The Map Folds Three Ways

*I wanted to write a road-trip story that felt like two real people bumping against each other, not a fantasy of instant heat. The bet gave me a reason for them to keep crossing paths. And yeah, I left it hanging because some roads don't end at the state line.*

I'm Janna Gonzales, thirty-three years old, granddaughter of a Mexican ranch cook who ran the best kitchen in Harney County, and right off I do not lose bets. I plan things. I plan things the way other people breathe. So when Kris Perkins leaned across the booth at the Downtowner diner in Burns and said, "You two should just race already," I should have kept my mouth shut.

Instead I pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and clicked my pen.

Lance Bateman watched me do it with that grin of his, the one that makes me want to throw a stapler at him. He's thirty-five, a big sunburnt white boy with red-blond stubble, a welder off the rigs for the season, and he was sitting across from me with his boots up on the crate he uses as a footrest because the diner booth has a broken leg and he refuses to sit anywhere else.

"So the route," I said, drawing a line on the napkin. "Conference in John Day, Saturday morning. I take 20 east to 395, straight shot, four hours and ten minutes by my math."

"And I take my way," Lance said, tapping the napkin with one dirty finger. "Which is faster."

"Your way is a rumor. Your way is gravel roads and cows."

"My way is beautiful, is what it is. And Duane's truck can handle anything you throw at it."

Duane Fallon was on the other side of the booth, Lance's older cousin, thirty-seven, nursing a coffee he'd been nursing for an hour. "Don't bring me into this," he said. "I just lent the truck. Whatever happens to it happens to you."

"See, Duane gets it," I said. "Witness. Kris, you're my witness."

Kris raised her hand like she was swearing in at court. "Witness. And Janna, honey, if you lose, you're buying him a steak dinner and admitting his way is better in front of everybody at the conference."

"Oh, that's not happening!"

"And if I lose," Lance said, leaning back until the booth creaked, "I buy her the steak and I say, out loud, that maps beat memory."

I wrote it on the napkin. Landmarks, four of them, check-in points so nobody could cheat. The old Phillips 66 out on 395. The hourly motel in Seneca, which Kris picked because she is a menace and thought the name was funny. The canyon rest area. Then the diner in John Day. Sign it, date it, done.

"Friday morning, eight o'clock," Lance said. "Weather's clear."

"Friday morning, eight o'clock," I agreed, and I signed my name under his, and his signature looked like a kid wrote it with his left hand, and I remember thinking that should have told me something about the whole weekend.

Kris kissed the top of my head on her way out. "Win or lose, this is the most fun you've had in a year."

"That's a terrible thing to say," I told her.

"It's true though."

Friday morning I loaded the car at the library where I work, historical society, county archives, all of it mine, all of it labeled. My route was printed, taped to the dash, and backed up on my phone twice. At 7:58 I saw Lance's truck roll past the window, that big beat-up thing of Duane's, and he honked twice and threw his hand out the window like an idiot.

I gave him a thirty-second head start out of politeness. Then I followed.

The high desert out of Burns is flat and brown and honest. Nothing to hide behind. About forty minutes in I came up over a rise and there he was, pulled over on the shoulder near a cluster of mailboxes and a shuttered gas station, hood up on the truck, and I slowed down because I am not made of stone.

He was standing in the road holding a paper map.

Upside down.

Let me be clear about that. The man had the map rotated a full 180 degrees and he was studying it like a doctor reading an x-ray, head cocked, squinting, completely confident. I slowed to maybe fifteen miles an hour, and just as I drew even with him he looked up and saw me and I laid on the horn and he waved the map at me like he'd meant to do that, like it was a salute, and I laughed so hard I had to pull over a quarter mile up just to breathe.

I texted Kris from the shoulder of the road. He had the map UPSIDE DOWN.

She texted back. Screenshot or it didn't happen.

Some friend.

The Phillips 66 was my first landmark, out on 395 where the land starts folding up into ridges. The place has been dead for years, pumps standing there like skeletons, but there's still an old vending machine inside the office alcove that some rancher apparently keeps stocked, and everybody out here knows about it. I pulled in at 9:40, right on schedule, took a photo of the building for the record, and went to buy a soda.

The bell over the office door jingled and I swear my heart did a little drop, because Lance came around the corner of the building wiping his hands on a red rag.

"No," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"You're ahead of me?"

"I'm ahead of you."

"How. Explain the math to me. You left after me. You had the map upside down at 8:40. I have photographic evidence of the upside down."

"That was a rest stop," he said, walking past me into the alcove. "And my shortcut, the one you mocked, it hits a washed-out bridge about nine miles up the county road. Old Sheep Creek crossing. So I rerouted. Took the north line road. Added maybe twenty minutes total but I'm still in front of you, librarian."

I stood there with my quarters in my hand. "The bridge is washed out? Since when?"

"Since spring, probably. Water did it. That's what water does." He fed bills into the machine and got two sodas and held one out to me. "Here. You look mad."

"I'm not mad. I'm recalculating." I took the can anyway. It was cold and my fingers were actually shaking a little, which annoyed me. "This changes my checkpoints. If you're ahead at landmark one, I need to make up time before Seneca."

"Or," he said, popping his soda open, "you could just admit the napkin math was wrong and ride with me the rest of the way. Duane's truck seats three. Roomy."

"I have my own car."

"You do. And your own car is currently losing."

I looked at him. He looked at me. There was dust all down one side of his neck and his forearms are stupid, honestly, they're just stupid, all tendon and sunburn, and I noticed all of this and decided not to notice it.

"I'll make it up on 395," I said. "The road's straight from here. Your gravel shortcut doesn't help you on a straight road."

"Nope. It doesn't. Which is why this next stretch is yours to win." He drained half the can and crushed it a little in his fist. "But hey, Janna. For what it's worth, the bridge being out? Genuinely sorry. I know you plotted that route pretty."

"You have no idea how pretty," I said, and he laughed, and the laugh did something to my chest that I filed away under later, under not now, under he is your rival and you have a bet to win.

He got back in Duane's truck and leaned out the window before he pulled onto the road. "Checkpoint two, the motel in Seneca. Winner buys the other one lunch there. That's a new rule, I'm adding it."

"You can't add rules."

"Too late, it's added. Kris would back me."

"Kris would back anyone who causes chaos, that's her whole personality."

He drove off in a wall of dust and I stood there in the shade of the dead Phillips 66 with my warm soda and my neat little printed route, and I got out my pen and crossed out a line on the map and wrote a new one, and I want you to understand that I was smiling while I did it. I noticed that too. Filed it under the same folder.

The road east out of there is long and empty and gorgeous in a way that sneaks up on you. I did the math out loud in the car. If I averaged sixty-two and he averaged fifty on gravel, I'd catch him before the motel. If he took the main road too, we'd arrive together and the whole checkpoint would be a tie, and I found myself, God help me, hoping he'd take the gravel. Hoping he'd be there when I pulled in. Hoping he was already leaning on Duane's truck with two sodas waiting.

I called Kris at a rest stop with a picnic table and a view of nothing.

"You're smiling," she said before I said a word. "I can hear it. You're smiling on the phone."

"I am not."

"You so are. Is he there? Did you see him?"

"He's ahead of me. His bridge is washed out and he rerouted and he's ahead of me, Kris, and I don't know how, the man navigates by vibes."

"By vibes," she repeated, delighted. "Janna. Sweetie. You know what this means."

"It means I drive faster."

"It means you like him."

I hung up on her. Then I sat in the car for a minute with the engine off, looking at the empty road, and I thought, well. One thing at a time. Win the checkpoint. Deal with the rest of it in Seneca.

The flat tire happened eleven miles past the junction, on a stretch of road so empty that the map showed nothing between two dots. I heard the thump before I felt it, and then the steering wheel pulled right and I knew. I said a word I don't usually say and pulled onto the shoulder.

I'm thirty-three years old and I have changed a tire before. Twice. Both times in a parking lot with my father standing there telling me I was loosening it the wrong direction. So I got the spare out and I got the jack out and I got the lug wrench out and I knelt down in the gravel and I fought that thing like it owed me money.

The lugs were painted on. I know they were. Somebody with an air wrench at some shop in some year before I owned this car had cinched those things down like they were holding the devil in. I put my whole weight on the wrench and bounced and got nothing. I stood up and looked down the road in both directions. Nothing. Then a dot in the mirror that grew into Duane's truck.

He pulled in behind me with the flashers going and got out walking fast. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. The tire is not fine and neither are the lugs."

"Let me see." He crouched down and took the wrench from me and tried, and I will admit it