pumping nostalgia

I had been on the road for four hours when I finally accepted that the best part of the trip was the part where nobody knew where I was. I was forty-two years old, a hairdresser with aching wrists and a camera I barely used, and every autumn I drove out to the Nevada desert alone to take pictures of nothing in particular, and every autumn I wondered why I didn't do it more often. There is a particular freedom in being the only person who has to be pleased with you, and I had spent most of my adult life learning that lesson the slow way, one failed date and one exhausting Thanksgiving at a time. My ex, Franklin, used to call these trips my little escape pods, which was exactly the kind of thing that made them necessary.

The radio was mostly static out there, so I had my own playlist going and a large gas station coffee going cold in the cupholder, and the land was so flat it looked like somebody had ironed it, mountains sitting on the horizon like furniture nobody had moved in a million years. I was somewhere past the middle of nowhere on Interstate 80 when the fuel light came on, and I pulled off at an exit that promised gas and lodging and not much else.

The gas station had a convenience store attached and a low motel behind it with a neon sign that buzzed even in daylight, the kind of place where the vacancy sign probably never turns off. I pulled up to a pump and was screwing the gas cap back on my Corolla when I heard a familiar voice at the next pump say my name, and my stomach did a thing it had not done in twenty years.

"Meredith? Meredith Walsh?"

I turned around and there was Lawrence, forty-three now, grayer at the temples and heavier through the shoulders, but unmistakably the guy who had lived two doors down from my summer rental the year I turned twenty-two. He was holding a pump handle like someone who had just been caught doing something, which in a way he had, because he was standing in the middle of my memory wearing a windbreaker.

"Lawrence. Oh my god!" I said it before I could decide whether to say it, and then we both stood there grinning like idiots while his pump clicked off and mine hummed. "I can't believe... what are the odds, seriously. Are you following me?"

"If I were following you I'd have picked a better state," he said, and we laughed, and the laugh had a strange warmth to it that surprised me. He told me he sold industrial filtration equipment now and covered half the country in a company sedan, and I told him I still cut hair and had finally saved enough to buy the little shop I'd worked at since my thirties, and we made small talk with a current running underneath it the whole time, an old wire that had never been cut, just buried.

There was a diner attached to the motel, six booths and a counter and a coffee pot that had clearly been on since sometime the previous administration of whoever ran the place, and after some hemming and hawing that neither of us meant, we sat down across from each other with two cups of coffee that tasted like hot cardboard. The waitress, a friendly tired woman who looked like she'd seen every kind of road-weary customer this counter had ever hosted, left us alone, which was a mercy.

"So," he said, turning his cup around on the saucer. "Twenty years."

"Twenty years," I agreed. "Give or take. You never called."

"You never called either." He smiled to take the sting out of it, and then he let the smile drop, which was braver. "I thought about it. A hundred times. I'd get as far as finding you online and then I'd think, what if she's married, what if she doesn't remember, what if it was just a summer thing and I'm the only one still carrying it around."

"It wasn't just a summer thing," I said, and my voice came out lower than I intended. "I mean, it was, logistically. You left in September and I went back to school in the fall and that was the end of it. But I thought about it too. For years I compared every guy to a twenty-three-year-old who worked at a marina and kissed like the world was ending, and honestly that's not fair to anybody."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and then he went quiet again and looked out the window at the flat brown nothing, and when he turned back his face had that open look I remembered, the one that had gotten me into trouble the first time. "I'm forty-three, Mer. I've been married and divorced. I've got a kid in college I barely see. I'm not here to recreate anything or ask you for anything. I just... I've thought about that summer more than I've thought about most things that lasted a lot longer, and seeing you at a gas pump in the middle of Nevada felt like the universe finally returning a call."

"I've thought about it too," I said. "More than I'd admit at a dinner party. That last night, on the dock, when we promised we'd stay in touch and both knew we wouldn't. I've never told anyone that I cried in my car for an hour after I drove away."

"I sat on that dock until two in the morning," he said.

We looked at each other over the terrible coffee and the electricity between us was not subtle, it was practically a third customer at the table, and I felt forty-two years of good sense sitting on one shoulder and a twenty-year-old memory sitting on the other, and the memory was winning. I was on a solo trip. I had told myself this week was about my own company, no complications, and here was the single largest complication of my twenties sitting in a windbreaker drinking bad coffee.

"Look," he said carefully. "There's a motel about thirty