Page 41 of Hauling Ashe

“Mae, go.”

I shift from the seat and slam the car door. My heart races and my bladder aches. Rushing to the restroom, I barely make it to the toilet. I’m shaking from our altercation and the need to relieve myself. I should not have said what I said. I should not have worded my thoughts as I did. And I definitely should not have suggested a flight.

He did make sacrifices, too. He returned to Chicago because his grandfather asked. He married a woman because of obligation. He stood by her when she became a name.

And he can’t take a plane ride because so many people in his life have died in them.

Returning to the car, I enter Louie full of regret. Tucker sits stone-still with his arms wrapped around the steering wheel. He doesn’t peel out of the lot as I expected. He doesn’t gun it for the expressway.

“I’m sorry,” I say, although he’s said some hurtful things as well.

Not addressing my apology, he says to the steering wheel, “Maybe I should just get in the backseat. I have work to do.”

“It’s Sunday.” As if that explains anything. If Saturday looked good on him, Sunday looks lost. “You don’t need to get in the back,” I mutter.

“Yeah, but I should let you drive. It’s your car. Your trip.” He pops open the driver’s door and I stare after him. Without exiting the front seat, I climb over the center console and settle into the driver’s position. While it’s only been one day, this space feels foreign. Louie is not even my car, but Tucker doesn’t know that yet.

“He didn’t mean anything, Louie,” I say to the dashboard, giving the dark curve a rub like a favorite pet. Tucker opens the front passenger door, shoves back the seat to accommodate his longer legs and folds into the seat. Immediately taking out his phone, he faces the screen while I back out of the lot, and we return to the route.

Shortly, we near Oklahoma City. There’s much to be seen here but I don’t want to stop. Instead, I continue around the state capital and veer onto I-40 straight west to Texas.

Texalo is a city on the edge of Oklahoma before entering the Longhorn State and I don’t want to miss the place. The heavy rain and the silence in the car for the last two hours sets the mood to enter this ghost town. The area is depressing. The effects of the major highway caused travelers to bypass this now-forgotten community and wiped this place out. Rundown buildings abound, one of which is even a historical landmark with nothing remarkable about it. The shell of a building covered in rust and surrounded by dried weeds hints at history long forgotten.

And isn’t that the way of some things in the past? They are best left behind to rust and rot and disappear. Restoration is frivolous. There is no point in bringing up the could-haves and the should-haves. We make a decision, and we can’t go backward. We can turn around, start again, but we can’t ever change the original direction. The hint of the first path will always remain, worn with divots and ruts, whether visible or not. Maybe under weeds. Maybe turning to rot. The path is there, though, but the journey is done.

Even traveling the same route twice isn’t quite the same. You can’t ever duplicate that first pass. Something is markedly first because of its originality, creativity, or thrill. The first kiss. The first sexual experience. The first marriage. These are things that cannot be replicated. However new experiences on an old road can happen. A first kiss with a new person. A first sensual encounter with another human. A second chance in a different marriage. We can only look toward the future, despite our powers to glance in rearview mirror.

As for the history of this place, it’s haunting. Someone knows the truth. Isn’t that what ghosts do? They scare us with what they know and what they’ve seen. They are the revelations and regrets we hold deep within us. And we need to face those phantoms, that past, that history, before we can let them go. Before we can be set free to live our lives for now. And maybe love again.

I reach for Tucker, wrapping my hand around his wrist, hoping he’ll feel in my touch how sorry I am. Sorry about his wife. Sorry about my husband. Sorry that people have to take shit in their marriages. Love is hard work, but that doesn’t mean it should whittle a person down to nothing but shavings. Yet, it happens. Someone else can strip you to your bones and you’d still give them your femur. That’s sacrifice. That’s what love is.

When Tucker doesn’t respond to my touch, I slip my hand from his warm skin.

In less than a thousand yards, we cross into Texas, and the weight of hurt and heartache in this car is as heavy as the rain pelting our windshield less than half an hour ago. We’ve put in three days, and I need a break from Tucker and this front seat.

“Let’s stop in Shamrock,” I say, breaking the code of silence between us. Maybe the name alone will bring us some luck.

Tucker doesn’t respond at first. His attention remains on his phone until finally he announces he found availability at a commercial hotel chain. He books us rooms for the night.

Two. Separate. Rooms.

19

Playlist: “Free Fallin’” – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

[Tucker]

What the fuck am I doing? Why am I blocking her out? This is all me and as soon as we head to separate hotel rooms, I hate myself all over again. Today has been fire under ice. The constant downpour has been a damper on everything including my mood, which already was a thunderstorm.

Everything from Mae’s admiration of Rochelle to her discovery that Rochelle was my wife has been on my mind. When Rochelle passed, the divorce papers had been drawn up and were in my desk. She would be served upon her return from a trip to Montana, but the private plane went down, and all were lost. Pilot. Attendant. Rochelle. And Marty Haggen, her literary agent. They’d been together almost a year when I discovered their more intimate relationship. Rochelle told me she’d end it. We’d seek couples’ therapy. Hell, we hosted couples’ retreats on marriage and stoking desire. I hated how fake we were. Everything I’d left behind when I went to California, I had become. Pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

With thoughts overwhelming and energy under my skin, I can’t stay in the hotel room all night alone. I’d love a good gym, but this place doesn’t have more than a treadmill and I need something that allows me to roam. I walk a main street and find an old bar. Motorcycles are parked outside the place, but inside is a mix of patrons. Families. Couples. Groups of friends.

I wander to the bar and order a Heineken, then immediately notice a piano tucked into the corner of what looks like a dance floor. The parquet floor isn’t much more than a square, maybe nine by nine, near the end of the L-shaped bar counter. Maybe the area is a makeshift stage. I noticed a sign on the door boasting live music on occasion.

After handing me a beer bottle, I tip the male bartender and ask, “Mind if I sit at the piano?”

“Have at her,” he mutters in a soft Southern drawl as he nods at the lone instrument.