At a truck stop in Tennessee, they fueled the cars and bought sodas for everyone, but they delayed a bathroom break until they got to a roadside rest stop at 10:40 P.M., where there wasn’t an audience to see—and wonder about—the children in their stocking feet.
To discourage thieves and worse from preying on motorists who used these facilities, the comfort station and its wooded grounds were so brightly lit that the scene was as unreal as a highly stylized stage setting. The black shadows and white light, geometric forms in stark conflict, seemed to symbolize something profound, as if an avant garde play of singular tedium was about to be performed.
The cameras didn’t worry Luther. In such installations, the video equipment was out of service half the time. The lenses were rarely cleaned. Some cameras would be unfunctioning shells, a cheap way to dissuade predators and provide false comfort to the prey.
At a distance from the restrooms stood two concrete picnic tables with benches under the limbs of basswoods that were neither winter stark nor in fullest leaf. Luther sat on a bench to use his disposable cell to call the like phone he had left with Rebecca.
She answered at once, and he said, “You know I love you more than life itself.”
“You’re scaring me,” she said.
“I don’t want to, but I will. Something bigger than I ever imagined is going on.”
After a silence, she said, “That’s all you’re gonna tell me?”
“It’s all I have time for. It’s big, and I don’t know what it’s going to do to us, the family, our future. Until we know how things are shaping up, we’ve got to plan for the worst.”
He told her what she needed to do. It was a testament to Rebecca’s trust in him, her quickness of mind, and her well-honed survival instinct that she didn’t balk and didn’t ask why, because she intuited why in every instance.
When he terminated the call, he sat for a moment in the night shade of the basswoods, in the fragrance of honeysuckle, listening to tree frogs and crickets calling to their kind; and the made world had never seemed more precious to him. As he gazed out from nature’s comfort at the blacktop parking lot so barren in the cold fall of hard light, he asked for courage and for mercy, and if that should be too much to ask, then for courage alone.