A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  Penny directed me to a neat white single in the center of the park. I followed her up a wobbling exterior staircase to the landing, a pot of scarlet bee balm flowering on the ledge in tubular clusters. A surprise, until I remembered her father and his nursery, the prospect of a hereditary green thumb. She lifted the pot and removed a key from the water dish, disturbing a pallid butterfly that hovered nearby, waiting for us to get lost.

  “Want to play a game?” Penny opened the door, shooting a mischievous look over her shoulder. “I say a word, and you say the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “No.” I followed her inside and bent to untie my boots, adding them to the assortment of shoes lined up by the door: well-worn sneakers and high-heeled mules, a pair of leopard slingbacks and over-the-knee boots, one large, mud-caked set of Timberlands much too big to be hers. Some remnant from the mechanic boyfriend, her father, the brother I hadn’t met.

  “Ready? The first word is your favorite. Book.”

  “No,” I said again, wandering through her front room, noting a short futon hidden under a pile of knit blankets; a chipped full-length mirror set across two columns of textbooks to create a makeshift table; a small television in the corner, its rabbit ears twisted askew. Penny walked down the hall toward her bedroom, peeling off her clothes as she went. She dropped her jeans on the floor amid other items previously discarded: a short skirt, pair of cutoff shorts. A lace bra hung from the corner of a mirror, a thong dangled from the bedpost. She rooted around in her bureau before pulling out a strappy tank and a pair of shorts. When she finished dressing she collapsed backward onto the bed, patting the mattress next to her. I took a seat and lay back by degrees, until our heads were nearly touching. We stared at the popcorn ceiling. A bell-shaped water stain fanned out from the joint between two panels, a winter leak of rainwater or snow.

  “Just try being fun, Cale. You might like it.”

  “Maybe I’m not in the mood,” I said.

  “If we all waited to be in the right mood for something,” she said, “we would all be in bed. Book.”

  “Library.”

  “Table.”

  “Salt.”

  “College.”

  “Why is that a word?” I propped myself up on the bed and studied her carefully; the unblemished skin, her wide, generous mouth. She rolled her eyes.

  “Did Lamb talk to you?”

  “No.”

  I lay back down. “Liar.”

  “Cale—”

  “My turn. Stab.” I didn’t need to look to know she was rolling her eyes again.

  “Spear.”

  “Starship.”

  “Mars.”

  “Whale.”

  “Lourdes.”

  “Lourdes?”

  “She’s pregnant. And commuting to college, doing all this math stuff. It’s hard being a genius.” She poked me with a sharp finger. “Mother,” she said.

  I waited. For a word, a feeling. If we lay there for any longer, I would fall asleep.

  “Cale. He just wants you to have a plan. That’s all Lamb said, about college. I don’t think she has any kind of plan.”

  “Because he has so many?”

  “For what you’re going to do. Going to be.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Well, I thought you would. Don’t you know what you want to be when you grow up?”

  An astronaut, a librarian, a teacher. Thoughtless answers collected from a contented child whenever an answer was required. The future, beyond Pomoc, beyond Lamb, was always obscure.

  “What’s it like to live by yourself?” I asked Penny.

  “I have all the closet space.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What else is there to say?”

  “You don’t like it,” I said.

  “I do and I don’t.”

  “You could get a roommate.”

  “Oh, Cale.”

  “What?”

  “That wouldn’t work right now.”

  “Why not?”

  She turned her head on the bed, the look she gave me was soft, pregnant with something I had yet to fully grasp.

  “It just wouldn’t,” she said.

  21

  For two days no one ventured into the diner at all. Steering wheels were too hot to touch, the idea of traveling the length of a street for a drink or a meal, unimaginable. Here was the hour a truck might crunch into a fender at the corner of Juniper and Spruce, when a customer might refuse his meal and bellow for a manager, when a vexed waitress might hurl a stack of plates to the floor. Rico and I took turns standing on a small, wobbling table underneath the largest oscillating fan. I leaned into the cold case until the edges of the ice cream buckets began to soften and drip.

  At sunset I propped open the screen door and wandered onto the porch, picking up a half-smoked cigarette on the armrest of one of the Adirondack chairs. I lipped it but didn’t bother looking for a light. My chest still ached from smoking all of Lamb’s cigarettes the week before, and I didn’t want to think about how he managed a pack a day. I had an image of the black tar gumming up his lungs, his body’s pitiless revenge.

  In the distance a narrow shape was moving down the road. I tracked it until it became a thin blue bike, its rider bent low over the handlebars, weighted by the burden of a heavy pack. I waited for the rider to pass, but the figure slowed in front of the turnout, hooking a left into the diner’s lot, leaning up on the pedals near Rico’s van. I recognized the tight, high set of his shoulders as he climbed off his bike and rolled it to the porch, an unmistakable long blond ponytail when he turned to wipe his chin on his shoulder. It was Eric from school, from the Fat Trap, the evening I hoped he’d already forgotten. He climbed the porch steps and stopped the bike in front of my outstretched legs.

  “Do you mind?”

  “If that gets stolen,” I said, letting him pass, “we’re not responsible.”

  Eric leaned the bike against the railing, removing his helmet. The top of his hair was mussed, and a drop of sweat clung to the curve above his lip. I must have been staring, he wiped it with his hand. I led him inside to a booth near the window and brought him a menu. Rico had returned from his break and was bent low in the cook’s window, squinting to ID our first customer of the day. I stared, too, trying to remember something about Eric I liked. My reaction to him was always knee-jerk, a defense against all the qualities we shared. Eric, too, had spent countless high school lunch hours sitting alone, tucked in an unoccupied corner of campus, picking at a sandwich he had no desire to eat. Up close now I saw a severity around his mouth, but his eyes were the remarkable, irregular gray of lace jasper. He turned the menu over on the table.

  “I’ll get the burger plate, rare. Bring me one of those butterscotch milkshakes. Extra whip. Come sit with me.”

  “Me?”

  He looked around as if to emphasize the empty restaurant. “Why not? I hate to eat alone.”

  Then you should have brought a friend. But I placed his order with Rico at the window and busied myself with his shake, trying to remember what else I knew about him. Sophomore biology, he had sat in the back of the room and never raised his hand. But who did? The past two summers he seemed to come out of his shell. I saw him with the construction crew on the highway laying tar, chumming with the other men in orange vests and yellow hats. Now there was the Trap job, too. When Rico slid the order through the pickup window, I brought it to Eric and slid into the seat across from him, keeping an eye on the parking lot through the window.

  Eric took a straw from the dispenser and slid it from its paper sheath, crumpling the wrapper between wide, long fingers, a half-moon of dirt embedded deep under a short fingernail. He salted his fries and pushed the plate toward me. I took one, holding it gingerly while it burned through my fingers. I tried to think of something to say. I
was getting better at it, but I never knew where to begin. You’re a loner, so let me tell you how this works, okay?

  “How long have you been working here?” Eric asked.

  “Couple months now.”

  “You get this job after I saw you at the Trap?” A long strand of his hair had come loose from his ponytail. He shook it away from his face. “I never thought I’d see you there.”

  “I was just taking a drive,” I said, feeling my face flush. “I don’t know why I went inside.”

  “Nothing like a nice long drive to the Trap.” He was looking at me curiously now, expecting me to say more. But I didn’t want to go into the peculiarity of the summer, Lamb, my growing listlessness, the fog that came and went.

  “I thought you might be looking for work.” He took a bite of his burger.

  I shifted in my seat. “No.” Out the window, still no cars. “I was just bored.”

  “I hate to think of you bored. Needing excitement.”

  Did I dislike him solely for his solitariness, his exclusion, the ways he reminded me of myself? Or was there something else, some reason why—despite his relatively good looks, the mystery he managed to cultivate by dropping into town from some Midwest cornfield—he never managed to make friends or keep a girlfriend longer than a couple of months? That shifty, eager grin spread across his face again, the one that, I remembered now, always made him seem like a creep.

  “I can get you an audition,” he said. “You can practice your routine on me.”

  I slid to the edge of the booth, gripping the edge of the table. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Stay a minute.” He held out a hand to keep me.

  “Have you ever tried just not—”

  “What?”

  “Not being, you know, quite so direct.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’re subtle. I knew it when you walked into the Trap by yourself. What were you looking for in there, the library?”

  I stood up, pushing away his hand, but he grabbed my wrist—a tight, firm squeeze before releasing. He was watching me with those cool eyes, a grim smile.

  “Trap’s not good enough for you?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s great.”

  “What is it then? The bike’s just temporary.”

  “What?”

  “I’m saving up for a 450 on lift, a real cherry red screamer. Trap’s helping me pay for it.”

  “Eric. I didn’t mean—”

  “You could ask that other girl who works here. Trap’s not too good for her.”

  “Clara?”

  Eric smirked. “Not Clara. The hot one.”

  “Penny?” For the second time that summer, I felt like I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of a conversation I was never meant to have. Of course Eric knew Penny from high school—the construction crew were regulars here, piling into the diner early weekday mornings. He would see Penny all the time; she would bring him his eggs. Now Eric was pretending to be absorbed by his meal, dragging a limp fry through the ketchup.

  “She took me up on the offer.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “She came in for an audition. Couldn’t get the job.”

  The flush in my cheeks spread to my chest. It was his smirk, the way he had looked at me outside the Fat Trap, the way he was looking at me again now. As if he already knew everything about me; Penny, too. As if we were, somehow, all of us the same.

  “I saw the girl they had dancing at the Trap,” I said. “If Penny wanted a job there, you’d be begging her to take it.”

  “Nope. Manager didn’t want her stealing his customers. But it’s all right. I’m thinking about opening my own club. Me and him have been talking about it. He’s going to help me get a loan.”

  “So Penny stealing customers for what?” I laughed. “Our Sunday brunch striptease?”

  “You really don’t have any idea. She walks around like she’s headlining for the Golden Horseshoe. Penny and her friend, that girl skinny.”

  “Flaca?”

  “At the Texaco at like three, four, five in the morning, filling up or something.”

  “How do you know what goes on at the Texaco at four in the morning?”

  He gave me a pointed look. “Even you know what goes on at the Texaco. The first time I saw them it made sense, right? The skinny one sells her pills, sure. Now Penny does, too. That’s smart. But they must have seen how easy the other girls made their money. I saw her leave with a guy more than once.”

  I grabbed his empty glass off the table, to refill it or throw it at him, I wasn’t sure. It did make sense for Flaca to sell to the truckers at the Texaco, the girls who worked the truckers, too. Those girls weren’t careerists, not the same way as the women milling the block at the hour motel, their faces grown more severe every year. The girls at the Texaco were mothers and girlfriends with day jobs whose checks came too late or too short; the extra baby formula, the surprise hospital bill. I heard girls whispering about it in the locker room at school, buzzed girlfriends bent over plates of cheese fries at the diner after the palo bars had closed. We already sleep with guys for free. What’s the difference? If Penny was going to the Texaco to sell pills, it wouldn’t have been such a leap.

  “You asked Penny out sometime and it didn’t take, is that it? She didn’t give you the time of day.”

  “What do you bet she charges? Those other girls are trolls. She could double their make, easy.”

  “How would you know? I’m sure you don’t get up to anything yourself. I’m sure you’re just an honest observer.”

  “Fuck no.” He smiled again, his lips shiny with grease from the burger. He sensed it, pulling a handful of napkins from the dispenser and wiping his mouth, his hands; ringing the napkin around one finger at a time. “What do you think Jake’ll do when he finds out? Maybe he already knows.”

  “You should leave.”

  “You change your mind about the Trap, just come down. When I get my club, we could use a girl like you. I’m going to have all sorts; big girls, small girls, hot girls. Nerds like you.” He threw his napkin on his plate and leaned back, crossing his arms above his head in a long stretch. He was lean but looked strong; he had grown wiry from the construction work, his chest stretched against the thin cotton shirt in a way I was sure I was meant to notice. I got up and walked across the empty diner and into the back room. I stayed there for a long time, leaning against the sink, until I heard the bell over the front door chime, the muted clatter on the porch as he gathered his bike and bumped it down the stairs.

  There were only two coffee cups in the sink from the slow day; one of them was stained with Penny’s rose-colored lipstick around the rim. I opened the dishwasher and began re-racking plates. I was thinking about the outsized Timberlands by Penny’s front door. But Penny usually worked overnights at the diner, waiting tables for tips.

  Penny doesn’t work every night. Penny doesn’t always waitress the whole night through.

  16

  The kitchenette was the most orderly space in Penny’s home; a small dish rack, a toaster, a petite coffeemaker, the counters wiped spotless. When Penny opened the fridge I recognized one of the diner’s white take-out boxes, a carton of eggs, a lone grapefruit. I watched her move around the kitchen and tried to imagine her here every day alone, shaking cereal into a bowl, waiting for the electric kettle to sing. She pulled a box of pancake mix from the cupboard.

  “Grab those eggs for me?”

  I took them and cracked two into a bowl, whisking with a fork. “What are your neighbors like?”

  “Bunch of old people, mostly.” She rolled her wrist, oil sliding in the pan. I poured the eggs into her bowl of flour; she added butter, baking powder, chocolate chips.

  “Did your mom make pancakes when you were small?”

  “Neve
r,” she said, ladling the mix into the pan.

  While we waited, I studied all the clutter on her fridge door. An old photograph of Penny as a fierce-looking child in red tulle; a birth announcement for Lourdes’ baby boy stuck under the laminate magnet of a cross; a plastic letter P magnet securing a short grocery list (apples, Oreos); a work schedule hastily inked on a diner napkin underneath a magnetic R. I lifted the M to read the scrap of paper torn from county classifieds: 6 wk old Timber Wolf X GSD puppies, female & male avail, agouti, blk, sble $200–$900. (775) 457-6789. I turned it over. No date listed, nothing to indicate how old the ad might be.

  “You’re not thinking of getting a dog here?”

  “Why not?”

  “Wouldn’t you want more space?” Though there were plenty of dogs at the Crossroads; I heard them barking from inside screened windows, saw them tied to hitches with a leash, sunning themselves by dry bowls.

  “Everyone has dogs. You have dogs.”

  “I know, but they can be such a pain. What if you ended up with one like Wolf?”

  She laughed, flipping the pancake onto the plate. “I’d give him to you.”

  “You work so much. When are you going to find time to walk a dog three times a day?”

  “You know what time I get home from Jake’s? Someone got broken into a few weeks ago. Stole their television.” She shrugged, pouring more batter into the pan. Had I embarrassed her? I was only thinking of the cool, untouchable Penny from high school, a Penny whose proficiencies didn’t extend to caretaking. But that image was already losing its fixed shape, yielding a complexity I was still learning to maneuver. She was still sharp and airy—but also warm, funny, playful, cruel. Like all the best people I had ever known, she enjoyed pancakes in the afternoon. She glanced in my direction, narrowing her eyes. “I don’t want to borrow Wolf,” she said.

  I flipped up the lid of her coffeemaker, dumping the soggy filter in the trash. I checked the freezer, where Lamb kept our grounds, and took out the coffee can, cold to the touch. Penny set down her spatula on the counter and pulled it out of my hands. I watched her replace it in the freezer, shutting the door. She looked away, cutting any chance of discussion. “In the cupboard,” she said.