Gas Station Morning

The first thing I knew was the smell of gasoline and Callie's hair, all mixed up together, which is not a smell they bottle anywhere but should. The second thing I knew was that my neck was ruined. I opened one eye and the sun was coming up over some pump islands and a cinderblock building with a neon OPEN sign that was mostly dead, just the O and the N flickering.

So not a motel. A gas station. In the truck. In the bed of the truck, to be exact, under a blanket that had somehow migrated down to my shins.

"Callie," I said. Nothing. She was face down against my shoulder, one arm flung across my chest like she was claiming a country. She's forty-one and she sleeps like she's earned it. I'm Colin, by the way, forty-four, an artist, which is a fancy word for a guy who sold out his first real show last night and then apparently drove his girlfriend into the Arizona desert and made out with her in a pickup until they both passed out.

I lay there a minute. My mouth tasted like tequila and a highway. Every inch of me was sticky with sweat, and the desert was already warming up, that dry heat that finds you through a windshield. My shirt was gone. Her bra was hanging off the gear shift inside the cab, I could see it through the rear window, swinging a little in the breeze like a flag of a very small defeated nation.

Callie stirred. She made a sound, lifted her head, and looked around at the pumps and the sand and the sky going white at the edges.

"Oh no," she said, and started laughing. She laughed so hard she had to grip my ribs. "Colin. Colin. Where is your shirt?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

"Your shirt is on me! Look!" And it was, half on her, one arm through a sleeve, buttoned wrong from somewhere in the middle down. She sat up and something crunched under her hip. She fished around and came up with a bag of chips, flattened, empty, crushed to powder. "Well, there's dinner."

"That was dinner? I paid for that dinner."

"We shared it. It was romantic." She shook the bag over her mouth to get the dust. "God. My back. My entire back. I'm going to feel this truck bed for a week."

But she was still laughing, and I'll tell you the truth, I felt this raw ache in my chest, a good one, the kind you get when your whole life goes sideways in the direction you wanted. The show sold out. Every piece. A woman from Scottsdale bought two and asked if I had more, and I said no ma'am, I surely do not, and Callie squeezed my hand so hard under the table that I almost yelped in front of the gallery people. Then we drove. Then tequila. Then this.

"Hey," she said. She had stopped laughing and was looking at me with her hair full of sand. "Last night. That was something, huh?"

"It was something."

"You were insufferable. You were so cute and so insufferable."

"Take that back."

"Never." She kissed me, quick, then winced and pressed a hand to her lower back. "Okay. We need coffee and we need to not look like what we look like."

We look like what we look like, in case you're wondering, which is two adults in their forties climbing out of a truck bed at dawn in a gas station lot off Route 66, disheveled in a way that tells the whole story without subtitles. There was one elderly guy inside the store and he did not blink at us, which I respected. He'd seen worse. Everybody on Route 66 has seen worse.

* * *

The bathroom was at the back of the store, one of those one-holer setups where the sink is basically a suggestion. We went in together because the alternative was waiting in line behind a guy in a windbreaker, and anyway after three years and two of them dating serious, there is not much left between Callie and me that requires waiting.

She washed her face and I stood behind her and looked at the two of us in the cracked mirror. Her mascara had made it to somewhere around her jaw. My hair looked like something a bird built on purpose.

"Hand me a paper towel," she said. "No, not that one, they're all one towel, fine, give it here."

"We should have gotten a motel," I said.

"We should have gotten a motel. But no, somebody said, and I quote, the stars are better out here and the truck has a topper."

"The stars were better out here."

"Were they? I remember the dashboard lights. I remember the dashboard lights being very pretty and green and then I remember nothing for a while."

"That's fair. That's most of what I remember too."

She looked at me in the mirror while she scrubbed at her jaw. "Just so you know, your hands were all over my back for the last hour of that drive and I have claw marks on your shoulders, so the record is going to read mutual."

"The record will read mutual. Also I have a bruise on my collarbone shaped like Texas."

She snorted water out of her nose, which she claims is attractive, and we traded the one paper towel back and forth and did our best. She borrowed a comb out of her purse and dragged it through her hair and made a noise like she was a dying animal, and I buttoned my shirt, which had been on her, so it smelled like her, which was not a problem exactly but was a thing I noticed.

There was a knock on the door. "Occupied!" we both yelled, in unison, like we'd rehearsed it.

* * *

The coffee was the color of a tire and had been on the burner since, I'm guessing, the previous administration of the gas station. The pastry case had a danish in it that had fossilized. We bought it anyway, plus two coffees, plus a fresh bag of chips to replace the one we'd destroyed, because I'm an honest man with one guilty conscience.

We sat at the little table by the window with two plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Outside, the desert was doing its morning thing, all that sand and light and heat shimmer starting up over the blacktop. The motel cabins across the lot looked like they'd been closed since sometime in the nineties, doors boarded, a plastic windmill still turning out front out of sheer spite.

Callie wrapped both hands around her cup. "Okay. So."

"So."

"Walk me through it. How did we get here? Because I have gaps. I have actual gaps, Colin. I remember the gallery. I remember that woman buying the big blue one. I remember you doing your modest face."

"I don't have a modest face."

"You have an entire modest face, it's your best face. Then I remember one shot of tequila in the truck, one, we split it. And then my memory goes, I don't know, soft, from the day and the drive and the adrenaline. I remember your hands on the back of my neck. I remember the dashboard lights going green, then orange, then green again. And then I remember waking up on your arm in a gas station parking lot with a crushed bag of chips under my hip."

"Those are the highlights, honestly. That's the whole story in four images."

"Then I wasn't drunk, just wrecked, because I remember those four things really well." She took a sip and made a face that could curdle the rest of the pot. "This is terrible."

"It's terrible."

"Why is it terrible?"

"Because it's gas station coffee in Arizona at six in the morning and we love it."

She laughed and tore the danish in half and handed me the bigger half without even looking, which is the kind of thing you don't notice a person does until one day you notice it and then you can't stop noticing it. Her thumbnail had sand under it. There was a red line across her cheek from my shirt seam, and I reached over and brushed it with my thumb and she let me.

"So we were going to Phoenix," she said. "That was the plan. Your uncle's wall space, the frames, the whole boring Monday agenda."

"That was the plan."

"And instead we're here."

"And instead we're here."

She looked out the window at the truck, sitting there with her bra still hanging off the gear shift, visible through the glass like a confession. She looked at it for a while and then she looked at her coffee.

"Colin. Can I say a thing?"

"You can always say a thing."

"Okay." She turned her cup around twice on the table. "I don't want to just drive to Phoenix and pretend last night was just a celebration. I think last night was maybe us being reckless because we knew we had to have this conversation and we kept finding reasons not to."

I set my cup down. The neon sign behind her buzzed, the O and the N, over and over.

"Say more," I said.

"What I'm trying to say is I've been thinking about last night all morning and not just the parts you think I've been thinking about."