“Hey little girl. How much?” the traveler asked as he put his three cans of chewing tobacco and six pack of Bud Lite on the counter.
I wasn’t little nor was I a girl, unless you think a widowed, 27-year-old, single mom with two kids, ages 3 and 5, was a girl.
“Yes sir, that’ll be $16.75.”
“What the hell! That’s highway robbery,” as if I set prices in the Stop and Go Truck Stop.
I’d heard it all before, having been called “honey child,” “baby face,” “sweetie pie,” and “pumpkin.” I’d been propositioned. “Cutie, I got an hour and $60. What do you think?” as the toothless trucker grinned, rank from having driven miles behind a wheel, sucking in diesel fumes on the road. I’d been hollered at for being too slow when a customer had to wait for his sour grape Slushie and bag of Fritos. “What’s the holdup, young lady? I got someplace to go, you know,” the man screamed at me. “You gettin’ paid by the hour?”
I was. I worked 50 hours a week for minimum wage, my two babies in daycare at the nearby church, unless my mom could help out, if she wasn’t drunk that day. The minimum wage was just enough to keep me off welfare but not enough to get us through the month. Sure, I got widow’s pay from the U.S. Army, Dan having been blown up in Iraq, them sending home all that was left of him, body parts that only God’s DIY kit could put together, his boots too big to wear, and his Army-issued Timex.
We did OK, me and the kids, eating ketchup sandwiches on day-old bread, beans from the 57-cent bent-can aisle, watered down milk, and an occasional head of lettuce, just turned a bit black on the edges. “Tell you what sweetie. I’ll give it to you for a quarter. That do you?” the grocer leered, adding, “But I done you a favor, right? Maybe I deserve one too,” as if every single mom was a green light, a doormat for stray dogs.
I’d serve customers traveling through Texas going west to Santa Fe, north to Denver, south to New Orleans, their license plates from every state I’d never seen. They’d stop in our store for gas and gewgaws, a keychain with spurs, a coffee mug reading “Don’t Mess with Texas,” a snow globe with a hula girl from a state where it never snowed and didn’t have hula girls.
The travelers were on their way to mountains I’d never crest. They’d smell ocean scents I’d never smell, their kids playing on the beaches where my babies would never build fairy sandcastles. My customers would dine on cornfed steaks from Kansas, while my family ate mac and cheese. They’d drink café au lait in the French Quarter while I sipped on truck stop stewed coffee made the night before.
It was 4:00 p.m. in the Stop and Go, lull time between lunch and dinner. I felt tired. My feet hurt from standing already seven hours with another three to go. Out the rain-stained front window of the truck stop, I could see the highway overpass. People were going somewhere. I wasn’t. I looked down at Dan’s watch. His Timex had stopped ticking.
About the author
Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in many journals plus his six chapbooks: Once Planed Straight, Viral, And the Land Dreams Darkly, The 13th Floor; What Is Isn’t and There Is a Season.
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