Road Spite

My name is Rachel Wright, I'm twenty-three, and I have been in a U-Haul for twelve hours. That last part is the important one. Twelve hours of Nebraska. Twelve hours of my wife saying things like "ooh, a water tower" like the water tower owed her money and she was happy to see it.

Janey loves this move. I want that stated plainly, because everything after this is me being a jerk and she never once was. She got the job she wanted, the firm she wanted, and she got me to say yes to all of it. So the anger is mine alone. I know that. Knowing it has not helped even a little.

Here's how we got here. We met in law school, during a mock trial, where she cross-examined my fake client so hard I almost laughed on the record. We started dating at twenty-two. At twenty-three she proposed in a parking garage right after the bar results, and I said yes before she finished the sentence. We got married three months ago, in a courthouse, because we'd spent all our money on the bar exam and I thought that was romantic.

Then in June her firm called. Somewhere flat and far, a place with one stoplight and a job she'd have been crazy to turn down. So she turned me into the crazy one, because I said yes too. I said yes and then I spent the entire drive saying no to everything else.

"Want to stop at the world's largest ball of twine?" she'd asked somewhere around hour four.

"No!"

"Want to get dinner somewhere that isn't a gas station?"

"No!"

"Want to talk about it?"

"No!"

She'd laughed at that. That's the part that got me. She laughed, this little snort of a laugh, like I was being funny on purpose, and my stomach did the flip it always does and I got angrier, because how dare her laugh still work on me when I was trying to be furious.

The coffee situation deserves its own paragraph. Every gas station between the coast and here sells the same coffee, which is coffee-shaped water with a bitterness to it that felt personal. I drank six of them. Janey drank slushies. Blue ones. At hour nine she held hers up to the window and said it matched the sky and I swear to God I almost cried about a slushie.

"Hey," she said, softer, after that. "Talk to me."

"I'm talking."

"You're performing talking." She had her feet up on the dash, sneakers off, and she wiggled her toes at me. "Performing talking is when you answer with one word and then look wounded."

"I'm not wounded."

"You're a little wounded."

"I'm fine," I said, and drove past a field, and there were about four hundred more fields exactly like it, and I thought, this is my life now, fields, until I die.

She didn't push. That's another thing about her. She never pushes, she just goes quiet and lets you hear your own self, which is worse than pushing, frankly. We drove another hour in the quiet. The U-Haul behind us held every stick of furniture we owned, packed by movers I paid in full before we left, receipts and everything, all settled, no debts, in case anyone was wondering whether I had any other reason to be tense. I didn't. I was just tense.

The motel showed up out of nowhere around ten at night. It was the kind of place with a sign missing most of its letters, so it said MOT L and then a buzzing gap where the E used to live. The parking lot was mostly U-Hauls and pickups. Ours fit right in, which felt like an insult.

"Oh, this is great," Janey said, getting out, stretching, arms over her head like we'd arrived at a resort. "Look at that sign. That sign has character."

"That sign has two letters."

"Character, Rachel."

The room cost forty-one dollars and the man at the desk paid us back some of that in ambiance. Sticky floor. An air conditioner bolted into the wall that rattled like it was holding a grudge. One bed, which should have been fine, we've shared a bed for a year, but I looked at it and felt something twist.

"I call shower," Janey announced, already unzipping her bag.

"You've called shower every night of this trip."

"Because I get in the car wet and you get the car dry and that's the system we agreed to."

"We never agreed to that system. You just declared it in Missouri."

"Missouri was a long time ago," she said, solemn, like she was citing case law. "Statute of limitations has run."

"You can't statute-of-limitations me on showers."

"Watch me." She backed toward the bathroom, grinning, holding her pajamas like a shield. "You can have second shower. Second shower is actually better. The water's warmed up by then. Think of it as legal precedent."

She shut the door. I heard the water fight its way out of the pipes, brownish at first probably, then the shower curtain rings scraping around. I sat on the bed, which bounced like a trampoline, and I was mad about the bed too, and the floor, and the twine ball I'd refused to see, and I sat there being mad and then I heard her singing in the shower.

That's the thing I keep coming back to. She sings in the shower. Off-key, badly, some song from a commercial she can't finish. She's been doing it the whole time I've known her and every time, every single time, my stomach does that flip, and I sat on a trampoline bed in western Nebraska listening to my wife murder a jingle and I wanted to throw something and I wanted to cry and both of those felt like the same feeling.

She came out with wet hair and steam rolling behind her, towel around her shoulders, absolutely delighted with herself.

"Your turn. Water's good. There's a trick where you angle the showerhead down or it hits you in the face."

"You couldn't have led with the trick?"

"Nope. You had to earn the trick." She flopped onto the bed, phone out, scrolling. "Also there's a diner across the road. Open till midnight. The sign says HOME COOKING with an exclamation point."

"The sign can't even spell motel."

"The diner spelled its whole sign. Show some respect."

I took my shower. The water did hit me in the face once. I angled it and stood there longer than I needed to, letting the hot water try to talk me down, and it half worked. Coming out, I found her sitting cross-legged on the bed, hair in a towel turban, and she'd set out my pajamas for me. Folded. On my side. Little things like that are her whole language and I've been refusing to translate this whole trip.

"Diner?" she said. "I'm starving. I've been surviving on blue slushies and hope."

"Fine. Diner."

"God, an actual full sentence. Things are looking up."

"Don't push it."

Before we left the room, she caught my wrist. Just lightly, two fingers, and she looked up at me from the bed with her hair still dripping.

"Hey. Whatever's eating you," she said, "you know I'd rather have you mad at me than not have you, right? That is the entire situation. Mad, sad, whatever. I'm not letting go."

"I know," I said.

"Do you?"

"I know," I said again, and meant it, and that was somehow the worst part, that I meant it and was still so angry, and I pulled my wrist free not because I wanted to but because holding still felt like admitting something. She let go easy. She always lets go easy. That's her other trick, the one that gets me every time.

* * *

I unpacked. Well. I unpacked the way you unpack when you don't want to be unpacking. One bag, my coat bag, the one I'd thrown in the truck last because I was mad about packing it in the first place.

Here's a thing about being angry for twelve hours in a U-Haul. You run out of things to be angry at and start recycling. The seatbelt chime. The radio. The way she says "we're making good time" like it's a personal attack. By Nebraska I was angry at the concept of horizon.

So I dumped the coat bag out on the bed, and my coat fell out, the gray one, and something fluttered out of the pocket and landed on the sticky floor.

A note. Folded twice. My handwriting wasn't on it, which is how I knew before I opened it whose it was.

I should have just put it back in the pocket. I know that now. But my hands did it anyway, and I sat right down on the trampoline bed and opened it, and there it was in Janey's terrible slanted print, the print she uses for grocery lists and, apparently, this.

Rachel. Practicing. Ask me again in the parking garage after the bar results and see what happens.

That was it. That was the note. She'd written it months ago, before she proposed, before the courthouse, before any of this, and at some point it had ridden around in my coat pocket for a whole season like a little folded secret and I'd never once checked the pockets because who checks the pockets.

I sat there holding it and my chest did something complicated.

Because that was the woman who wrote that note. The one who rehearsed proposing on a scrap of paper and hid it in my coat like I was going to find it by accident, which, I should note, I never did, so the whole plan was a wash, and she proposed out loud in the parking garage anyway, shaking, holding a ring she'd clearly overpaid for, and I said yes before she finished the sentence.

And this was the woman I'd spent twelve hours not talking to. Same woman. Same coat. Same me.

"Hey," Janey said from the bathroom doorway, toothbrush in her mouth. "You find something?"

"It fell out of my coat."

"Oh my god, the note." She came out, foam at the corner of her mouth, grinning. "You found the note. I forgot I even wrote that. You were supposed to find it before the bar results and get suspicious and I was going to play dumb."

"You rehearsed a proposal on a Post-it."

"It was a nice Post-it. It was from our wedding planning pad."

"We weren't wedding planning yet."

"I'm a forward thinker. It's why the firm hired me." She went back to the sink, talking around the toothbrush. "You're smiling."

"I am not."

"You are. I can hear you smiling. It's a very loud smile."

The coat went on a hanger on the back of the door, which was missing a hook, so the hanger just leaned there, pretending. I folded the note and put it in the inside pocket, the one over the heart, which I did not do on purpose and will not be discussing.

Then it went sideways again, because that's our whole thing lately, apparently. Sideways.

"Okay," Janey said, pulling on jeans, hair still half wet. "Diner. Across the road. HOME COOKING! I'm getting pancakes. It's ten thirty at night and I'm getting pancakes and nobody can stop me, this is America."

"Actually it's Nebraska."

"Nebraska is in America, counselor. I looked it up."

"I don't want diner food." It came out sharper than I meant. Everything's been coming out sharper than I mean. "I want pizza. I want to not put pants back on and sit on this bed and eat pizza out of a box. Is that a crime."

"It's not a crime." She paused with one shoe on. "It's ten thirty in a town with one stoplight. There's not going to be pizza. There's going to be the diner."

"There'll be pizza. There's always pizza. Everybody delivers everywhere."

"Not here they don't. Look around, Rach. This place's idea of room service is a vending machine."

"Then I'll skip dinner."

"Rachel."

"I'm not hungry anyway. Go. Get your pancakes. Have a great time at HOME COOKING."

And she stood there with one shoe on, and I watched her decide something. I watched her decide not to fight, which is the thing I hate most, because it means I've won something that isn't worth winning.

"Okay," she said. Quiet. "I'll bring you back