by Gail Sattler
This particular rest area was much smaller than the one they’d stopped at the day before, so they found themselves finishing their walk around the picnic area in a very short time. They were about to leave the grassed area and return to the parking lot when they heard a child squeal with delight.
“Mommy! Mommy! He took it!”
“Don’t move, Sweetie. Mommy wants to take your picture.”
They watched a woman crouch down to take a picture of a little girl feeding bread to a black squirrel beside one of the tables.
Lionel’s gut clenched at the sound of Gwen’s sudden intake of breath. He remembered her comment that, as a child, she’d enjoyed feeding the gophers at the zoo. He had a bad feeling she was thinking of a gopher that wouldn’t ever get fed again.
He grabbed her hand. “Let’s go. We don’t want to get behind schedule. You know all about schedules.”
She stiffened but allowed him to lead her to the truck.
He fished in his pocket for the keys. “You want to drive or ride?”
Her voice, when she answered, wavered slightly. “Either way, whatever you want.”
He stuffed the keys back into his pocket and grasped both her hands. “Gwen, I know you’re upset about it. It’s okay to be upset. Even us guys feel bad when we hit an animal. Even little ones like gophers.”
Being at virtually the same height, she seemed closer than she really was. If she were shorter, it would have given him some distance as she stared at him with those big round eyes—eyes that started to well up with tears. She blinked a few times and the moisture cleared.
He dropped her hands and slid his palms up to her shoulders, which probably wasn’t very smart, because it only drew her closer. The softness of her hair as it brushed his fingers made him want to run them through the dark locks. Her hair was an unusual color, a brown so dark it was almost black, and even though she hadn’t had a shower in two days, it still looked fresh. It shone in the afternoon sunshine with a natural luster he thought would have looked good in a shampoo commercial. He knew he shouldn’t be touching her hair, or any part of her, but he couldn’t move away.
“You probably think I’m such a ninny. I know it was just a gopher. It’s not like it was someone’s dog or anything.”
He wound his fingers in her hair, amazed at the silky feel of it. “You’re not a ninny.”
He spread his fingers and watched as her hair slipped between them. He then returned his attention to her beautiful chocolate brown eyes. As soon as they made eye contact, she bit her bottom lip, her eyes grew moist, welled up, and overflowed.
“Aw, nuts …,” he mumbled. He pulled her forward, and when she didn’t resist, he surrounded her with a hug. Her chin rested exactly on top of his shoulder as they stood. She sniffled again, right beside his ear, sending a feeling of dread through him that she was going to start sobbing her guts out, right in the parking lot.
Now he really didn’t know what to do.
Very gently he rubbed small circles on her back, doing his best to soothe her. She didn’t cry but, instead, let go a ragged sigh. The tension in her shoulders relaxed beneath his touch, so he didn’t stop. Lionel closed his eyes. A few strands of her hair tickled his nose. Instead of turning his head away, he pressed his cheek into her hair.
He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to kiss her. Very slowly he began to turn his head until his whole face was buried in her hair. All he had to do was touch her chin with his fingertips to turn her head just a little and he would be in just the right position.
At the realization of what he was about to do, his eyes bolted open. He backed up about an inch, creating some distance between them. As soon as he pulled away, Gwen also stiffened and backed up, completing the separation.
She swiped her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffled. “Thanks, I feel better now. We’ve got to get going, we’ve got miles to make.”
Gwen started to slow the truck as they approached the exit for the truck stop, noting the time on the dashboard clock. “I’ve driven for nine hours today, you’ve driven for seven. We’ve already used two hours of non-driving time, but we can still get in ten hours each for this twenty-four-hour period if we hurry. Tell me all that we need to do, in case I’ve forgotten something.”
Lionel checked his watch. “We have to fuel and do our trip fuel sheets, then update our personal fuel log as well as our trip logbooks. While we’re stopped and we still have daylight we should clean the clearance lights and windows and check the tires. Plus you want to have a shower, and I have to do my laundry. We were going to have supper too. We’ll never do it.”
Gwen tilted up one corner of her mouth while she downshifted, organizing the details and guesstimating how long each step would take. Lionel opened his mouth while she was still thinking, so she quickly shook her head to silence him in order to take a few more seconds to calculate her plan. She turned her head for a second to catch his attention. “We can do it if we organize ourselves efficiently.”
“Oh, yeah. Right,” he grunted, and crossed his arms.
Gwen slowed their speed to a crawl and rolled up to the pump. “We can do this.” She applied the hand brake, but before she released the seatbelt, she grabbed a pen and a napkin from the slot and calculated how long each duty would take as she wrote the details of her plan. “You begin fueling, I’ll start the laundry and reserve the shower. While I’m doing that, you clean the windows.” She stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she figured out how long the washer would run and tried to recall how long the fueling and maintenance took them yesterday. “When everything is in the washer, I’ll come back and do the clearance lights and tires. Then I’ll go have my shower. You’ll be finished with the fueling and the windows by the time I’m done, and by then the washer should be finished. We can throw everything in the dryer and then go have supper. We can do the paperwork while we eat. By the time we’re finished the clothes should be dry, then we can move out.”
He didn’t speak, so she handed him the napkin as proof that she was right.
“Come on, Lionel, we don’t have much time.”
“I don’t believe this.” He looked down at her notes on the crumpled napkin. “I’m traveling with the Schedule Queen.”
Gwen reached across the space between the seats and poked him in the arm. “Trust me. This will work.”
He handed the napkin back. He spoke so softly she could barely make out what he said. “You missed calculating how many seconds it would take for me to brush my teeth.”
She glared at him and crossed her arms. “Did you say something?”
“Nothing worth repeating,” he grumbled as he unclipped his seatbelt then reached for the door handle.
Gwen loudly cleared her throat, making him freeze in place. She purposely didn’t say anything but narrowed her eyes and gave him her best dirty look, one she’d perfected on her brother.
He raised his palms in the air toward her and sighed. “Okay, I give up. We’ll do it your way.”
Gwen immediately stepped into the back and pulled out her bag of dirty laundry. “Where’s your stuff?”
He opened the door and started to leave, but stopped at her question, leaving one leg sticking out as he answered. “The rags are in the bin underneath where your clothes are, like they usually are.”
“No, not that. I meant your clothes. The stuff you need washed.”
“Oh, that’s in a bag in the bin on the bottom left. It’s …” His voice trailed off. The door closed, but instead of being outside to start fueling the truck, he appeared beside her in the cab. “I’ll do the laundry.”
Gwen stiffened and tightened her grip on her own laundry bag. She didn’t want a man going through her personal things. “It’s okay, I can do it. You go fuel the truck.”
He shook his head and pulled a bag out of the bin he’d told her to check, but didn’t give it to her. “You fuel the truck. I’ll do the laundry.”
They stood, neither one moving,
staring at each other, neither giving up his or her bag of laundry.
Gwen bowed her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “We don’t have time for this. It’s okay, Lionel. Really.” She reached for the bag, but when she grasped it and started to pull, he didn’t let go. Gwen squeezed her eyes closed. “Lionel, I assure you, you don’t own anything I haven’t seen before.”
His cheeks reddened, but he still didn’t let go.
She pulled a little harder. “I have a twin brother. I’ve washed a man’s underw … uh … personal items before. It’s not a big deal. Come on, we don’t have time for this.” It wasn’t that she was anxious to do his laundry, but there was no way she was going to let him wash her underwear.
“As long as you promise to dump the load in the machine without looking.”
“I promise. Now let go.”
Reluctantly, he released his grip. While he was acting mildly complacent, Gwen hopped out of the truck and ran to the front counter to make the necessary arrangements.
On her travels with Uncle Chad, when they’d stopped at night she got a motel room, so she’d always had the comfort of her own bathroom, shower included. Then, in the morning when she was done with the room, she tidied up the truck while Uncle Chad had his shower. This was going to be her first experience with renting a truck stop shower.
She told herself that the facilities would be similar to those available at the various campsites she’d been to over the years. After she put her name down, she went into the truck stop’s Laundromat, pulled a few pairs of jeans out of Lionel’s bag, and stuffed them into the machine with her own jeans. Then she dumped everything else into another machine without looking, along with the few things of her own that needed washing, just as she’d promised.
She hustled back to the truck and quickly wiped off the clearance lights, walked around the unit to check the tires, then stood behind Lionel as he stood on the running boards, busily cleaning the windows.
“I’m going to have my shower now. Catch you in about twenty minutes.” She retrieved her small overnight bag and some clean clothes out of the larger duffel bag and jogged to the shower area.
It wasn’t exactly relaxing, but the shower left her feeling clean again, which she supposed was the point. She stuffed her toiletries back into her bag as she contemplated her last duty, that of transferring their clothes from the washer to the dryer. Then she would be meeting Lionel in the restaurant for supper.
Life on the road was vastly different from anything she’d ever experienced. Any other time she’d gone to a restaurant for dinner with a man she’d worn a skirt, a nice blouse, and, even though she usually didn’t wear a lot of makeup, she always put some on when she went out on a date. She hadn’t brought a single tube of lipstick with her for her truck-driving stint, and she certainly hadn’t brought a curling iron.
Gwen peeked over her shoulder before she left the room and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She paused, studying her image to see what everyone else saw.
Her hair was still damp and hung loosely to her shoulders. She wore no makeup, and her fine-dining attire was a T-shirt with the faded logo of a Christian summer camp where she’d counseled a few years ago. Her jeans were so well-worn the right knee almost had a hole. Her battered sneakers had seen better days, but they were the most comfortable she owned. She looked like a slob. A clean slob, but a slob just the same.
Not that she had to dress up for Harry’s Truck Stop Cafe.
She imagined this would be what married life was like—not having to care what she wore, coordinating dinner with a man in between work, laundry, cleaning, maintenance, and other chores. She ran her fingers through her hair to fluff it and let it fall. No matter what she did, in her present state, nothing would improve.
While she was taking the classes for her Class-One license, a few friends had not-so-graciously pointed out that spending the summer trucking around the continent in her old clothes wasn’t going to do anything for her single status. She was so tired of the well-meaning yet annoying attempts at matchmaking that she could hardly wait to get away. However, now that she was here in a hole-in-the-wall truck stop in the middle of the continent, she knew this wasn’t what she had in mind.
So far her experiences on the road hadn’t been bad, although she felt very sorry for Uncle Chad with his truck breaking down. She thanked God she hadn’t been driving when it happened, because she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, it wasn’t her fault. However, she had been driving when that poor little gopher met its demise, and that was her fault. Except for killing the gopher, she was enjoying her summer so far.
Gwen slung her overnight bag over her shoulder and headed for the Laundromat. She transferred everything from the washers to the dryers and nearly bumped into Lionel in the doorway. “Great timing,” she said. “You done?”
“Yes, are you?”
She nodded. It was suppertime, and not a minute too soon.
The second the waitress took their orders, Lionel spread a pile of papers and notebooks over the table. “This was a good idea. I think we really can do all this stuff in two hours and get in our full driving time. I’ll do the fuel log and fuel trip sheets.” He pushed both drivers’ logbooks toward her. “Here. You can kill two birds with one stone, since you’re so good at it.” His hands froze, his eyes widened, and his face paled as he met her eyes. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I meant that you’re good at making notes on my times in your logbook, so you can do both logbooks. Not that you’re good at killing things. I meant doing two things at once. Like when—”
Gwen bit her bottom lip, reached over the piles of paper, and laid her hand over his, interrupting him before he dug himself in deeper. She really did appreciate his attempts to make her feel better. Lionel was really a sweet man, if one liked the loner type. “It’s okay. I know what you meant. Let’s get this paperwork cleared before the food comes.”
Chapter 7
Lionel didn’t bother to try to hide his smile. “Good morning. Or afternoon. Or whatever. Did you sleep well?”
She yawned as she flopped into the seat and clipped on her seatbelt. “Yeah, I did.”
Without needing to be asked, he prepared to stop at the first rest area or truck stop they came to, just as she’d done for him as soon as he woke up. It had been only a few days since they’d been driving together, but in those few days he suspected they had seen more of each other and done more talking than most married couples did in a month.
While he hadn’t thought they would argue, he had traveled alone for so many years that he had expected her constant companionship to get on his nerves. At the very least, he’d expected to do a lot of reading in the bunk to get away from her while she was driving, but he’d been in the bunk only to actually sleep.
Again, she’d driven all night while he slept, and then he’d driven until mid-afternoon while she slept. He tried not to feel guilty about Gwen driving the graveyard shift hours, but because Chad’s breakdown happened when he was out of hours, it hadn’t left them any leeway. Now they’d fallen into a pattern. While the hours she was driving were easiest for a beginner, with the least amount of traffic on the road, he knew it wasn’t fun to drive all night alone in the dark. He had also worried about how the change in her sleeping patterns would affect her, being up all night and sleeping in the early day, but she had adapted well.
Just like yesterday, he’d started getting antsy about noon, anticipating when she would wake up.
He checked the time. It was nearly three o’clock. “We’ll be at Evansville before midnight. We’ve been making great time, and you’ve been doing real good. Are you sure you aren’t going to be making a career change in September?”
“Not a chance. They need me at the high school, and the kids at church would miss me. I’d miss them too. Besides, my sister-in-law is going to have a baby and I want to watch her grow big and round. I also have to laugh at Garrett every time he makes a fool of himself getting ready to be
come a father and going through the pregnancy with her. I can hardly wait for him to go to prenatal classes and watch all those ghastly films. It’s my sisterly duty to remind him what he’s in for.”
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate your efforts.”
She smiled and stared off into nowhere in particular, making Lionel wish she would smile like that when she thought of him.
“He will, strange as it sounds. By the way, can I use your laptop? I have to send him an E-mail and see how they’re doing. Robbie was going to have an ultrasound, and I think she’s had it by now. I just want to make sure everything is okay.”
“You know you can. You don’t have to ask.”
She turned her head and gave him a big smile.
He smiled back, his heartbeat quickened, and his chest swelled, knowing that this time her smile was for him.
Lionel cleared his throat and forced his attention back on the road. There was only one explanation for his sappy reaction to her simple gratitude. He was losing his mind.
He pulled into a rest area and waited inside the truck when she ran off to the amenities building, watching her every step until the door closed behind her. He couldn’t believe that someone who ate so much could be so thin.
After this short stint was over and she was back with Chad, they would see each other only a few times when they crossed paths on the road or ended up back home at the Vancouver terminal at the same time, which wouldn’t be often. After the summer was over, he would never see her again because she was going back to her teaching job, and he would continue with his life on the road.
He would be ten times a fool if he thought they could begin dating once life returned to normal. He’d been down that road before, and life had taught him well that it would never work. He had done his best to spend as much time as possible with Sharon when he wasn’t away on the road. He had really thought they could be happy, because the time they spent together had been good, yet they weren’t miserable when they were apart. The happiest day of his life had been the day she said she’d marry him. Up until that point, his relationship with Sharon had been everything his parents’ relationship hadn’t been.
