Passing Semis
in the Rain
Karen Goldner
Copyright © 2017 Karen Goldner
All rights reserved.
ISBN-10: 1541051173
ISBN-13: 9781541051171
To all of us who’ve taken a while to figure it out.
Prologue
The sun hit my eyes like a laser, bouncing off the rear-view mirror as I barreled down I-10 outside of Pensacola. My stomach had been knotted up so long I scarcely noticed it anymore. I reached to the passenger seat and patted the .38 snub nose to make sure it was still there. Just like I'd done every ten minutes since being chased out of Louisiana. And just like ten minutes ago, the hard metal felt comforting. I would check back in another ten minutes, but in the meantime there was nothing to do but drive. Drive, even though I didn't know where I was headed and didn't know who was chasing me.
My navigation was determined by the tablet I had plugged into the lighter. The red dot on the screen was moving, staying about an inch ahead of the blue dot, which was me. It had been that way since Bay St. Louis, one hundred fifty miles behind. I had no idea where I was going other than trying to catch up with the red dot, and so far the red dot had stayed on I-10. So I kept driving.
The road curved just enough that I could look in the rear view mirror without being blinded. I didn't see the white Camry, which wasn't surprising since I had shot out his windshield by Lake Pontchartrain three hours ago. But I was half expecting to see somebody else, a car that hung back a bit and wouldn't try to pass me. A car carrying the guys who had come after me before, or maybe different guys with the same intention. Near Gulfport I'd thought someone had been trailing for a while, but when I slowed down, the car zipped past and kept going. I didn't see it again.
The interstate curved, and the laser returned, and I stopped looking back.
So I drove as fast as I could get away with, and asked myself, "Tina Johnson, what the hell are you doing here?"
I asked myself the same question as the darkness came. I asked it again when the rain began in torrents and the trucks roared past and I was scared out of my wits. Then, finally, I made a move.
1
The year I turned forty-nine began more or less normally. I had two jobs, a husband, a house, and a car with the unfortunate habit of not starting.
By Thanksgiving the husband was history, although technically not the marriage, since lawyers don't make money from quick divorces. After the husband, everything else disappeared, too, and I was left trying to fit together a puzzle without all the pieces.
Like nearly all kids who grew up in Omaha, I had once dreamed of going somewhere glamorous or exciting. That hadn’t happened. As I approached middle age, a lifetime of settling started to haunt me.
My marriage had been what they call "rocky." Joe and I had been married for fifteen years, a second marriage for both of us. I toughed it out for a long time; for a while we had a sort of balance. He would go to work and I would go to work. He would rebuild muscle cars and I would watch movies. He would tell me that my hair wasn't brown enough—honestly, he truly said that—and I would leave the room while trying to keep a smile on my face.
Mother always said that if you smiled and thought good thoughts, you could get through anything. Finally, creeping up on fifty, I realized this hadn't worked any better for her than it worked for me. I faced the "is this all there is?" question and the answer scared me.
There was so much of the world, and even of the United States, that I hadn't seen. Before I met Joe, I never seemed to be able to save up enough to travel anywhere. After we married, Joe was perfectly satisfied with the fact that he'd never been further than two hundred miles from Omaha. He spent what little money we could save on his cars, and that was that. This wasn't the biggest issue in our relationship, but it was one of them.
I tried to figure out how to make our marriage better. Usually this involved conversations that ended with Joe shouting and slamming the door on his way into the garage and me retreating to the spare room for the night.
When it was finally over and he told me to get out, I realized it was for the best. The divorce was official in January, and I knew I was trading my house keys for my freedom.
Janet, a woman I worked with, let me rent her son's old bedroom when I moved out of the house. She had a nice kitchen and it was fun to cook for somebody who liked when I tried new recipes.
Had it not been for Janet, I would have been in a bind. Mother had died several years before the divorce, and my brother had not been around since then. My dad had lived with us for a few years when I was a kid, but he left one night and never came back. I didn't know whether he was dead or alive, and a long time ago I had learned to stop caring which. Joe was the end of my family. I was lucky that Janet helped me out.
She and I worked together for a big telemarketing company. That's not quite as awful as it sounds. Sometimes I was the person who bothers people during dinner, but most of the time I was doing inbound, taking calls for people ordering something. Occasionally it was even fun and interesting, talking with people from all over the world.
I also had a second job. To make extra money, I cleaned the condo of a sweet old man named Theodore. It was a nice hundred bucks a week. I always told Joe I only made fifty. I kept the rest in a jar at my friend Shelly's house, at least until she moved away. My grandmother would have called it "mad money," which was a phrase I had never understood as a kid. By the winter of my divorce, however, I'd saved almost four thousand dollars and completely knew what she'd meant.
The cleaning job ended when Theodore died right before New Year's. It was a real loss, and I don't mean the money. I missed Theodore's stories about his life, and his predictions for Nebraska football, and his corny jokes. His kids lived back East, so they were never around much, and sometimes he talked with me like I was his daughter. That felt good.
Bad things come in threes, the saying goes. Just to prove it, in February, I got called into my supervisor's office and was fired from the telemarketing company. I had missed one too many metrics, apparently. I was told that I wasn't cutting it anymore, and that my attitude wasn't "conducive to a team environment," whatever the hell that meant. I still cannot believe the HR guy could say that with a straight face.
The good thing about losing your job after you've gotten divorced and lost your other job is that you're pretty numb through the actual experience of being fired. I went home that night, and drank a quarter bottle of vodka.
The following Friday, some people from work held a small going-away party. It reminded me of the scene in "Working Girl" when Melanie Griffith gets fired. "We took up a collection. It's not much, and don't go spending it on the Con Ed."
My collection was enough to pay Janet what I owed her for February rent.
I spent my days watching TV and fixing a few things around the house.
Then something quite extraordinary happened.
I got a letter from an attorney—certified mail. It wasn't from my divorce attorney, or Joe's attorney, so I wasn't sure what it would be about. Good thing it was certified or I would have thought it was junk mail from an ambulance chaser and tossed it.
Inside was a letter from Theodore's estate attorney, saying that he had left me five thousand dollars and his car, a five-year-old, low-mileage sport utility vehicle called a Vue.
And so, out of nowhere I had a good chunk of mad money, a car with fifteen thousand miles on it, and absolutely no strings to tie me down. It seemed like now was as good a time as any to get out of Omaha.
2
There isn't much about the Midwest in Febr
uary that makes you want to stick around. It's cold and snowy, plus you know it's going to be cold for another month at least. It's soul crushing, really.
And worse than the weather, of course, was that I was approaching the end of my first half-century and I couldn't count on another fifty years. It felt like now or never.
Right now, while I was healthy and had a little nest egg and a cream puff car and not even the hurdle of a job to quit, right now, I needed to see new places and meet new people and do new things.
For the first time in my life, I was ready to do something I wanted to do.
I was ready for an adventure. I was ready to travel America and not worry about what came next.
I figured I had plenty of money to live on for a couple of months plus enough to start over wherever I decided to go. After a whole life of living according to somebody else's limits, something inside me was ready to hit the road and not look back.
But where to go?
That's a trick question, because for me there was only one answer: New Orleans.
The Big Easy. I'd wanted to see it since I could remember. When the Dennis Quaid movie came out in the '80's, I went three times. I saw "The Pelican Brief" twice, and not just to gaze at Denzel. I don't like horror movies, but I saw "Interview with a Vampire" because it was set in New Orleans. Joe didn't like to travel, and we never had money anyway, so I had never made it to the city of my dreams.
I announced my plan on Facebook, and other than a few people who didn't think I would actually go through with it, everyone was jealous. I found out just how many people my age want to chuck it all and drive off into the sunset.
Of course, I was nervous about traveling by myself for the first time ever. I didn't know whether I would come back to Omaha or decide to stay in New Orleans, or maybe even decide to go somewhere else. This was a big change: all my life I had lived by the limits other people had set for me. That had always felt safe, but I had started to realize that it wasn't the real me. During the divorce I had begun to listen to myself—not what I was saying, but how I was feeling. Now I had a feeling that if I didn't take this trip, I would forever regret passing up the chance.
The biggest problem for me was the driving. I was not a big driver. I hated driving on the interstate even in town; the truck traffic on I-80 is horrible. If you end up behind a semi in the rain you're just stuck there, because it is quite unsafe to pass one with the water pouring off the trailer. So I was a little nervous about driving all that way—it's a thousand miles from Omaha to New Orleans. But I knew that this trip was something I had to do, and that feeling got me over the fear.
I splurged on a smartphone to replace my old flip phone so that I would have GPS. This made me feel better, plus I had convenient texting, email, and the Internet, and a monthly bill that was half a used car payment. Safety first.
The phone was the easy part. I had to figure out what else to take on the road for a trip to New Orleans and possibly points unknown. I worried about it for a while, but in the end it took me a lot less time to pack my stuff than I had thought it would. I folded down the back seat of the Vue and loaded it with four plastic totes of clothes, a couple of random boxes, some blankets, and a pillow. Everything fit nice and neat, and I thought that I could make a little row down the middle if money got tight and I needed to sleep in the back. I was pretty satisfied with myself.
That last night at Janet's I was finishing up the dinner dishes late. We had talked for a long time after dinner about my recent past. We could not handle talking about what was going to happen the next day. We had been casual friends for a long time at work, but my living with her during such a tough time had made us a lot closer. As I started drying a pan, Janet flipped on the small TV in her kitchen. It was a little after ten o'clock and the news was on.
It was just background noise, of course, until I heard the name Christine Hamilton. Then I put down the pan and walked closer.
Janet was wiping the counter and saw me. "What?" she asked.
"I know a Christine Hamilton." They cut to a video of Christine, walking through the courthouse, surrounded by cops and people in suits, and I realized yes, this was the Christine Hamilton I knew. She had light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a nose that was a little long.
"She looks like you," Janet said.
"A lot. We went to school together since about third grade, and when we were little we really looked alike. Other kids called us the Tina Twins. If we were standing right next to each other you could tell us apart, but in junior high I actually passed for her to take a test."
Apparently Christine was a witness in a criminal trial, and she was supposed to have testified in Omaha’s Federal Courthouse that day. But she didn't show up, so the police were trying to find her. The news footage was from her initial arraignment, the reporter said.
I had run into her at our class reunion the previous summer, but before that, I hadn't seen her in ages. After that, I occasionally saw her on Facebook. It is definitely strange to see an old classmate on television with cops looking for her.
"What did she witness?" I asked Janet, as the news cut to something about an upcoming Latin American summit in Miami and a three-car crash on Interstate 80.
Janet shrugged. "I missed that part."
"Hope she's okay." I worried about Christine a minute, but my mind was filling up with a lot of worries about myself. It was finally sinking in that tomorrow was the day I would leave Omaha.
I hugged Janet and left her standing in the kitchen as I went to her son's room for the last time.
In the morning I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the washer, then followed my nose to the kitchen, where Janet had coffee brewing. She had just taken a cinnamon coffee cake out of the oven.
"I thought you'd want something warm." She smiled, a little sadly.
I started to tear up. This was going to be harder than I had thought. I blinked and took my duffel bag outside.
"You're taking a lot of clothes," Janet said as I came back inside. She handed me a cup of coffee. She had seen the totes stacked in the back of the Vue.
"Well, I'm not sure what the weather will be like and I want to have enough stuff that if I decide to go further than New Orleans, I'll be okay."
"You're really not coming back, are you?"
"I don't know. Maybe. I mean, for sure I'll be back for my stuff at some point. I'm not going to leave it in your basement forever."
She smiled a little and shook her head like she still could not believe what I was doing. My eyes welled up and I grabbed a tissue as she ran a knife around the cake pan.
We both sat at the kitchen table and stared into our coffees while the cake cooled. Janet flipped on the TV again because neither one of us could handle the silence. She found the Weather Channel and everything looked clear, at least as far as Arkansas, which was as far as I planned to drive the first day. I felt relieved about that.
As it turned out, Jonesboro, Arkansas, is a good halfway point between Omaha and New Orleans, and a guy I knew had an aunt who lived there. My friend Ray had called his Aunt Teresa and she had offered to put me up. I thought that was really nice, to do that for a perfect stranger.
The cake cooled enough to cut, and it was cinnamon heaven. I ate two pieces, and Janet put a third in a baggie for me. She gave me a travel mug filled with coffee.
"You can return this when you come back," she said. But she gave me a really old mug that she wouldn't miss.
She hugged me and we both got wet eyes. Then I was off.
3
The drive to Jonesboro was pretty easy. Traffic wasn't heavy, even around Kansas City. It's a nine-hour drive to Jonesboro from Omaha if you don't stop. I had told Aunt Teresa I wouldn't be there until around six, so I had an extra hour.
I was glad that I gave myself that time, since after I got past Kansas City I realized that I was in a place I had never been before. It felt great to be somewhere completely new, even though it was just Missouri. Driving on Highway 7
, I saw a sign for the Harry Truman Reservoir and thought, "why not?"
It was a little out of the way, but it was pretty, even in February. I drove over the dam, and the lake was impressive. I imagined what it would be like in the summer. I drove around for a few minutes and then got back on the highway to continue south.
That detour added an hour and a half to the trip, but it was so worth it. Joe would have thought it was silly to drive an hour out of your way to see a lake. But Joe was in my past now, and my future was about adventure, about exploring places I had never been. My present was, too. Every mile I drove along the little highways in Missouri was a mile of something new.
Which was good, because it is not an especially interesting drive otherwise. Luckily, as a going away present, a friend had made me a couple of CD's: one was classic rock and one was newer dance music. I started with the classic rock, but then I popped in the dance music and rocked out through Missouri to the Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga.
Every so often I would scream just a little, sometimes feeling scared and sometimes feeling free. I felt like I was ripping off chains, but I also felt completely alone.
Then I started thinking about what "alone" meant. In a way I had been alone for a long time. When I was married, I had learned to ignore Joe's comments, but that also meant that I had stopped paying attention to him much at all.
I still had some people. My friend Shelly had moved to Minnesota but I could call her if I needed to. Shelly and I go way back. On the first day of Kindergarten, we were the two weird girls who had no other friends. She was too tall and too skinny to look right in her skirt, and I was socially awkward with horrible hair. My mother could do a lot of things well, but cutting hair was not one of them. My pixie cut made me look like a boy. Since no one else would sit by us during story time, we became friends. Over the years many other people—friends, boyfriends, husbands, and, in Shelly's case, kids and grandkids—had entered our lives and we had not always been close, but we always seemed to reconnect when we needed support.
Passing Semis in the Rain: A Tina Johnson Adventure Page 1
