5
A truck roared past her, the first she’d seen in a while, and pushed her closer to a sign along the highway that read, Fire Danger Today. Extreme. The dry air that blew in through the open windows felt like someone lightly sanding her lips. She could travel these endless Western roads for a long time and see few other cars, a half hour, an hour on the same stretch, her mind swept elsewhere, away, absent, a dream of a mind. But then a tractor-trailer approached, or she’d see a dead animal in the road, and she’d have to steer around it, and once she was alert again it seemed as if an invisible hand had lowered her from the enormous sky onto this highway while a mouth whispered to her through the hum of the tires, “Your father is dying.”
She was entering a national forest, it hadn’t rained in weeks, though it was still only late June—an intermittent years-long drought—and they were worried any careless spark might set everything ablaze. She realized she was hungry. Hadn’t eaten before she’d left. She and Jack had made the quick decision for her to drive rather than pay for a last-minute airfare that they would be months paying off, since her father, hospitalized with heart problems, though gravely ill, would likely live a few more weeks. A three-day drive like she hadn’t taken in years, since she and Jack had come west, in fact, and it had been many more years since she had seen her father.
She pulled off the highway into a town that had been carved out of the forest; it had a couple of streets with run-down homes set back from the main road where there was a small grocery store, and next door, for some reason, what looked to be a onetime antiques shop with a small trailer out front and a sign that read Ed’s Deli. Three picnic tables were set out in the dirt parking lot, and an older man and woman were sitting at one of them under a canopy that shielded them from the heavy sun. When she pulled into the lot in the tiny used pickup truck she and Jack had purchased to move supplies to and from the motel, she raised a cloud of dust, and was grateful that the slight breeze carried it away from the man and woman.
When she stepped out of the truck, the couple looked her over, smiling. They were sitting at the table with no food, but just outside the front stoop of the trailer was a gas grill where burgers were cooking. Inside she could see the shadow of someone moving back and forth in front of the window. There were signs in marker on whiteboards that listed the sandwiches and beverages, and in quotation marks below the phrase “All ingredients fresh from next door,” and then a red-markered arrow pointing to the small grocery store.
The man at the picnic table watched her looking at the menu and then said, “Everything’s good!”
She smiled at him and said, “Is that so? Any recommendations?”
“The burgers are great. That’s what we’re waiting on,” he said. “So’s the turkey. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“No.”
“Good thing, because you’d be out of luck.”
The man who must have been Ed stepped out of the small screen door in his trailer. He was younger, with a blue T-shirt that read, I may be unemployed, out of shape, short on cash, and drunk, but I sure am fun! He nodded at her as he looked her over, lifted the cover of the grill and flipped the burgers, and then turned back to her and said, “Happy to help you now.” He took out a pad of paper and a pen, and she ordered a turkey sandwich.
The man at the table said, “Hell, Ed, it’s not like you got a line of folks here. Can’t you remember a simple turkey sandwich?” Ed didn’t smile, but instead gave a half salute without looking, and walked back into the trailer.
She waited at a separate table in the sun. She was unused to having nothing to do with her hands, since at the motel she was either changing sheets, sweeping floors, attending to guests, or playing games with Lucy, her daughter, who stood at the knees of the truckers and campers while they were checking in at the desk, and often asked, “You stayin’ at my house?” At the end of the day, when she and Jack lay back in bed, usually with Lucy asleep between them, she would sometimes say, “Mercy,” which was a word her grandmother had used to express surprise, but, in Claire’s case, she thought of the work at the motel, loving Lucy, attending to Jack, as a form of mercy that framed her life in ways she had, before this, never found imaginable.
“Where you coming from?” the man at the table asked.
“A little town just south of Merced.”
“And where you heading to?”
“Michigan.”
“No kidding?” He looked from her to the truck and back to her. Ed came out of the trailer with two prepared buns alongside chips, and flipped the burgers off the grill and closed up the sandwiches. When he slid them in front of the man and woman, he saluted again, and said, “Turkey sandwich is coming up.”