The highlighter was orange, the aggressive kind, and I drew it across each segment of the route until the paper went translucent in strips. I had times written in the margins - 9:15, 11:00, 1:30 - in my neatest handwriting - like the trip was a deposition. The paper curled up at the corners from the wet ink and I pressed it flat with my palm and it curled again.
The Itinerary That Argued With the Window
The printout had a crease down the middle from where Dan had folded it in half, and then in half again, and he held it on his knee like a ticket to something that had already started. I pulled back onto the highway going the wrong direction and nobody said anything for a while. The peach sign came up faster than I remembered it. Dan's arms were crossed the way arms get when a person has decided to be correct about something later, and I could see his reflection in the rearview, just the top half of his face - watching the road go backward. My partner reached over and turned the radio up one notch, which wasn't enough to fill anything.
The woman had a card table with a paper sign taped to the front that said PEACHES $4 BAG and a beach umbrella striped green and white that was doing almost nothing against the afternoon. She handed me a bag without asking what size, and the peaches were warm in a way that peaches from a store never are. Dan's juice went down his wrist and off his elbow and onto the gravel before he bothered to do anything about it. My partner had both hands around a peach like it was a cup of something hot, eyes somewhere past the tree line, not at me - not at the phone sitting face-down on the hood. The reservation time had come and gone while we were standing there and none of us reached for anything.
The printout was under the registration, which was under a gas receipt from a town I couldn't place. The orange had faded to the color of old tape. The peach pit had gone pale and hard, sitting in the crease where Dan had folded it, smooth on one side, ridged on the other - the size of a large worry stone. I held it in my palm for a minute, the way you hold a thing when you're not sure if it's trash. I put it in the cupholder.
The Peach Stand That Wasn't on the Map
We stopped because Dan said he needed to use the bathroom and there was a gas station and then there wasn't, just a gravel lot with a shuttered building and a hand-lettered sign that said COLD DRINKS BAIT and a screen door hanging by one hinge in the heat. A man was sitting in a folding chair next to a cooler and he sold us three bottles of something with a yellow label I didn't recognize, and it tasted like cream soda had given up trying. My partner sat on the hood and looked at the field across the road, which was just a field - and said it was nice, which it was. Dan was still inside trying to find a signal. I left the printout on the seat and didn't bring it out.
The yellow-label bottles were gone and the man in the folding chair had fallen asleep with his chin on his chest, and I didn't want to leave yet. My partner found a cat behind the shuttered building, gray, one ear torn - and crouched down with a hand out and waited the way only patient people can wait. Dan came back from looking for signal and said we were forty minutes behind, and my partner didn't turn around. The cat walked into my partner's palm like it had been expecting us specifically, and my partner made a sound I hadn't heard in three states. I thought about the laminated backup copy wedged next to the emergency kit my mother gave me, and I left it there.
Dan found the diner by accident, which is to say he was looking at his phone for something else entirely and looked up and said "that place" with no explanation. The sign out front had lost two letters and said PIE & UNCH in red neon - and a piece of tape over the door said CASH ONLY in marker that had bled into the cardboard. We sat in a booth with cracked red vinyl and a laminated menu sticky at the corner, and the woman who brought the water knew the other woman two tables over by her first name and her hip surgery and the name of the dog she'd had to put down in March. My partner ordered the pie without asking what kind, and it came fast, still warm, and the fork went through it and my partner closed both eyes for a second the way people do at the end of a long drive when they finally stop moving. The printout was still in the car - fading in the heat, folded into something the size of a fortune.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
