I turned the corner and saw Interstate 5, the cars swirling past in the mist. I banked into the freeway, glancing in my mirror. No one was there…only Poe, interred in the backseat.
“You’d better turn that heater on,” she said. “God, you’re so wet.”
“I will, soon’s the car warms up.”
She gave me a look across the vast expanse of my front seat. “I guess you’re wondering what I was doing in a bar if I was so broke.”
“I try not to wonder about stuff like that.”
“This is the end of a long day, in a very long week, in a year from hell. I was down to my last five dollars. The only thing I could think of that I could buy with that was a margarita. I had two and killed the five. Sometimes I do crazy things like that.”
“So now what do you do? Do you have a job?”
She shook her head.
“At least you’re not stranded here. I couldn’t help noticing the Washington plates on your car.”
“No, I’m not stranded. Just lost on planet Earth.”
“Aren’t we all. I’m not so old that I don’t remember what that feels like.”
“You’re not so old,” she said, looking me over.
“You must be all of thirty.”
I laughed. “I’m not doing you that big a favor. I’ll be forty years old before you know it.”
“Almost ready for the nursing home.”
“You got it. Where’re we going, by the way?”
“Little town called North Bend.”
Ah, I thought: Grayson country.
She sensed something and said, “Do you know North Bend?”
“Never been there.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s just a wide place in the road, but it happens to be where my family lives. You know what they say about families. When you come home broken and defeated, they’ve got to take you in.”
She was still tense and I didn’t know how to breach that. Food might do it: I’d seen that happen more than once.
“Have you had dinner?”
She looked at me. “Now you’re going to buy me dinner? Jeez, you must really be my guardian angel.”
“So what do you say?”
“I feel like the last survivor of the Donner party. That means yes, I’m starving.”
I saw an intersection coming up, filled with neon promise.
“That’s Issaquah,” she said. “There’s a Denny’s there. It was one of my hangouts when I was in high school. Can you stand it?”
I banked into the ramp.
“You look terrible,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes. Maybe they’ll let you in if you comb your hair.”
“If I get thrown out of a Denny’s, it’ll be a bad day at Black Rock.”
Inside, we settled into a window booth. I ordered steaks for both of us, getting her blessing with a rapturous look. I got my first look at her in good light. She was not beautiful, merely a sensational young woman with world-class hair. Her hair sloped up in a solid wall, rising like Vesuvius from the front of her head. It was the color of burnt auburn, thick and lush: if she took it down, I thought, it would reach far down her back. Her nose was slightly crooked, which had the strange effect of adding to her appeal. She could stand out in a crowd without ever being a pinup. Her looks and ready wit probably made job-hunting easy, if she ever got around to such things.
“So what do you do for a living?” I asked.
“Little of this, little of that. Mostly I’ve been a professional student. I’ll probably still be going to college when I’m thirty. I graduated from high school at sixteen and I’ve been in and out of one college or another ever since. I go for a while, drop out, drift around, go somewhere else, drop out again. I transfer across state lines and lose half my credits, then I have to start up again, learning the whole boring curriculum that I learned last year and already knew anyway, just to get even again. Schools shouldn’t be allowed to do that—you know, arbitrarily dismiss half your credits just so they can pick your pocket for more tuition. But that’s life, isn’t it, and I’m sure it’s nobody’s fault but my own. It drives my family nuts, the way I live, but we are what we are. My trouble is, I’ve never quite figured out what I am. This is a mighty lonely planet, way off in space.”
