Second Go-Round

Okay, so here's how my Thursday was supposed to go. One last delivery to Alpine Falls, a box of restaurant supplies for the diner up there, and then home by six to a frozen pizza and a movie I'd already seen twice. That was the plan. I am sixty-three years old and I have been driving courier routes for thirty-five years, and I still believe in plans, which maybe says something sad about me. Don't psychoanalyze me, I didn't ask.

The trouble started on the switchbacks, because of course it did. You don't take the mountain road to Alpine Falls unless the main highway is closed, and the main highway was closed, some rockslide thing two counties over, so up I went. My truck, a 2011 diesel with two hundred thousand honest miles on it, has never once let me down. I was actually complimenting it in my head, which I do, don't judge me, when it made a sound like a giant clearing his throat.

Then it died. Just like that. No sputter, no warning, nothing. One second I'm third gear around a hairpin with the whole gold canyon below me, next second nothing but steering and silence.

"No. No no no, not today, sweetheart," I told the dashboard, because I talk to the truck. We've been through a lot together.

I coasted onto the gravel pullout, put the flashers on, and popped the hood, knowing full well I would stare at an engine and see an engine. I can check the oil. I can check the coolant. Beyond that I am useless, and I knew it, and I stood there in the cold anyway, holding a rag like it was going to tell me something. The aspens were doing their late October thing, all gold and showy, and I would have enjoyed it more if I weren't busy being furious at everything, including myself, for being forty minutes from anywhere with a dead truck and a delivery window.

I called the shop I contract for. Marc said a tow from the valley would take two hours minimum, maybe three. I said fine, I'd wait, and hung up before he could hear how much I hated it. Then I leaned against the warm hood and cursed the engine, the rockslide, the state of California, and my own stupid pride for not just calling Marc first and rerouting.

* * *

That's when the old blue pickup came around the bend and slowed down. Now, in the city, nobody stops. Up here, apparently everybody stops, which is charming for exactly four seconds and terrifying after that. The truck pulled in behind mine and a man got out, and I did the thing you do, the little mental inventory, tall, gray beard, flannel, hold on.

Hold on.

I knew that walk. Thirty-five years, and I still knew that walk, that slightly rolling gait of a man who spent half his life on uneven forest ground. Because I did know it. Leon Braddock. My Leon, from back when neither of us was anybody's anything, the man I dated for two years in our late twenties before he took a ranger job up in the Sierra and I stayed in Sacramento and we managed to destroy a perfectly good thing over one stupid fight about the future.

"Well I'll be damned," he said, and then he stopped walking, because he'd seen my face too.

"Leon Braddock," I said, like we were at a reunion instead of a breakdown. "You still alive?"

"Barely. Sixty-five this spring." He came closer, hands in his pockets. "Lyssa. Lyssa Weaver. In the flesh. What are the odds?"

"Astronomical, apparently, since my truck picked this exact bend of road to give up the ghost."

He laughed, and I hate that the laugh was the same. Some things should expire.

He looked at my truck, then at me. "She dead dead, or just sulking?"

"Dead dead, far as I can tell. Which is not far. I checked the oil and the coolant and then ran out of knowledge."

"Tow cable's in the bed. Town's eleven miles down. Earl's shop is right off the main street, and Earl owes me about nine favors." He said it easy, like offering directions to a stranger, but we were not strangers, were we, and we both knew it.

I should have said no. I want that understood. Every nerve I had said no, that this was a sign from a vengeful universe. But it was getting cold, the flashers were blinking, and Marc's tow was three hours out at best. So I said, "Fine. Yes. Thank you," in the least grateful voice I own, and Leon just grinned like I'd handed him a present. He carried my box of restaurant supplies to his pickup bed himself, careful, as if it held eggs.

* * *

Here is a fun fact about being towed by your ex-boyfriend from 1990: there is no conversation that fits. I rode in his pickup, which smelled like pine and old coffee, and we did eleven miles of mostly silence with a few terrible attempts at small talk in the middle.

"So you still driving?" he asked at one point.

"Thirty-five years. Runs in the family, sort of. Dad drove tanker."

"And you never married?" And then he winced, audibly, and said, "Sorry, that came out wrong. That's not, I didn't mean it as a, whatever it sounded like."

"I knew what you meant," I said, which was generous, because I didn't, not really. "I was married. Divorced eleven years ago. You?"

"Never. Came close once or twice. Never stuck." He kept his eyes on the road, towing my whole livelihood behind us, and I stared out the window at the pines and thought about how the air up here smelled like woodsmoke already and how unfair it was that he got to be sixty-five and still have all his hair.

Earl's shop sat at the crooked end of the main street, a cinderblock building with a hand-painted sign and a dog asleep on the porch. Earl himself, who must have been ninety if he was a day, took one look at the truck, listened to Leon describe the sudden death, and pronounced it the lift pump, with a part that had to come up from the valley distributor in the morning.

"So, tomorrow," Earl said. "Truck stays here. Girl stays wherever she stays." Then he looked at Leon and grinned in a way I did not care for. "There's the lodge diner, or there's Leon's place, or there's the motel, which is also sort of Leon's place, long story."

"It is not my place," Leon said. "I just own the building. Different thing entirely."

Wonderful. Stuck in a town of four hundred people, my truck hostage to a pump, my delivery late anyway, and the only man in the Sierra Nevada who could make me feel both sixty-three and twenty-nine at the same time, standing right there with his hands in his pockets.

We sat in the plastic chairs by Earl's counter while he filed paperwork at glacier speed, and the conversation got stilted the way old conversations do. He asked about my sister, I asked about the shop, he said he ran a gear store two doors down from the diner, I said that figured, he asked why that figured, and I said, "Because you were always the one with the pack and the boots and the plan, Leon. Some things stick."

"You got the fight in you still?" he asked, out of nowhere, and I laughed before I could stop myself.

"Better than ever. Ask the engine."

"I remember the fight," he said, quieter, and Earl suddenly found something fascinating in the back room. "The one that ended it. I said some things."

"So did I."

"Mine were worse."

"Yours were worse," I agreed, because they were, and something in my chest did a strange little hop at the admission. He smiled, half a smile, the old one, and I looked away and asked Earl, loudly, if there was a motel with actual heat.

There was. Leon's building, naturally. The universe, I decided, was not vengeful. It was worse. It had a sense of humor.

* * *

We ended up at the lodge diner because I put my foot down about it, which means Leon suggested the diner and I agreed so fast it looked like I'd put my foot down. The box of restaurant supplies went in through the kitchen door first, a delivery completed in the strangest way imaginable, and then we sat. Two bowls of stew, two beers from a tap that had probably been installed during the previous century, and a window with a view of the aspens going gold in the last light. It could have been worse, is what I'm saying.

"So the fight," Leon said, turning his mug around on the table like it was a compass. "Can we talk about it yet? Thirty-five years is long enough, right?"

"Depends. Are you planning to apologize or defend yourself?"

"Apologize. Mostly. Defend a little."

"That's very you."

He laughed, and the sound affected me in a way I refused to examine. "Here's my defense. I was twenty-nine, I'd been offered a good job, and I asked you to come. That's it. That's the whole crime."

"You didn't ask. You told me it would be crazy to turn down. And when I said I had my route, my own contract, you said driving a truck was not a life."

"I said it was not a life for both of us."

"Same thing!" I stabbed a fry at him for emphasis. "You had the plan, Leon. The ranger job, the little cabin, me in the cabin. You never once asked what my plan was."

He sat with that for a while. Outside, a guy in a down jacket walked past with a dog. "That's fair," he said finally. "I didn't ask. I figured I knew you."

"Nobody knows anybody that well at twenty-nine."

"Speak for yourself. I knew you laughed at your own jokes before the punchline. I knew you talked to that old Chevy like it was a person. I knew I never once, in two years, stopped thinking about the way you laughed."

Oh. Well. What was I supposed to do with that? The stew suddenly required my full attention.

"And you?" he asked. "You never left the