Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  A car cut her off even though she was in the right-hand lane, and she felt a heat in her chest. Fucker, she said. The highway suddenly materialized again, her car moving swiftly, and she felt a sort of danger: she hadn’t even been seeing the road and in its place she’d been freely thinking about April, of her father, though she hadn’t wanted to be, as though something in her was preparing her for motherhood again. As though something in her was reminding her of mistakes so that she wouldn’t make them with Jack. Like she had a shock collar on and each time she wanted to venture into the world freely, the thing went off, reminding her that she wasn’t free. And yet, she knew, there was no shock collar: it was just her. It was just herself reminding herself, which made Tammy want to shout at this other Tammy, this annoying double of her: shut the fuck up. She knew that nothing she did could undo what she’d done. Her life was saturated with what she’d done. Jack was the only way to correct any of it. She saw images of him in bed, reading or singing him to sleep, images of him at the dinner table with Steve, Steve cutting his food into small bites, images of the boy on a rope swing once they found a little house, some place with a yard for the boy, images of him when she had to discipline him, but not in the way she did with April, not the shouting and arguing she did with April, a more controlled, motherly version of herself, and then, when the boy got older, images of him looking through her records, listening to old music, classic rock and Motown and jazz and her telling him the meaning of these songs to her, images of Jack growing into a young man, maybe he’d forgo college and join the Navy, maybe he’d become a pilot, images of him holding her hand as they walked across the street to the grocery store, images of her younger self once again a mother, but this time focused and patient and understanding and wise, and then these images reduced themselves to a single image, as though the images of Jack growing into a man were suddenly rewound into just Jack as she knew him now. A four-year-old boy, alone in his bedroom. His aunt and uncle with him, but April and Nicholas gone, his mother and father gone. She suddenly recalled that the only information she knew had come from a very brief phone call from Nathaniel when he’d said that Jack was okay, just sleeping a lot, and thinking of this, she began to cry. A moment after this, her phone buzzed with a call from Steve, and she saw that again she had service. She took several deep breaths, composed herself, though she didn’t exactly know why, why she’d want to hide the fact of her crying from Steve, but she did, and she hit the green glowing button to answer her phone.

  Before he could say anything Tammy told him that he was right, that she shouldn’t be driving there, that she shouldn’t be doing this. She told Steve that he was right. She was making this about herself. Instead of thinking about Jack, she was thinking about her past, she was thinking about how things had been hard for her, about the fact that she didn’t want to be pregnant at eighteen and had missed out on so many things, and she thought that wanting to correct the mistakes she made wasn’t a bad thing to want, and she thought that wanting to be a better version of herself wasn’t bad either, but wanting to use Jack to do it was. It was no reason for the boy to live with her, no reason for her to be the guardian, she said. Streetlamps lit the highway in cones of light. Highway signs were beginning to crust over in sleet. Tammy saw more billboards for an upcoming exit and told Steve that there were gas stations and fast food places coming up and she was going to stop rather than keep driving because the sleet was getting intense. Steve told her to hold on a minute, don’t do that yet, just slow down, drive safely, because he wanted to tell her that she had been right earlier. He hadn’t been just trying to make her focus on the grieving process, focus on April, or whatever he’d said before. She had been right. He hadn’t wanted her to go get Jack. All he’d really been doing this whole time was waiting to convince her that her wanting to take care of Jack was all caused by Tammy’s grief-stricken state, and then once he’d done that, he was going to try to convince her that he really did want Jack to come live with them, it was just that he didn’t think they’d be able to do it. He said he was going to say that they were too busy, that they didn’t live in a good area, that Jack would think they were too old, he was going to say that he himself thought they were both too old, he was going to say that neither of them had savings or anything to put into a college fund for Jack, he was going to point out that he was diabetic, and while generally healthy, this wasn’t ideal, and Tammy too had had her own health problems. Steve said that he actually had more than this, though he couldn’t remember it all right now, and he was planning on subtly bringing each of these things up, but what had changed his mind was how Tammy’d spoken about her own father and April, and he got it. He really did get it. And while Tammy was now saying she felt she was selfish, he wanted to tell her that he didn’t think that. Tammy hung up the phone. She wanted to pick it up and throw it out the window, but knew that such a childish act would be counter-productive. She saw the exit approaching, the glowing lights of gas stations and fast food places, the signs on enormous poles like canes for giants, towering above the mountainous land, the trees, her car, making her feel small. A blinking cell phone tower beaconed her toward the exit and she took it. She took the off-ramp to the right, not caring which place she went to, and finally pulling into a place called Dina’s Country Diner rather than one of the fast food places.

  She parked and got out, jogged to the front and inside. There was a sign next to the hostess stand asking her to seat herself and she took a booth that overlooked the road, and in the distance, the highway, the mountains, the sleet and rain. On the ground in the grass, the sleet gathered, a speckled whiteness on the grass, but nothing was accumulating on the roads. Her phone buzzed in her pocket with a call she knew was from Steve, and she pushed the button on top of the phone to stop its buzzing. She was no longer angry. Well, she was, she thought, but she wasn’t. What else could she expect from him? Of course he wanted what he wanted, just as she wanted what she wanted, and of course both of them were going to try to get it despite the other. That was how things were. The problem now was that she didn’t even know what she wanted. She didn’t know now if Steve had manipulated her into somehow believing that she shouldn’t go get Jack or if she had come to that on her own, and now, in trying to decide if she’d decided to not get Jack, in trying to decide if she was acting selfishly in wanting to bring him to live with her, in wanting to raise him, in trying to decide if she was somehow using Jack as a replacement for April and was not, as Steve had mentioned, properly mourning April, she couldn’t see clearly where she had been manipulated and what she really felt. This felt like a new suffering, a sicker kind: her own confusion at what to feel and how to feel it, her own confusion at what was real and what wasn’t, and yet, she wasn’t mad at Steve so much as disappointed by him, and she wasn’t mad at him because she herself had felt herself manipulating him, maybe not consciously, but she wanted him to feel guilty and ashamed by his initial response to her, and she knew she’d formed her responses to him in a way that she hoped would make him feel that way, and that itself, she knew, was a shameful thing.

  A waitress, Tammy’s age, overweight, with almost grey skin and what appeared to be no demeanor, as though life had failed to give her a personality, came and asked what she wanted. Tammy said she didn’t have a menu. The woman didn’t sigh or complain at this. She just walked to the hostess stand, grabbed a menu, handed it to Tammy, and said she’d be back in a minute. Tammy looked at the menu, not really hungry, and quickly decided on a bowl of soup and coffee. She glanced around the restaurant, which also had a lunch counter. A man, who Tammy believed must be a truck driver, sat there reading a newspaper. For a moment she felt she was living twenty years in the past. He had reading glasses on and was alternately peering over them or reading through them. When the waitress returned, Tammy ordered and the waitress said, Don’t order the soup. Tammy almost asked why not, and then figured it wasn’t worth it, and then said, What should I order on a night like this then? The woman looked o
ut the windows, her eyes widening, as though seeing for the first time, in surprise, that there was a world beyond the diner. Brisket sandwich, she said. She took the menu back and said she’d be back with Tammy’s coffee presently. The word presently surprised Tammy, like it was some kind of joke, some word this woman had heard in a Bond movie and was trying out in her own life. It was also evidence, just barely, of some kind of personality behind the tired, grey, dope-eyed face. Tammy felt again the phone in her pocket and this time she pulled it out and turned it off entirely. She tossed it on the table, where for a moment, the sound of the phone hitting the tabletop seemed the only sound in the restaurant. It made Tammy glance up, to see who was looking at her, and three booths away, a young man, eating soup and grilled cheese, was looking at her, then away. Then he looked up again, put his spoon down, and said, Did she tell you not to get the soup? The man had a soft, boyish face, freckled, and red hair that was cropped very short. He wore a flannel shirt. Tammy told him the waitress did say that. I wonder why I didn’t get that advice, he said. Tammy shook her head and after a moment, the man said, It doesn’t taste bad. I just hope they haven’t done anything to it. The person, she realized, was the sort of person who wanted to talk, who could not, when around other people, observe silence. I’m Caleb, he said. Do you mind if I just. He got up, picked up his plate of soup and sandwich, put it in the booth next to hers, then went back, and grabbed his Coke, and sat down. Tammy looked at him and his face, which three booths away looked like a man’s face, but, closer now, actually appeared to be a boy’s. He was twenty, she thought, couldn’t be more. He said, If I’m intruding, I can go back, and she shook her head. You shouldn’t throw your phone like that, he said. That’s a good way to crack the screen. Even the back of it. I know it’s in one of those safety cases, but it could crack the back of it too. Tammy thanked him and said she’d be more careful and he said that sometimes old people didn’t know exactly how to treat the new phones. His own mother had once thrown one across the room when she was in an argument with his father and she had to drop nearly two hundred bucks to get another and have all her data transferred. I get how phones work, Tammy said, though thank you for noting how old I am. The boy-like man held his hands up and said he was sorry, he didn’t mean it like that. He ate, dipping the grilled cheese in the soup, just as Tammy imagined Jack doing in her kitchen. For a moment, she saw the young man as Jack, a grown-up Jack, and wondered what this boy’s life had possibly been like. After a moment, Caleb asked where she was headed and Tammy hesitated, considered saying, To bury my daughter, or just, To a funeral, though there wasn’t going to be a funeral, but those things sounded too dramatic, and so she said that she was going to see her daughter and grandchild. The man-boy said that it wasn’t a great night to be driving alone and then asked if maybe her husband was out in the car and rather than take it as an offensive, overly intrusive question, Tammy said she was divorced and liked driving at night. I like that, the boy said, who seemed more like a boy every passing moment. You don’t need a big man to do your work. That’s how it ought to be. He told her that that wasn’t the way his father saw things for sure, and that actually, he came from a broken home, too, just like Tammy and her daughter. He said that his father, whenever they went on a trip, insisted on doing all the driving, and when there was work to be done around the house, his father did it. Fixed the toilet, the roof, built an addition when his brother came along, never made his mom lift a finger, except for the cooking and laundry. He was glad things were changing, he told her, because the other thing his father didn’t let his mother do was talk. He remembered plenty of nights she got a lick to the face for even expressing an opinion. She eventually was done with it all, he said. I haven’t seen her for nearly two years, and I’m happy for it, he said. It must mean she found something better. He told her that there was no way he could change anything between his parents and he didn’t want to, and there was no way to change his view growing up that his father was like a kind of god, because to him and his brothers, and to his mother, he was, but he could see now that that was all basically bullshit and that his mother figured it out. He told her that he still had to check himself on certain things and that sometimes he got confused, like for instance once he was on a date with a girl and he’d not held the door open for her, he did it on purpose, he thought that she’d probably want to do that herself, in fact, his friends at the community college told him as much, that girls now didn’t want to be herded around like cows was the exact words they used, and so he didn’t order her drinks at the bar, and he didn’t make any suggestions about food and especially didn’t order for her, and then later in the night, when they were finishing the date, and he was, he admitted, a little bit drunk, not drunk, buzzed, you know, a lot of beers over several hours, a couple shots, well then we went to my car and I just wasn’t thinking and I opened the passenger door for her. Right when I did it, I remembered, and thought, damn, messed that one up, but that’s when she said, Looks like it takes you getting drunk to become a gentleman. The boy laughed to himself and glanced up to see if Tammy was smiling and she was, a little, and she nodded at him to indicate she understood. She wondered where this boy grew up – his voice had a rural, almost Southern quality, though they were nowhere near the South, and she pictured his friends at the community college as being first-generation college kids, coming from farm families, blue-collar families, and the boy himself looked like he wasn’t a stranger to hard work. He was endearing. Here he was, trying to be some kind of modern man in a world that wasn’t sure if that was what it wanted, and he was getting it confused. Tammy herself got it confused.

  The waitress brought her food. Tammy looked at the sandwich, a dry roll between which were slabs of meat, French fries on the side. She pushed it away and took the coffee, put cream and sugar in, stirred with a fork. She told the boy that she had a difficult father as well, but she told him the difference between her and him was that she was now a difficult mother. The boy asked if she and her daughter didn’t get along, and Tammy said that was one version of the story. She told him that she sometimes got caught up in telling herself this story about her and April – your daughter, he said, and Tammy nodded – and about how there was something dividing them. Stop telling yourself this story, she said she tried to tell herself, but it was difficult, when she’d been telling it to herself for so long. She’d been driving to visit her daughter and she’d been doing it again, she said, telling herself the story, about how they were going to argue, not see eye to eye, not feel like mother and daughter, not agree about what was best for Jack. The boy nodded knowingly and then finished his grilled cheese in three successive dip-bites and said, I think that’s what my mom figured out. That she was in this other person’s story and she wasn’t going to do it anymore, she had her own to make up.

  Tammy thought that while she was lying, there was a way what she was saying was true somehow, that there was a story she was telling herself and it was one she couldn’t escape: the fact that she hadn’t been a mother to her daughter for those first two years was a story, was the beginning of the story about a battle between her and April that lasted for as long as April was alive, that was still going on, even though April was gone, and the fact that they’d grown closer when April’d finally left home, sort of became friends, she thought, and then weren’t anymore, was also a story. It was not the full truth, somehow, and was not something she could ever figure out. So why think about it, why try to figure it out? It was like people talking about movies or television shows incessantly online. In two weeks none of these people would remember the shows or their neat little theories and they’d be on to the next thing. That was the best way to be. Move on. Next thing, and try to make it better than the last thing. That’s a thing she’d tried to teach April. Move on. Next thing, better thing. That’s what she had imagined she was going to do with Jack now, though even that might be wrong. Just like leaving her parents’ house with April, to get to something better, you had to make
the next thing better. The world didn’t help you. The world was something you had to try to wrestle into place like wrestling a sibling into submission. So that you could impose your story. The story you wanted. Just like this boy’s mother did. Some people couldn’t do it. She, for instance, for most of her life, hadn’t been able to. It was exactly what her own life lacked, knowing what to wrestle and when. But now, this thing with Jack, this was the thing she knew she had to fight for. Still, her conviction that this was the right thing, both for her and Jack, she was now doubting.