Three Days to Maybe

Hilary pulled into Shelly's driveway at a quarter to six in the morning, and her stomach was already a knot. Not a bad knot, exactly. More like the feeling right before a dinner rush, when you know the tickets are coming and you know you can handle them, but your body hasn't gotten the memo yet.

She was thirty-four years old, a line cook from Vincent, and she had been quietly, hopelessly gone on her neighbor for the better part of two years. Shelly was thirty-two, a graphic designer who worked from a home office Hilary could see from her own kitchen window, and she was trans, and Hilary had known that since roughly the third week of their friendship, when Shelly mentioned it over borrowed sugar like she was reading off a grocery list. Hilary had said "okay, cool, do you bake too?" and that had been that. It was one of the reasons she liked her so much.

She killed the engine and sat there. Was it weird to honk at six in the morning? It was weird. She got out and knocked instead, soft, twice.

The door opened almost immediately, which meant Shelly had been standing there waiting, and that did something warm to Hilary's chest that she chose not to examine.

"You're early," Shelly said. She had a travel mug in one hand and her hair was pinned back and she looked, frankly, unfairly good for someone who had presumably also been awake since five.

"Early is on time! That's what kitchens taught me." Hilary grabbed the biggest suitcase before Shelly could argue. "Wow, this weighs a ton. What's in here, bricks?"

"Interview clothes. Plural. I panicked packed." Shelly locked her door, then stood there a second looking at the house, and Hilary pretended not to notice. Three days to Portland, one job interview, and then whatever came after. Shelly had the interview Tuesday. If it went well she was staying. If it went well, Hilary's neighbor was gone by the weekend.

Nobody had asked Hilary to drive her, technically. Hilary had volunteered with a little too much speed, and Shelly had looked at her for a beat and then said sure, if it wasn't a hassle. It was not a hassle. It was possibly the best thing to happen to Hilary's whole year, and also possibly the worst, depending on how the next seventy-two hours went and whether she could keep her mouth shut.

They loaded the car in comfortable silence. That was a thing about Shelly, she didn't fill air with noise, and Hilary, who talked for a living in the sense of yelling "corner!" and "two top!" over a flat top, found she didn't need to either. Suitcases in the trunk. Cooler of snacks wedged behind the driver's seat because Hilary had cooked the night before with frantic energy, and now there was a tupperware of breakfast tacos riding shotgun duty.

"Did you make these?" Shelly asked when she saw them.

"Obviously. You can't drive to Oregon on gas station food. That's how you end up sad."

"I'm already driving to Oregon."

"Okay, fair, but the tacos help."

Shelly laughed, and Hilary filed the sound away like it was a tip in a jar.

The first stretch of highway was all gray light and empty coffee lots. Hilary drove, Shelly navigated by phone, and somewhere around the second hour the conversation drifted from podcast recommendations to past jobs to nothing much. It was easy. It was so easy it made Hilary a little dizzy.

They stopped at a diner outside of some town whose sign advertised a rattlesnake festival. Vinyl booths, laminated menus, a pie case that Hilary eyed with professional respect. They slid into a booth by the window and ordered, and Shelly said something about the interview, about the firm, about how the portfolio was either going to land or it wasn't, and Hilary said it was going to land, she'd seen the work, it was stupid good.

"Thanks," Shelly said, and then she went quiet for a moment, turning her mug a quarter turn on the table. "Can I say something kind of heavy before we get back on the road?"

"Always."

"I haven't spent real time in small towns since I transitioned. Like, actual small towns, not Vincent pretending to be one." She smiled a little, but it didn't reach all the way. "I came out in my mid twenties, and since then I just... I plan around it. Which bathrooms. Which stops. Whether a place looks like the kind of place where someone's going to say something. It's a whole spreadsheet I run in my head and I don't even notice I'm running it anymore."

Hilary's hand had been reaching for the ketchup, and it just stopped, right there in the middle of the table, hanging over the little glass bottle like she'd forgotten what ketchup was for.

"That sounds exhausting," Hilary said. "The spreadsheet."

"It's not, really? That's the weird part. It's just how it is." Shelly shrugged. "Sorry. You asked about the festival sign and I gave you that."

"No. Don't apologize, are you kidding?" Hilary pushed the ketchup toward her, gently, like an offering. "I'm glad you told me. What do you need? Like, practically. For the next three days. Do you want me doing the talking at stops? Not talking? I can be quiet. I mean, I can't, really, but I can try hard."

That got a real laugh out of her, thank god. "You don't have to do anything. I just wanted you to know. Some stops I'll be weird about, and it's not about you."

"Okay. Noted. Filed under important." Hilary meant it, and she thought Shelly could tell she meant it, because something in Shelly's shoulders came down half an inch.

The food came. The pie was, in Hilary's professional opinion, store-bought crust masquerading as homemade, and she said so, and Shelly said she was a snob, and Hilary agreed enthusiastically. It was good. Sitting there with her, in a booth that smelled like burnt coffee and pancake syrup, it was so good that the knot in Hilary's stomach loosened into something else entirely, something she'd have to deal with eventually, just not yet.

Back on the road, the sun climbed up and the highway flattened out into that long Oklahoma-to-whatever emptiness that makes time go strange. Shelly talked for a while about her interview outfit, soliciting opinions Hilary was wildly unqualified to give, and then the talking slowed, and then it stopped, and Hilary glanced over and found her asleep against the passenger window.

Her mouth was a little open. Her cheek was smooshed against the glass in a way that would definitely leave a crease. One hand was curled loosely in her lap like she'd been holding her phone and just let it go.

Hilary looked back at the road. Then she looked again. Was this creepy? It felt a little creepy. But nobody was grading her, and the car was on cruise control, and there was nobody in the world to catch her staring except God and the occasional cattle truck.

Here was the thing she kept coming back to, mile after mile. Shelly trusted her. She'd told her about the spreadsheet. She'd fallen asleep in Hilary's car, in the middle of nowhere, mouth open, phone slipping out of her hand. You didn't fall asleep next to someone you were running calculations about. That was a fact, and Hilary held onto it like a handrail.

The highway hummed. The taco tupperware sat between them, two tacos still left for the afternoon. A semi passed going the other way and rocked the sedan a little, and Shelly didn't even stir, and Hilary thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that she could do this every day. She could drive this woman across the country and back and consider it the best job she'd ever had, and she'd cooked beside some real tyrants, so she knew bad jobs.

What was she going to do about it, though? That was the question sitting in the seat behind her, riding along quietly. Three days was a lot of miles. Miles made people brave, or stupid, and those were often the same thing. There was a motel tonight somewhere outside of Amarillo or thereabouts, two rooms booked, and a whole evening with nothing to fill it.

Hilary turned the radio down low, so low it was almost nothing, and drove.

The gas station in Oklahoma showed up around two in the afternoon, a lonely little island of pumps and ice coolers with a wind so steady it looked like it was pushing the clouds along by hand. Hilary filled the tank while Shelly went inside, and when she came back out she was carrying two bottles of water and wearing that particular face people wear when something happened.

"What's up?" Hilary asked, taking the water. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. The guy at the register was fine. It's just." Shelly popped her own bottle open and took a drink. "Can I tell you something? It's not a big deal, it's just a story, and I feel like you should hear it since you're driving me all the way to Portland."

"Obviously. Tell me everything. You know I live for stories."

Shelly leaned back against the car and looked out at the highway, which is what people do when they'd rather look at anything else. "A few years ago I was seeing this guy. Freddy. We'd been out maybe five times, and it was going well, and I liked him, and I thought, okay, this has gone on long enough that he should know. So I told him. That I'm trans."

Hilary felt her jaw tighten. She could actually feel it happening, the muscles bunching up, and she made herself unclench it.

"And he was quiet for a second, and then he laughed. Not a nice laugh. And he said, well, that explains a lot. And I asked what that meant and he wouldn't say. And then he asked for his money back for dinner." Shelly's laugh came out flat. "Which, okay, it was thirty-eight dollars, but you know? Thirty-eight dollars. Like I was running some kind of scheme."

"He asked for his money back," Hilary repeated, very evenly, which took enormous effort.

"He did. And then he texted our mutual friend a screenshot of my message, like a warning about me. Which is its own thing." Shelly shrugged, that small shrug again. "Anyway. That's why the spreadsheet exists. The whole file is that. I don't even think about Freddy that much anymore, it just, it set the template, I guess."

Hilary wanted to say about six things. She wanted to say that Freddy sounded like a complete waste of a human being, she wanted to say that anyone who could be near Shelly for five dates and then behave like that had failed at being a person, she wanted to say that if she ever ran into Freddy she had arms from lifting stock pots all day. But Shelly had told her this calmly, like handing over a file, and making it about Hilary's anger would just be another thing Shelly had to manage.

So instead she said, "Thank you for telling me. And for the record, thirty-eight dollars was not a scheme, that was just dinner."

Shelly laughed for real then, quick and surprised. "Thank you. That's the correct reaction, actually. Most people fumble it."

"I never fumble," Hilary lied cheerfully, and they got back in the car.

She drove. The wind kept pushing. And somewhere around mile ninety she finally let her jaw fully relax and thought, quietly, that the bar for men was buried so deep underground that finding it would require heavy machinery, and that she was going to be so careful with this woman that it would take her entire life, if she got the chance.

The trouble started at six, outside Amarillo, at the motel Hilary had booked two rooms at back in Vincent. They pulled in and the sign was dark. Not flickering, dark, and half the parking lot was blocked off with cones.

"Please be closed for remodeling," Hilary said, "and not closed for a reason."

They were closed for a reason. A guy in the office, apologetic, told them a water main had gone and the whole wing was shut down until the next day. He suggested a place ten miles down the road.

Ten miles down the road, the place was booked for a rodeo. The place after that was booked for, and Hilary would never fully get over this, a quilting convention. At the third place, a long low single-story thing with a flickering sign and a vending machine glowing in the window, the night clerk typed for a while and then looked up with real regret.

"You're in luck and you're not," he said. "I got one room left. One queen. After that I got nothing till El Paso, basically."

"One queen," Hilary repeated.

"That's what I got."

They stepped away from the desk, and Hilary did the fastest math of her life. Two rooms booked, zero rooms available, one queen. She had slept on plenty of floors. She'd slept on a beach once. She would sleep in the car before she'd make Shelly uncomfortable, that was simply a fact about her.

"Okay," she said. "One room. I'll take the floor. It's fine, I've slept on way worse, one time I slept in a walk-in cooler, don't ask."

"Hilary." Shelly was frowning at her. "No."