon every day and bring me back to his apartment, where I’d wash his roommates’ sink full of dinner dishes and make us boxed mac and cheese, served in scratched plastic bowls alongside whatever beer I’d lifted from work. We’d spend the rest of the afternoon in bed fooling around, getting high, drowsily watching “The Price is Right.”

He’d take me home just before dinner so I could get to sleep early, and he’d head for his job at the bar in Mars Hill. Mama hated Travis almost as much as she hated me walking on the highway, but for this incarnation of our relationship she kept her disapproval to just pointed looks and raised eyebrows when I’d walk in. I got the feeling she was too unsurprised to even be disappointed that I was back with him. I didn’t bring him up. What was there even to say? This was fate but it wasn’t love. This was the wheel I was bound to, and I was just rolling along.

After a month or two of this new routine, Travis started showing up later and later, leaving me sitting on the curb or pacing the patch of grass in front of the gas station for half an hour, an hour. He’d take me home earlier and earlier, wrenching the blankets of his bed off of me to signal that my time was up. This time I was numb instead of clingy. This time there were no frantic phone calls or text blizzards. Instead I kept going through the motions, performing my role in the routine, a dancer committed to a joyless choreography.

The day he picked me up two hours late and dropped me off at my house without a word, I cried, annoyed with myself. Hadn’t I known this was how it was going to be? Hadn’t I barricaded my heart safely? I knew I shouldn’t let myself wallow, but I felt like a glass of water half-evaporated, the marrow emptied from my bones. I lay in bed and let tears roll off the sides of my face into my hair. I fell asleep like this, hours early, and woke at midnight, unrested, a weight pressing my gut into the mattress.  My head cleared after scrounging in the fridge for a pudding cup. I added up the signs: my uniform slacks had been feeling a little tight, my bras a little fuller. And my period was at least a few days late, maybe more.

The next morning I thought about talking to Tanya about it, but the words I spent the short drive preparing dissolved into a choked out version of my usual “do you want a coffee or anything?” I spent all morning trying to maneuver an excuse to end up in the gas station’s little health and beauty section. Eventually, while restocking ibuprofen and energy packets, I tried to swipe a pregnancy test.  I fumbled as I moved to slip it into my shoe under my pants leg and sent it clattering across the aisle. Darlene’s cold stare from behind the counter told me she wasn’t going to pretend she didn’t see it like she did when I swiped gum or sodas. When I crept back to my register she said she was doing me a favor by not writing me up for the attempt. On my break, I threw a twenty at her, grabbed the test, and stalked to the bathroom, a fresh sob smothering my breathing. 

I sat on the yellowed toilet and stared at the cracked brown ceramic tile while I waited for the result. The seconds expanded and for just a moment let myself fantasize. My nephew was soft and cute and didn’t cry too much. I didn’t have any kind of motherly urge towards him, but I didn’t dislike him. I even offered to play with him some on my days off, and I didn’t have a hard time keeping him alive. I figured I’d like my own kid better than Tanya’s, too. When we started dating, Mama used to wail at both of us girls that babies would lock us down, close doors to our future. My laugh at this memory echoed in the overbright gas station bathroom. What future doors were left to close? 

When I was a kid, Daddy used to have this book leftover from some hazmat training that told the meanings of the numbers you’d see in the diamonds on the sides of semi trucks. Once I found the book, I started seeing the numbers everywhere. 1203 meant gasoline, 1075 was kerosene. On our long drives down to Macon, Georgia, where my grandparents lived, I’d spend hours on the lookout, trying to spot new ones, but the placards themselves were rare, nevermind the more exotic cargo. I never did spot the 0436 that would mean the truck was carrying a shipment of rockets. My favorite one was 1993, “flammable liquid not otherwise specified,” just because that was what year it was and it felt kind of special. 

Now I see 1993 trucks at least once a week, delivering diesel to the gas station. It’s not special anymore but my heart twinges anyway when I see the number and think about that book, and Daddy’s car, and the year 1993 when all of life seemed open as the long stretches of predawn freeway, Daddy’s Robert Plant on the stereo. We pretended to hate it but when he sang “my love is in league with the freeway,” we felt it too. I was transported back to hot driving afternoons with the windows down because the A/C was busted, my legs stuck to the vinyl and Tanya and me playing MadLibs in the backseat, filling all the spaces with sex words we barely undersood. Time felt infinite then. Nothing was decided yet, and the roads stretched forever. 

Maybe I’d be able to get my own car with child support money from Travis. Maybe it would be an opening. Me and my baby could just drive and drive whenever we wanted. The whole country would be open to us. 

Now Daddy’s gone, along with his book and his car and the 90s. He got some kind of infection in his feet that wouldn’t heal. He didn’t want them to take his legs, so he died instead. Mama and Tanya have never forgiven him for that, but it made sense to me. It would have been a prison for him.

I tossed the test into the trash and went outside for the rest of my break. The sun was turning one side of the hills golden, the other still shadowed in morning blue, mist curtaining the gaps. I leaned against the rack of propane tanks and searched again for distant movement, staring at the forest floor so crisp and sunbright I thought I could see the outlines of individual leaves between the shadows of the naked trees. 

The bell on the front door of the convenience store jingled and I looked up instinctively. Darlene was coming outside with a huge cup of soda and a pack of snack cakes. She offered me one and I shook my head. 

“So?” she asked, raising her eyebrow and nodding toward my abdomen.

“Negative,” I said.

“That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, sudden tears welling up. 

“Honey, don’t cry. You’re just gettin’ a little chubby cuz you ain’t been walkin’.”

Her unexpected honesty pulled a laugh up out of me, the half-formed tears blinked away. A car pulled up to a pump then, and I went inside to take my place behind the register. 

I gazed out the window, watching as Darlene held her soda cup by the top, bringing her hand up to her face to alternately sip from the straw and take a drag from her cigarette as she jabbered into her cell phone. I watched the girl get out and pump her gas, shivering a little, then drive away. I stared beyond them, past the cluster of pumps huddled under the sprinkler-studded roof, past our few paved parking spots, to those naked winter hills. I listened to the hum of the coolers, the creak of the hot dogs’ metal cage as they turned, the sounds of the slushie maker, the ice maker, the coffee maker. When the bell on the door jingled, announcing Darlene’s return, I smiled. 

Darlene came up next to me and followed my gaze out to those golden hills.

“Ever been up there?” she asked, nodding towards them.

“No, have you?” I answered, surprised.

She laughed, her huge arms rippling. “No, no, but I know there’s a buncha trails up there. My son and his friends are always hikin’ around them hills. Prob’ly bringin’ beers and girls up there, but at least they ain’t causin’ trouble.”

“I didn’t know there were trails.”

“Mmm-hmm, you can get a map somewheres. All kinds of little waterfalls and neat things to see, from what they tell me.”

“But I never see anything -- shouldn’t we be able to see something?”

“Honey, all you gotta do is drive up there.”

“I mean from here, or even from the road. Why can’t we see the trails, or the people?”

Darlene laughed again. “It’s farther away than you think and there’s more trees than you think. It ain’t like a highway.” 

I was quiet for a minute, studying the contours of the ridges and gaps, trying to imagine trails secretly crisscrossing those shadows. I imagined hikers up there, looking out over the highway, looking toward Tennessee. I wondered if I could see the gas station from up there. I wondered what else I could see. I wanted to find out.