*
It’s ten past four in the morning when he pulls off the highway into a brightly lit service area. The lot is half-full of trucks and semis, with only a few passenger cars scattered in between. He parks his rental and gets out to stretch his legs, looking up at the open dome of sky. There aren’t any stars in western Pennsylvania. He assumed there would be, but the haze makes it hard to see anything other than a pair of commuter planes blinking red in the distance. Kyung buys a map, a bottle of water, and a pack of cigarettes from a bored-looking girl at the gas station and then walks next door to the diner. The people inside—all truckers, he assumes—look up from their plates when he enters. He hesitates for a moment, sensing that the crowd is rougher than he’s used to. The men are uniformly big and white and burly. They have bags under their eyes and constipated expressions that flicker with curiosity at the sight of Kyung. He’s not in a college town anymore, a difference he can feel as he slides into a seat at the counter and lifts an oversized menu in front of his face. He quickly orders a sandwich to go from another bored-looking girl who might be the sister of the one working next door.
“Coffee while you wait?” she asks.
He’s had nothing but coffee for nearly ten straight hours. Another cup would kill him. “No, thanks.”
The girl seems confused by someone declining coffee at this hour, but she takes her carafe and moves on. Kyung spreads his map over the counter and stares at it, not looking for something so much as trying to avoid being looked at. He traces his route from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, disappointed that the distance he drove barely amounts to the width of his pinky.
“Waste of time,” he hears someone mumble.
On the other side of the counter, a middle-aged couple sits side by side, stirring their coffee in slow, sleepy unison. Husband and wife, he assumes, because of the matching gold bands on their fingers. They’re also dressed in matching plaid shirts—blue for him and green for her—that appear soft and broken in from years of wear. Both of them are heavyset and unhealthy looking, with oily pink complexions that remind Kyung of lunch meat.
“If all you wanted was coffee, then why’d we even stop?” the man asks.
The woman rolls her eyes and runs a hand through her hair, which looks fried from too many dye jobs and home permanents.
“So?” the man says.
“So, what?”
“So drink it already. Let’s go.”
The woman downs several gulps of coffee and slams her cup on the saucer. She wipes the drops that spilled on her shirt with the back of her hand, camouflaging them into the plaid. “You happy now?”
“No, I’m not happy. We just lost half an hour. I thought you wanted to eat.”
“Oh, quit your bitching.” She peels off some bills from a small wad of money held together by a rubber band and throws them next to their check. “I told you I’d take the next leg.”
They collect their things and head for the door, lumbering single file because they’re too wide to walk next to each other.
As they reach Kyung’s end of the counter, the woman looks at him in passing. “Are we so damn interesting?” she snaps, not stopping or slowing down to wait for his response.
The bell on the door rings as it opens and closes, but Kyung doesn’t turn to watch them leave. He didn’t mean to stare at the couple, but it was hard not to. The farther he drives, the stranger people seem to him, and the smaller the town, the more everyone treats him like some kind of alien, as if they’ve never encountered an Asian person before.
“Husband-and-wife driving teams,” mumbles another man sitting a few stools away. “Now, that’s my idea of hell.”
One of the cooks passes the galley window that opens onto the kitchen. He’s talking to someone Kyung can’t see, laughing as he waves a spatula in the air. How long does it take to make a sandwich? he wonders. He looks around the diner for the waitress, who’s standing outside smoking a cigarette and staring vacantly at her cell phone. He wants to get her attention and ask her to rush his order, but he worries it won’t help. The girl doesn’t appear capable of rushing. Everything she does seems lethargic and slow. She even smokes slowly, blowing misshapen attempts at rings into the air.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
Kyung doesn’t think so, but he nods as if he does.
“Kind of a space case, though.” The man picks at the oozing yellow egg yolks on his plate with a fork. “I asked her for scrambled.”
He glances at the man, alarmed by his overgrown mustache and beard. The cap on his head can’t contain his long hair, which spills out the sides and back in ragged salt-and-pepper strands. Kyung isn’t sure if he’s trying to make conversation, or simply observing out loud. He hopes it’s the latter and returns to his map. He finds Massachusetts again, a small patch of green no bigger than a postage stamp, crisscrossed by red and blue strands of interstate.