2

“You don’t have his plate number? I can’t have every truck with a green cab stopped before it leaves Ohio. I’m sorry about your dog. If the guy gets pulled over, we can maybe get the dog.”

I hang up before the state trooper can give me any more bad news. They can’t, or won’t, help track down Artie. I’ve called Artie’s cell eighteen times, but he won’t answer. If he did, I wouldn’t ask him to do anything but leave Mack where I can pick him up, maybe at another TA, or a vet not far off the road. But Artie sees my number and ignores me. I don’t exist for him anymore.

I need a ride. I need to catch up with Artie. Feeling like a tramp, I start talking to the truckers arrayed around the counter like piglets on a sow. “No can do.” “Against the rules of my company.” “Back off; I’m a family man.”

Soon enough, I attract the attention of the center’s manager, who gives me the look. I hold my hands up in the universal sign of “no harm” and move away from the truckers.

Families are tucking into the all-you-can-eat brunch. I sit alone at a table a mere three feet from a likely-looking group: mom and dad, two chunky preschoolers, and a grandma. “Nice day. Where you headed?” Nice, ordinary midwestern friendliness, nothing scary here.

“We’re headed down to Disney.”

That’s east enough for me. Maybe they can get me as far as New York before they head south down 95.

“What’ll you have?” The waitress is looming over me. The seventeen-inch-tall multipage plastic menu is still flat on the table.

Hungry I’m not, but I need to look like a customer. I order two eggs and bacon, white toast, coffee. I think that I’m going to hurl. I smile at the family beside me. “I’m heading east, too. Any chance you’ve got room for a passenger? I’ll pay your gas.”

The father twitches his mustache-covered lip like an old-time movie Lothario. His wife’s eyes open in that wifely “Don’t you dare” look I’ve seen on the wives who sometimes come looking for their husbands in my bar. He holds his hands palm up. “I don’t think so. We’re pretty full.” Grandma, intent on her biscuits, suddenly gets what’s going on. From her corner of the table, she sets an eye on me, and I nod and go back to playing with the sugar packets in their little white box on my table.

Before my food can arrive, I drop a dollar on the table and leave the building.

*   *   *

“You need some help?” It’s the one-legged Harley rider. He leans on a single crutch, resting on a leg that ends in a traditional motorcycle boot, the leather beneath his left knee vacant, moving slightly in the Ohio air.

“I guess I do.”

“Your boyfriend dump you?”

“No. My ride east abandoned me. But, worse”—I swallow to gain control of my voice—“he’s got my dog. He took off with my dog.”

“Bastard.”

“I need to catch up with him.” I hate that my voice cracks.

“Where’s he headed?”

With those few words, I feel a flicker of hope, as tiny as the flame on a Bic, but a flicker nonetheless. “Boston.”

“No stops on the way?”

“No. Nonstop.”

“Down Ninety?”

“Yeah. He’ll keep going straight through. He can do twenty hours with enough Red Bull.”

“I can get you to Erie.”

“That’ll help.”

“Climb on board.” My one-legged Harley rider ships his crutch into a special hanger and slings his bad leg over the saddle. “There’s a helmet in the pannier, and a headset. Put it on and we’ll be able to talk.”

I find both, a turtle-shell helmet that scarcely looks like it would protect me, and only if I fell directly on my head, and the headset. I stow my duffel in the pannier, fishing out my sunglasses first. I slide onto the seat behind him, careful not to kick him.

Using his one good leg, my new friend backs the Harley out of the space, then carefully removes the handicapped placard from the handlebars and places it in his jacket pocket. “I’m Mitch.” His voice in my ear startles me.

I bring the mouthpiece up. “Justine Meade.” As I’m about to embrace this stranger for the better part of the day, I offer him my hand.

He takes my hand in his leather-gloved mitt, an oyster in a black shell, then brings my hands around his middle. “Hang on tight. We’ll catch that son of a bitch.”

*   *   *

Mack doesn’t know how long they have been going. He only knows that it is time for dinner. His dinner. His kibble, which he can see in its plastic bag on the floor of the side of the cab where Justine should be, is tantalizingly out of reach. It would be nice to have a lap of water. His Shetland sheepdog ancestors knew about privation as they rounded up sheep on the rocky hillside, but he’s a domestic house dog and quite used to routine. Dinner at six. Water all day long. If he were any other dog, he might take himself down from the bunk and go help himself, ripping into the flimsy plastic with sharp teeth. But Mack is not just any other dog. He is a well-trained dog. One of his first lessons was in don’touch. Stare at that kibble in the bowl all you want, but don’touch it until given the word. Don’touch the garbage pail, despite its temptations. Justine once left a package of cold cuts on the kitchen table, an easy reach from his back legs, but he disdained touching it, although he spent the day staring at it in futile hope that it would fall off the table and become fair game. Justine hadn’t said don’touch, but he’d never reach for anything on a table anyway.

Artie keeps staring at his cell. Mack knows that it’s called cell because Justine has taught him to fetch it when she’s in one room and the cell is singing in another. Artie’s cell doesn’t sing; it makes a sound like a miniature truck horn: blat blat blat; blat blat blat. Artie thumbs it quiet. He doesn’t speak to it. But each time it honks, Artie looks at it.