Off-Season Dare

Cara rolled the rig into the Pelican Beach depot at half past six on a Friday night in July, and she knew before she even killed the engine that something was wrong. The dash lights had been flickering for the last twenty kilometres, and now the whole cab went dark as she turned the key off. She tried it again. Nothing. Just a sad little click, click, click.

"Oh, you have got to be joking!" she said out loud, to nobody, to the truck, to the whole sleepy town.

She was thirty-four years old, she had been driving long-haul for eleven of those years, and she knew an alternator when she heard one die. This one was dead. Properly dead. And of all the places for it to happen, it had to be Pelican Beach, a coastal town that in winter had roughly three residents, one fish and chip shop, and a bus depot that looked like it hadn't been painted since the eighties.

She climbed down from the cab and the cold hit her right away. July in South Australia is no joke, and the wind coming off the estuary had a bite to it that went straight through her jacket. And then she saw him, standing under the flickering floodlamp with a duffel bag over his shoulder, and her whole mood got complicated.

Eddie. Her husband. Thirty-six, tall, still wearing that flight attendant uniform jacket that always made her laugh because it looked like something from an old movie.

"Cara!" he called, jogging over. "You made it! Well, sort of made it, I heard that thing coughing from a block away."

"Don't," she said, holding up a hand. "It's the alternator. It's dead. And the earliest anyone can look at it is Monday, according to the one mechanic in this town, who I think was eating dinner and did not appreciate my call."

"Monday," Eddie repeated, and she watched the word land on him. "Right. So here's my news, and you're going to love it. My route got cut short. The company cancelled the return crew shuttle because of a scheduling thing, some mix-up. So my shuttle doesn't go back until Monday either."

Cara stared at him. Then she laughed, because what else could she do? "Monday. We're both stuck here until Monday. In Pelican Beach. In winter."

"In Pelican Beach in winter," he agreed, grinning at her in that way he had, the way that used to make her crazy back when everything between them was easy.

They had been married ten years. Married at twenty-four and twenty-six, young and stupid and so in love it was embarrassing. She met him at a truck stop diner outside Port Augusta, of all places, when he was between flights and she was between runs. And for a long time it had been great. But the last three years, well. She drove east to west, he flew north to south, and somewhere in all those crossing lines they had turned into two people who mostly texted each other about groceries.

Standing there in the cold with him, she felt that distance like weather.

* * *

The depot itself was locked up tight. There was a waiting room with a heater that worked, technically, but the depot manager, a woman named Pat who had taken one look at Cara's breakdown paperwork and said "Monday, love, maybe Tuesday," had also mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that there was a lost-and-found cupboard out back with camping gear in it that nobody had claimed in years.

"Pat said we could use the waiting room," Eddie said, "but honestly, have you seen the waiting room?"

"I've seen it. It's got one heater and it sounds like a jet engine."

"So," he said, and here he did the thing where he got a little gleam in his eye, the old Eddie gleam, the one she hadn't seen in a while. "I may have already found something better."

He went back into the depot office and came out holding a tent. A battered green two-person tent, folded up into a lumpy bag that had definitely seen better decades.

"You want to camp," Cara said flatly. "In July. Behind a bus depot."

"It's a flat spot right by the water, Pat showed me on the map. There's a campground back there, half the sites are abandoned but there's one decent clearing with a picnic table. We've got sleeping bags in my duffel, you've got a bunk in your cab, and it's either that or the jet engine heater." He held up the tent bag like a prize. "Come on. When's the last time we did something like this?"

And the honest answer was: too long. The early years of their marriage had been full of camping trips, terrible ones, wonderful ones, the whole bit. But somewhere along the way those trips had stopped happening, and Cara had stopped suggesting them, and that was one of those quiet little griefs she didn't look at directly very often.

"Fine," she said. "But if I freeze to death, I'm haunting you specifically."

"Deal," he said, and his smile got bigger, and she felt something in her chest loosen just a little bit, which was annoying, because she had been holding onto a nice tight grudge all evening.

The campground behind the depot was exactly as advertised, meaning it was mostly neglected. There was a gravel track, a row of leaning power posts, and one flat patch of ground beside the tidal estuary where the grass had given up but the dirt was even. A single floodlamp on a pole flickered like it was deciding whether to bother. Out on the water, the occasional headlight of the night bus swept past on the far road.

The tent, it turned out, was wrong in two ways. It was too small, clearly built for one person and a nervous dog, and it was missing a pole. The main ridge pole. Gone. Eddie stood there holding the two end pieces and staring at the sagging space between them.

"Well," he said. "That's a problem."

"Use the broom handle from your duffel," Cara said. "You brought a broom handle. I saw it."

"I brought a broom handle, yes, because I am a man of practical vision." So he did, and the broom handle was slightly too long, which meant the tent had a permanent hump in the middle like a camel, but it stood up, mostly, and by some miracle the fly still had all its guys.

They got their bedding sorted while the light died completely, and Cara went back to the cab one more time to grab her toiletries bag and, on an impulse she didn't examine too closely, one other thing.

She came back to the campsite carrying it in both hands, which is not how you normally carry a bowling ball, but this one deserved care. She set it down on the picnic table with a nice solid thunk, right where the flickering floodlamp would catch it.

The engraving caught the light. Kira.

Eddie had been wrestling with the tent guy-line, and he stopped. He went very still, the way a man goes still when a name he has not said out loud in years is suddenly sitting on a picnic table twelve feet away, glowing.

"Cara," he said slowly. "Is that. Why is there a bowling ball with Kira's name on it on our picnic table?"

She smiled at him in the dark.

"So you brought it to hurt me," Eddie said. He sat down on the bench across from the table, still holding the guy-line in one hand like he'd forgotten about it. "That's why it's here. You drove eleven hours with a bowling ball in your cab to hurt me with it."

Cara opened her mouth, ready with something sharp, and then nothing sharp came out. Because the truth was dumber and sadder than anything sharp.

"It was an impulse," she said. "A stupid one. I was at a secondhand place outside Port Wakefield, and I saw it, and it had her name on it, and I thought, ha, that'll show him. And then I paid nine dollars for it and drove a thousand kilometers with it riding shotgun, and every kilometer I knew it was stupid. But I was already doing it by then. That's the thing about impulses, Eddie. They don't stop being impulses just because you finish them."

Eddie looked at the ball for a while. The floodlamp flickered. Somewhere out on the far road the night bus went past, headlights sweeping the water.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. It was a dumb thing. You did a dumb thing. I've done dumb things too, you know I have." He stood up, and she thought he was going to come over and be gentle about it, and she braced for gentle the way she'd braced