Rest Stop Refill

I'm forty-three today. Forty-three years old, riding shotgun in a rental Corolla that smells like hot vinyl and the vanilla air freshener Gideon bought at a truck stop two states back, and my husband won't tell me what's in the trunk.

"Come on. Just a hint."

"Nope." He's got both hands on the wheel, real serious about it, eyes forward like the road is fascinating. "You've cracked every surprise I've ever planned since 1999. Not this one."

"That was one surprise, Gideon. The kayak."

"It was also the guitar, and the dinner at the fondue place, and that weekend in Reno."

"Okay, that's fair. But I found the kayak because you hid it behind the grill. Nobody hides anything behind the grill."

"Which is why it's not behind the grill this time." He grins at the windshield. "And it's not a kayak."

"So it is big."

"I didn't say that."

"Is it why we had to rent a car?"

He doesn't answer, which is an answer. I fold my arms and watch the sagebrush go by, all gray and scruffy out here on I-80, ninety-some degrees and nothing for miles except the shimmer off the asphalt. Twenty-two years of marriage. I married this man when I was twenty-one, after we met in the office mailroom where he used to walk my packages around the building the long way just to talk to me. He proposed on a road trip just like this one, and I cried so hard he thought I was saying no.

He has not successfully surprised me since.

"You're smiling," he says.

"I'm doing math. Whatever's in the trunk, you didn't want it in our car. It's either messy or it's alive."

"It's neither... mostly."

"Gideon."

"Happy birthday, sweetheart. Quit interrogating me."

I'm wearing the same perfume I wore on our first date, the one he bought me three more bottles of over the years before they stopped making it and I started rationing. I put a little on my wrists at the hotel this morning and he noticed, didn't say anything, just breathed in a little longer when he kissed my neck. That's the thing about a man after two decades. You learn which silences mean what.

So it's his turn to plan the day. Cabin up in the mountains, four hours from anywhere, the kind of quiet you have to drive to get. I'm happy with quiet. I told him that. Quiet and a decent bottle of wine and him.

Then I hear it. A soft pop from behind me, like a cork giving up without a fight.

"What was that?"

"What was what?"

"Gideon. What was that."

"That's... probably nothing."

We come around a bend and there it is, a sign leaning in the heat: DUST DEVIL PLAZA, NEXT EXIT. Gas, tacos, lodging. Gideon takes the exit so fast the tires chirp.

"Pull over, pull over, there's smoke in the car... that's not smoke. Is that smoke?"

"That is not smoke," he says, but he's already skidding into the gravel lot, and the whole car smells like a bakery fell over. "Okay. Do not open the trunk."

I open the trunk.

* * *

There is cake everywhere. Not cake like slices. Cake like weather. Whipped cream has expanded to fill all available space and then some, and what I think was once a two-tier something with blue icing is now a crime scene. The lid of the box is stuck to the roof of the trunk.

"Happy birthday?" he says from somewhere behind my shoulder.

"Gideon."

"It was a good cake this morning. It had your name piped on it."

"There's still writing. Here's a... this is a G, I think. And some cream."

"The girl at the bakery said keep it cool. I put ice packs under it. The ice packs melted, and then the cream..."

"Where are we even supposed to be eating this?"

"The cabin has a fridge."

"The cabin is four hours away."

"I know how far the cabin is, Penny."

I look at my husband, forty-four years old, sweat through at the collar, holding a fistful of what used to be cake, and I start laughing. I can't help it. He tries to look wounded and fails.

"It's not funny."

"It's a little funny. Come here, you've got cream on your shirt."

"I know I've got... everything has cream on it. You have cream in your hair."

"That's my hair cream."

"That is cake, Penny."

We're standing at the back of a rental car in a rest stop parking lot, both of us slimed, when a semi rolls in and a big guy in a ball cap climbs down, takes one look at us, and keeps walking toward the bathrooms like we're not his problem today. Smart man.

* * *

The motel office is built onto the side of the gas station, and the whole building is shaped like a covered wagon. I'm not joking. There's a wooden wheel painted on the wall and everything. Inside, a young woman sits behind the desk with a TV propped on a filing cabinet, some home renovation show, and she does not look up.

"Hi," Gideon says.

"Checkout's at eleven."

"We'd like a room."

She looks up now. She's got a name tag that says GLADYS and the flat expression of somebody six years into the night desk.

"Room's forty-nine ninety-five. Two if you want the... there's only one kind of room."

"Well, here's the thing. We need it for about an hour. Maybe an hour and a half."

"Hour and a half is still a night."

"It's a private celebration," he says, and he leans on the counter like this is a confidential matter. "It's my wife's birthday. There's been a cake incident. We need to clean up and re-light the candles before we keep driving. One hour, no questions."

Gladys looks at him. She looks at me. I hold up my hair, which is matted with white cream, and give her a little wave.

"No questions," she says slowly. "That's what everybody says right before questions."

"There'll be no questions."

"Is it a body?"

"Gladys," I say. "It's a cake. There's been a cake tragedy. Twenty-two years of marriage and he still tries to surprise me."

Gladys's face softens maybe a centimeter. "Oh. That's... okay, that's actually kind of sweet. Honeymoon suite is open, it's the wagon with the big bathtub. Sixty bucks, you're out by four, and you're not using my towels for the cake."

"We would never use your towels for the... we'll buy paper towels at the gas station."

"You do that." She slides a key across the counter. It's an actual metal key, with a big plastic diamond hanging off it. "Room six. The door sticks, you gotta lift the handle."

"See?" Gideon says to me as she goes back to her show. "See? Smooth."

* * *

Room six is all wood paneling and a quilt with horses on it. The bathroom is very small, and the door sticks so bad it takes Gideon two hands and a shoulder to get it open.

"This is where I'd stage a fire hazard," he says, looking at the sink, which has a faucet shaped like a horseshoe.

"You're not washing cake out of my hair in a phone booth sink."

"You have cake in your hair. I don't make the rules."

So that's how my forty-third birthday goes: me bent over a sink the size of a cereal bowl while my husband runs warm water over the back of my head and picks frosting out of it, piece by piece, narrating like a surgeon.

"Chunk. Chunk. Big chunk here, that's mostly cream, you're fine."

"Is my hair salvageable?"

"Your hair is beautiful. Your hair always... hold still, there's a blue streak."

"That was your name, wasn't it. The piped writing. You got your own name in my hair."

"That was your G, actually. Happy birthday, sweetheart."

I'm laughing so hard I have to grip the sink. He works the water through with his fingers, careful around my ears, and it's the same hands that used to walk my mail the long way around the building, and I think, forty-three, sticky, in a covered wagon in the middle of Nevada, and I would not trade this for the fondue place or Reno or anything.

"Okay," he says, shuts the water off, wraps a scratchy wagon-motel towel around my shoulders like a boxer's corner man. "Phase two. Candles. There were candles in the car, and the tacos outside smell incredible, and..."

There's a knock at the door. Then a voice, low and tired.

"Folks? Your helium tank is rolling across the parking lot."

Gideon goes very still.

"We don't have a helium tank," I say.

"We don't have a helium tank," he agrees. Then, quieter: "Unless the balloons in the trunk."

The knock comes again, harder this time. "Folks. It's rolling toward the taco stand. I got a schedule."

"That's Walter," Gideon says. "That has to be Walter. The trucker."

"Of course it's Walter. Who else is out there with our helium tank."

Gideon cracks the door, and the hinge does that thing where it sticks, so the door hangs there half open. Walter is standing in the lot in a ball cap and a sleeveless shirt, pointing with a thumb over his shoulder. Big rig idling behind him, blocking our rental Corolla nose to tail.

"Your tank came out of your trunk, I'm guessing. Rolled right past my cab. Somebody didn't close..." He stops. He looks past Gideon at me, and I realize I'm standing there in a bra and the motel towel, holding my wet hair up off my neck. "Ma'am. Happy birthday, I guess."

"Thank you, Walter," I say, because what else do you say.

"Look, Walter," Gideon says, "we're mid-celebration. Give us ten minutes."

"Ten minutes and the tank's in Mexico. It's your car it's headed for, not mine. Well, it's both our cars, that's my point. It's parked nose to tail with mine, and I got a delivery window in Elko."

"We'll move it. Right after the candles."

"You got candles and a helium tank and cake on your wife. I drove this route twenty-five years, I don't ask no more." Walter rubs his jaw. "Just move the tank. Please."

"Ten minutes," Gideon says, and waves him off, and Walter goes back toward the gas station grumbling about schedule windows and people.

Gideon shuts the door, or tries to, and it sticks on the latch and doesn't fully catch. Neither of us notices. We're already laughing about it.

"Okay," he says. "Candles. Tacos. Tank."

"No."

"No?"

"No. Sit down." I point at the horse quilt bed. He sits. "Twenty-two years. You tried to surprise me with a cake in a rental Corolla in July. It exploded. That's the birthday story now, forever."

"I could still fix it. There's got to be a bakery in Elko."

"Elko is the wrong direction. And no." I drop the towel. I'm in my bra and my skirt and dripping on the wood paneling, and I feel great, actually, which is a sentence I did not expect to think today. "Here's the dare. You want a redo? Go get the cake. Out of the trunk. Right now."

"It's soup, Penny."

"Then bring me soup in the pan it came in, and we'll eat it with taco forks and I'll blow out a match. Go on. I dare you."

"You're daring me."

"I am daring you. In my bra. In a covered wagon. This is the most fun I've had on a birthday since the kayak."

He stands up. He looks at himself, dress shirt already off from the cake excavation, and shrugs out of his pants, and there he is in his boxers, forty-four years old, gray coming in at the temples, grinning like it's 1999.

"I'll be right back."

"Lift the handle."