“If you don’t love me now, you’ll never love me again.” Classic rock, country and talk radio blares out of each cabin. The intense fumes of diesel fuel are inescapable, it sticks to clothing and nostril hairs. These people are fermented in a concoction of wet pavement, gasoline and energy drinks, ossified to their very existence. Even the coffee tastes like it has petrol in it.
I’m not as impatient as I was when I was younger but I’m waiting for him which puts me at a base level of dull agitation. There’s not a goddamn thing I wanna eat here, everything looks like a straight shot to artery replacements or diabetes. I order the fries. They’re probably lowered into a vat of motor oil. My petrol coffee with a side order of Valvoline french fries. This place is the embodiment of a Bob Seger song. The looks I’m getting aren’t even subtle but the waitress at the counter still calls me “Honey.” Her smile brings me little comfort.
He is already a half-hour late and there’s no wifi or reception in this black hole of communication somewhere between Cantua Creek and Kettleman City. If I look at the timeline of my life, I’m sure I’d be surprised to know I’ve been waiting for him for a little over ten hours of accumulated time. That’s really not that much in the scope of thirty-five years. Problem is that it’s not just the waiting, it’s the effort for an inevitable waste of time; I’ll sit across from him, and he won’t make eye-contact and I won’t break mine. I never break eye-contact with him, I know how it makes him uncomfortable. He’ll ask me about things that I don’t feel like telling him. Not because I’m lazy but because I don’t think he deserves to know anything about me. I wish he’d just stop blubbering and tell me he has cancer or something terminal… anything that would force me to be obligatorily nice to him. Faked pleasantries in the face of looming death are better than listening to him blunder his way through a string of false apologies.
I’m already ahead of myself, battling it out with an apparition of him before he even walks through the door. Emotional shadowboxing. I wonder if the opposite side of this story is happening across the counter from me with someone else. I’m probably the only fool in this joint that went out of his way to be here. This shack, this waterhole, this isn’t somewhere you plan to be. It’s somewhere you most definitely end up.
Tired of waiting, I go outside. I wouldn’t be mad if they threw out my barely touched basket of translucent fries. There’s not much to look at out here. There’s a sparse beauty to it; the landscape canvas soaked in royal blues and purples. Hues of pink hug the darkness of the hills being penetrated by motorist’s headlights; families on vacation heading to Disneyland; teenagers on their first road trip without parents heading to somewhere “cool,” secretly wishing they were heading to Disneyland. Certainly, either one of these truckers or motorists is getting road head. It’s just something you do on this stretch of road. There isn’t shit else to pass the time. You can only sing your favorite songs, at the top of your lungs, so many times.
I wander around the wet fluorescent-lit structure for a while, looking for a signal. I don’t know why, there’s no one I would call right now, it’s just something to do. I’m wandering around long enough to make a decision: go back inside and wait or jump back into my econo-rental and drive back to the civilized world, out of the barren wasteland. I think of few reasons to get gone but the dread of sitting in a car for the next few hours outweighs any reason to leave, and I go back inside, back to my basket of fries soaking through the parchment paper they were haphazardly delivered on.
I take the basket from the counter and sit at a booth with my eyes on the front door. I think five or ten minutes have passed, and my head finds its way into my hands. I think it’s time to go. The Christmas bells jingle above the door and someone calls out his name, and then another person grunts a low registered welcome. He is clearly a regular. I don’t look up right away because, honestly, I’m used to him forgetting about me, forgetting what I look like. He’ll probably walk right by me and not even...
A worn-out voice mutters “Hey.”
I look up and see him standing there, you can tell he wants a hug but I’ll be damned if I give him one. Instead, I offer him a Valvoline french fry. “Sorry I’m late, I just…” I cut him off with a head shake before he can squeak out another lame-ass excuse. As he sits, sarcasm oozes from my mouth as I ask him, “Do you come to this charming place often?” He scoffs. He doesn’t know how to handle me, never has. The waitress from the counter saunters over to the booth and asks him what he’d like. “The usual, Maryanne” he replies. He knows her name and orders the “usual,” he does come here often, and we can’t be any more different. I would have to be from another fucking planet.
“How’s your mom?” he asks, to which I swiftly reply, “That’s none of your damn business.” The “usual” finds its way onto the table… I think it’s Salisbury steak. I think. There’s just too much gravy involved to be entirely sure. In the back of my mind, there are a million other places I’d like to be right now but not a single one of them comes to the forefront, so I make up a general lie. “Look, I’ve got somewhere I need to be, so we should probably say what we gotta say.” He pushes the “usual” away while still gnawing on a bite of it. “Okay, well, I’ve got cancer.”
I’ve never been able to contort my expressions to say what I’m not really thinking. So right now, he is reading “It’s deserved” written across my unsympathetic face. It’s deserved, it’s your sentence for the years of absentee parenting, it’s deserved for making my mother cry, for hurting her, for hurting us. It’s the penance you pay for being a knuckle-dragging-ignoramus. Your cancer is the cure for full-blown asshole. I’m not sad, I’m angry he won’t be around for more years for me to ignore his fucking phone calls. I won’t even question what kind of cancer he might have or where it might have come from. I know his pack-a-day habits, his six-pack after six-pack midnight routines. He’s eating that damn plate of Salisbury mush while looking for sympathy. He has cancer, I don’t question it.
Somewhere in the midst of it, while wading my way through emotions hidden by a contorted expression, I looked down at the table. I broke eye-contact and the table opened into a swirling portal of memories that won’t go away; Christmases, Easters, birthdays all swirl with a form of happiness projecting from my mother center stage, a radiant aura of love and warmth. But frayed at the edges of these memories is a spot painted in angry colors, smouldering reds and earthy yellows. A picture developed wrong. It’s him. It’s all my anger. It’s all my resentment, frustration, and callousness presented in technicolor.
“What are you telling me for?” I ask because I can’t think of anything else to say. His response is muffled, it’s far away. His sob story is the same one I’ve been listening to for years but now it has cancer as the punchline. Like it was the behind-the-scenes culprit that was fucking up his otherwise promising life the whole time. At some point during his lengthy session of the blame game, I stand up.
“I’m having a smoke. You can keep talking outside.”
I’ve been here for five hours, that’s half the accumulated time I’ve had to wait for this asshole in my life. I’ve been here for five hours and I realize, outside of my childhood, this is the most time I’ve ever spent with him. I’m about halfway down my cigarette when he asks if he can have one, my reply full of sarcasm. “I don’t know, can you?” I light his cigarette, and the most subtle of details reveals the most devastating revelation; he takes a long drag and the cigarette finds its way low between the index and middle finger, close to the top knuckles. No one holds their cigarettes like that, no one but me.
This little detail, this insignificant speck of information; I look at his hands, calloused, saturated with twenty years of physical labor. Although shorter than I, his posture is mine. The wrinkles and creases of his brow leading to a sharpened point of discontent, also mine. His anger, mine. My anger, his. I’ve waited for him for ten hours accumulated time but I have lived with his anger, within me, for my entirety. Not because of him but because of me. I’ve nurtured it, I’ve cultivated it. I’ve honed it into an unbridled weapon for me to wield against those that have wronged me and even those that have loved me.
We haven’t said much in the last few moments. All I need is for him to say two words and we can release the burden between us. He’s said these words many times over but I wasn’t receptive, I was oblivious to the little details. His cigarette is nearing its end. I just need him to say two words. The cigarette butt sails across the backdrop of fluorescent haze and wet asphalt. In my peripheral, I can see he’s looking at me. He wants to say so much more but all he can muster is “It was good seeing you.” It’s more than I can say, I’m just waiting for him to say those two words. All I can squeak out is “Yeah.” With a slight nod of acknowledgement, he begins to walk away. Please just say those two words and we can make up for all of that lost time. He’s far enough to know it’s not going to happen…
Photo by Taylor Durrer on Unsplash