Tiff went to NA. She went to drug court, rehab. But that crawling, itching feeling beneath her skin, deep in her muscles stayed put. Every time she saw an asshole, a faker, someone who skidded along the surface of the world like beads of hot oil while Tiff sunk, she wanted to pummel them, to force them to feel the shame they deserved to feel but somehow didn’t. And of all people it was her son Bucky who was skidding now. He wasn’t even thirteen yet and was already smoking those expensive asshole cigarettes, stealing beer from open garages in the wide daylight and denying it to Tiff while it was stank on his breath. “Where’d you get the money?” Tiff always asked. “Where’d you get the fucking money?”
Whenever Tiff or her parents tried to lay down the law, he bolted—to other people’s houses, to empty buildings. The state game land. This time, he’d caught a ride with some older guys to a field party, then to a trailer outside of town, and then he was gone. There was a police report, but they didn’t do jack shit. The cop said, “Wait a few days, he’ll probably come back with his tail between his legs.” But Bucky had never been that kind of kid.
The sky was bruised a yellow-green and Tiff had been asking customers at the truck stop outside of town if they’d seen Bucky, showing his picture. The semis idled along the side of the exit and entrance, clogging the air with diesel, while people in polo shirts with out-of-state plates filled up on gas, blinking at the shithole they’d found themselves in.
From where Tiff was standing she could see the sign for the state line on the highway: West Virginia, Wild and Wonderful. Tiff kicked at the cigar wrappers, chip bags, roach clips. Gum speckled the parking lot, black with soot, like if you made yourself small enough, you could fall through one of those black spots and be gone.
“Seen him?” she said to a couple getting into an SUV, shoving the picture at them. “That’s my kid—he ran away from home.”
“He’s your kid?” the woman said, raising her brow, filling the tank like she was filling a void. And when the door closed, Tiff said, “Racist-ass bitch.” She wiped her hands on her shirt she got at Cheat Lake with Bucky two years back: Kiss My Ass, I’m on Vacation. She was a mess and she knew it—mismatched socks with one broke flip-flop, jeans that hadn’t been washed in a week because she was out of detergent again. Her parents dropped off groceries once every two weeks, but half that shit was nasty anyway. On weekends when she did have Bucky, they were living on mac and cheese, Chef Boyardee, McDonalds.
She felt a swell of satisfaction imagining these gas station assholes discussing Tiff and Bucky over some hoity-toity dinner, exclaiming, “I wonder what she did to cause him to run off?” They would make assumptions because they could never understand Tiff’s life.
She drove towards Mather where Bucky’d been found last time, in someone else’s old barn surrounded by Doritos bags, candy bars, “living like a packrat,” the cop said, “off someone else’s dime.” At the police station, Bucky had gone to hug Tiff and she’d said, “You think I want to hug you after what you put us through?” She regretted that now.
Driving out, the vibration of the car on the road soothed Tiff—reminded her of being very small, still in her car seat. Trusting that her father would deliver them safely, that nothing bad would ever happen to them. And for a while, it was true.
It’s just that the pieces never fit together in Tiff’s life, like someone sanded down all the edges, so it was just a bunch of circles, jellyfish. After the first bad thing happened, it seems to lead her into a world that only got more terrible. Her car was shit; she missed Don. No one else in this entire world understood her, or cared. Late at night, she’d sometimes walk from her rental down to the creek by where the old house was, bought up by a developer, unrented and crusted over in soot. She’d throw something into the deep end of the creek that belonged to Don: a comic book, a mug. A collectable. Then she’d wait for a sign, like maybe the ghost of him would rise up to retrieve it.
Tiff had only driven a couple miles on the access road alongside the highway before the heat warning came on like it had been doing, and Tiff had to double back to the truck stop, popped the hood and dumped water into the coolant tank. This piece of shit was always steaming, busting open—causing her to have to wait for hours for the radiator to cool down. Everything leaked. Everything in this goddamn world was just leaking out of itself, onto Tiff.
Beyond the truck stop—thick woods. Each tree ended at the sky like the tip of a needle. Now that Tiff was sober she felt slower, like she was carrying rocks. Everything took more effort. And memories resurfaced of things that had been done to her—by Grubber John, by the three men at the Motel 6, but why the fuck did she trust them in the first place? She’d been desperate. Back then she hadn’t given a fuck.
The memory was like a wave knocking her flat, washing her below the surface.
So those men had done what they’d done. But afterwards, CPS had come to the hospital, and among the beeping machines informed Tiff that she was under investigation for child neglect.
“It couldn’t wait until I was out of the hospital?” Tiff said, blinking like a reptile because if the Motel 6 guys couldn’t make her cry, CPS wasn’t going to be the ones to crush Tiff. People who felt they had the power used it however they so chose, in ways that made them think they deserved the power they were given, but it was all bullshit. They were just flimsy sock puppet people, running their mouths like everyone else.
Tiff blew her nose into an old baby wipe she’d found in the glove. The problem with this world, she decided, was that everything got used up so quickly, and then it was just trash. It was gone. But she would not let Bucky be gone. Bucky was hers and no one else’s, no matter what CPS decided. She made him. She gave birth to him. He came from inside of her.
The sun was sticky on her back. She trekked to the entrance ramp of the highway, then jumped the barrier. Her polished nails reflected what was left of the sunlight. Tiff had hitched before; mostly semis picked her up. Everyone else was too chicken shit.
Cars blew by her, truckers slowed and honked and carried on. The blaring movements were overwhelming and Tiff felt a wave of nausea—like the suctioning end of a syringe.
Then a Wal-Mart semi pulled off ahead of her, rattled and sooting and honking twice, and she hurried to get in.
“Bad place to hitch,” the trucker said as he opened the passenger door for her. “You’re lucky. Most guys won’t pick up anymore. Even girls. They’re afraid of big hairy boyfriends hiding in the bushes.” His eyes were bloodshot. He was blinking a lot. “You don’t have a big hairy boyfriend hiding out there, do you?” he said. He laughed, but it was forced. Tiff could always tell that shit. The fakery.
“I am the hairy boyfriend,” she said, which shut him up for a minute. But then he faked another laugh and said, “You ain’t shit, girl.”
“That’s probably true,” she finally said, sitting back, pulling out a cigarette. “And neither are you.”
In the old days Tiff liked to play the game: how far can you get on an empty tank of gas. She liked to play how do you fix this with a paperclip, a rubber band, and a string? She liked to take risks.
As the truck emitted its heavy guttural fumes and accelerated, Tiff stared out at the woods, scattered with trailers, doublewides, whatever would fit a space that no one else wanted. Somewhere out there Bucky was running away from his life, just like Tiff had. She wanted to tell him, you always end up right where you started. Running is a waste of time. And right when you think you’re where you’re supposed to be, everything will be taken from you.
*
Back when Bucky was younger and Tiff still had full custody, they found a small pup in a cardboard box outside the Shop Rite, flea-bit and tick-infested. “What kind of asshole would leave a dog in the hot sun?” Tiff said, cuddling it, picking off the ticks, wiping the eye boogers, like she used to do with her parents’ dogs.
They bought some water from the vending machine out front. Bucky cupped his hands, Tiff poured, and the dog drank. “I love her already,” Bucky had squealed, and Tiff felt a pang of irritation.
“She needs a bath,” Tiff said, trying to bury her feelings. “If we keep her, you’re taking care of her, not me.”
At first they kept the pup in the trailer, but by the time it was a year old it was pissing everywhere and tearing through the trash, chewing at the walls, digging up the carpet like it was dirt. So Tiff drug the wire crate outside under an oak tree, but then that dog just barked incessantly. “Shut the fuck up!” Tiff would shout. She gave it extra food, threw things at it. She’d go out and spray the damn dog with the water hose, screaming until her throat hurt. Nothing worked. Then finally Some Bitch gave her sound advice—Tiff rolled a half a Benadryl in lunch meat—and the dog slept.
After the first year Bucky lost interest in that dog, started obsessively playing game boy in his room, and Tiff found herself doing all the work, tossing dry food directly into the cage some days when she could not handle that shit. Opening that cage meant she was going to get clobbered. The dog rasped and hacked. The dog overturned its water every day. She thought about dropping it off somewhere. But then it was winter. So the dog stayed.
And then Bucky got off the bus one day and found the dog dead. He began screaming and Tiff already knew. She ran to Bucky, feeling like a parachute having to propel a heavy body, but she came. Bucky was crouched at the dog cage, where the dog’s body was. She was barefoot. The snow stung her. Her fingers hurt—the webbing hurt—everything ached.
“Oh, baby. She was probably sick,” Tiff said to soothe him. “She probably died in her sleep.” But Bucky kept crying. “She was never quite right in the head,” Tiff said. “You know that. That’s probably why she was left there in the first place.” But he kept wailing, and Tiff couldn’t stand his tears, like they were accusing Tiff of something Tiff didn’t do. “Stop crying,” she finally snapped, because she could no longer hold it in. “You’re acting like a little baby.”
While Bucky dumbly watched, Tiff was the one who dumped hot water to thaw the dog out, pry her from the wire. The ground was too hard to bury her, so Tiff bagged the dog for trash pickup. The weight of that dog, it ripped through the first bag, and Tiff shouted “mother fuck!” and brought out three more bags, drug that dead dog through the grass to the can at the top of the driveway.
“Don’t put her in the trash!” Bucky was screaming. “Do not put her in the trash!” And Tiff was cold, achy, feverish on and off, back pain rippling through her. She wanted to cut and empty these feelings like an artery, and Bucky was the only thing there to absorb it. His nose was too big, his eyes too small, this molting, reforming creature that was once her sweet baby. She could barely recognize him now.
The next time he shouted at her, Tiff struck up, “Oh, you are a real piece of work, aren’t you,” she said, repeating words her mother used to say to her. “You make me do all the work then criticize me for it. It’s neh neh neh neh. You are just like your grandmother, I swear to god,” she huffed.
“I’m nothing like gran,” he was shouting. “You’re like gran.”
Tiff kept on: “Why didn’t you drape a blanket over the top of that cage like I’d told you to do? You just sit in that room of yours staring at that game boy screen like a bump on a log and meanwhile, your damn dog froze to death.”
She marched inside and he followed her, crying harder.
Tiff could not stop what was tumbling out of her.
He shouted, “I hate you!” And Tiff mocked right back in his little girl voice, I hate you. She started washing the dishes that Bucky was supposed to wash but never did, tiny floret edges that came from the old Canonsburg ceramic mill, dumped when it closed. People, including her own grandmother, dug the dishes up from the soil like onions. Her life was full of the things that other people left behind: old furniture, used dishes—even the newspapers were from her parents, dropped off two days later, stained with food. And Bucky.
Bucky didn’t know a thing about what Tiff had sacrificed to keep him. Bucky took and took and took and what did he ever give back? At least when he was little, he’d hugged and cuddled and been sweet to her.
Tiff slammed a plate down on the yellow plastic counter. Instead of shattering, the plate just spun in circles until Tiff brought her hand down on it. “You think you’re so special...” Tiff started up. “Tell me, what makes you so special?” She ripped the radio out of the wall and threw it, and he dodged and ran down the front steps shoeless into the snow, and the minute the door slammed, Tiff felt the surge of rage begin to dissipate, retract its shards, but what replaced it was too horrible to let herself feel.
She got into the bath, let herself go numb, her mind went somewhere else. But it kept returning to the year before, when three men at the Motel 6 invited her there to party—a date—she used to call it. They grabbed at Tiff when her back was turned, when it was all finished and she was waiting for the money. And when she fought back she got cut by a screwdriver. One held a gun right up to her temple; she could smell it. After a while of doing what they told her to do, things she would never let a man do willingly, they actually stuffed her into the futon. She had thought to herself: I am like toothpaste, I am like ravioli. That was where her mind went.
They left her beneath that yellow mattress that stunk like old sweat. And eventually, Tiff crawled out like she was pulling herself out of a sinkhole. Like an alligator from a boiling swamp. Because she was a thing that could not be killed.
She was in the hospital for six days, and CPS decided that would be a good time to try and take Bucky too, because they were god awful creatures that tore families apart and laughed about it. Where was CPS when Tiff needed real help? Not once did they provide work or food or housing or medicine or anything else. They were looking to take Bucky from the beginning, because like everyone else, all they ever did was take.
“Were you at the motel for prostitution?” they kept asking, folder perched under their arms. Notepad out and ready to record it all.
“Do I look like a prostitute?” Tiff spat back.
When she had begged them for help after Don died, these same assholes had crossed their arms over the top of their ugly pantsuits and said, “Do you think you’re capable of caring for your child?” in a tone that indicated to Tiff that this was a trap.
That day the dog died, after Bucky ran out, Tiff let the hot water run in the bath until it burned her skin, until it was sucked back into the overflow hole, back down into the septic tank, which hadn’t been changed in years, and leaked right into the field.
She wanted to hold Bucky, to never let him go. She wanted to go back in time to when he was small and loved her back.
Tiff fell asleep on the cat-piss-stained couch with the front door unlocked, and by morning, Bucky was in his bed, curled and shivering and tear-tracked, twitching in his sleep. Tiff draped another blanket on top of him, turned up the thermostat. Finally, at noon, she woke him. “I made some eggs for you,” she said. “You got to get up, baby.”
She let him watch his favorite cartoons all day. She took his temperature twice, washed his hair in the sink like he was a baby, kept saying, “The dog wasn’t your fault, hun. She was sick from the moment we found her.” She repeated what Some Bitch had told her once, sitting in the Wal-Mart lot, smoking up: “No one gets out of this life alive.”
But back then Tiff was defiant. “I will get out of this life alive,” she had said back, blowing rings of her own air. “I will be the one.”
And then she finally understood that no, she wouldn’t. She was just like everybody else.
*
Tiff woke late from a dream of Don, stuck in a shed without any windows or doors, screaming that he could not breathe, while Tiff clawed at the wooden beams to try and free him, knowing, understanding, that one way or another, by the time she got to him, he’d be gone.
She woke sweated to her bare mattress, shuddering the way she used to when she needed a fix.
The sky was as grey as the ash off her cigarette. She bummed a ride to the truck stop, a jump for her car. Then she spent the morning driving around fields looking for any sign of Bucky—smoke, fire, the kids he hung with, who swore they didn’t know where he was, because they were all lying little shits. In the late afternoon she drove out to the old Rockwell Co. mineshaft near the Amwell line where they sometimes hung out, through the grown-over dirt road, down a deer trail through the woods. Bucky had been caught there before, drunk and giggly like a girl.
Tiff left the engine running at the dirt pull-off—if she turned the car off, she’d need a jump again. Then she walked up passed a collapsed mill house, maple trees filling the interior. “Buck?” she shouted. “Bucky?”
Around here you needed to know where you were to know where you were going. The woods were sharp with rattling jaggers, stinging nettle. If you weren’t used to it, it was a thing that hurt. Most of the time when Tiff used to run away from home she ended up in these woods, curled up between logs or inside a cavern created by grape vines snuffing out hawthorn trees. Because once you understood it, it was a thing that kept you safe.
The property was marked No Trespassing, but no one listened to those signs. This was Ruby Mine property, abandoned and forgotten. The mine entrance had been gated off years ago, but kids had dug like dogs into the loose shale nd mud, squeezed underneath the iron gate. They liked to drink and smoke inside the mine. Their voices sometimes carried in the empty evening air, before the crickets, cicadas, frogs began. Every once in a while, the police did drive out there, but then the kids scattered deep into the mine—disappearing into the blackness.
It wasn’t worth following them in.
Today was quiet except for the crows. Tiff navigated between groves of multi-floral rose, around what once was a conveyor system to get the coal to the river below, and now, on the sunk and collapsing ravine, pieces of metal, a strip of belt, hung mid-air, the soil pitch black and glittering beneath it.
Two years ago, a couple of meth heads got lost here, came out another entrance three days later dehydrated and oxygen-starved, half-dead. Grubber John, who she’d been working with back then, said that they’d probably been looking for copper, and he was usually right about stuff like that.
At that time, Tiff had thought that Grubber John had been her rock bottom. He had gotten her into what she called “dates,” which just happened to begin in a motel room, or a car, or a vacant lot, and ended in Tiff getting paid.
She’d thought it was just once. Then just a couple of times, to get her through. But that’s never how a lucrative thing works.
And when she tried to quit that lifestyle, to go on real dates, it felt artificial, she felt as though she could see right through these men—they yammered on about their jobs, their kids, their love of fishing, how much they liked Gatorade, all the while Tiff thought to herself, “Why the fuck would I listen to this for free?”
People thought for some reason other people wanted to know about their lives.
But nothing was free. These men moaned and panted and wiped sweat from their necks, and Tiff was well aware of what they were paying for.
It was better not to think about who she was back then.
She gave it up for Bucky. Everything she’d ever done right she’d done for Bucky.
But she still fucked it up, and here she was, trying to find a kid that didn’t want to be found.
Beneath the grey sky Tiff heard a bobwhite, an oriole call out. Then the crows started up with their warnings again. This whole area was connected with mineshafts from the long haul days, but you had to be careful about the out-gassing. The miners had a ventilation system back then. But all of that was long gone, collapsed or barricaded.
Tiff slid beneath the iron bars blocking the entrance into the hillside, where the shale was crumbling—all that slag and crumbling rock and soot and further in, wet crevices that reminded her of the time spent doing work for Grubber John—what felt like a lifetime ago. All kinds of shit was left behind: discarded beer cans smashed and piled, and a half a shoelace, severed. Rotten railroad ties. She was used to the smell. She turned on her cell phone light, which was jack shit against the blackness.
“Hello? Anyone home?” she sang out. “It’s me, your conscience. You need to get the fuck out of here.” She heard nothing but her own voice echoing.
She followed the main shaft and at the bifurcation, she went right. “Bucky!” she shouted. “Buck?” She thought she heard something scraping on the walls. Maybe the chime of voices, but then nothing. She followed the walls down to the next drift level, still couldn’t see shit. The lower level was slick and everything stunk worse. A wood ladder led to another level, but it was all rotted out and collapsed. Beer cans, shattered bottles. Roof bolters, supports that were rusted and decaying. And against one end of the shaft, a black tee shirt that looked fresh.
“Buck?” she shouted. She made another right at the fork, heard a hollow click, then another. She remembered what Grubber John told her—when you hear the tommyknockers, a cave-in’s coming. But that was Irish myth. Her own family had been miners—her pap and all of his brothers. They used to tell stories about afterdamp. “There’s a reason people don’t live underground,” her pap used to say. “Turning the lights on is like lighting a fire inside a paper mill.”
Now he was dead, and Don was dead and if one more person Tiff loved died she was going to go ballistic.
“Bucky!” she shouted again, her voice moving through the chambers, boomeranging back. She followed the clicking, like after a rain, when the water moves through the grass down into the earth. Everything was rotting—that sweet stink of old wood and animals and wet metal and shit. She stepped over piles of tiny bones.
When the chamber opened like a vault into a larger room, Tiff saw two bodies, laying in the soot, about a foot from each other near an old oil can, pocked-faced and dressed in flannel, jeans, heavy boots. One was bleeding from the forehead, the other was shirtless with his arms out. Surrounding them, coiled copper, glinting like a burst open star.
“God. This is just what I need,” Tiff said out loud. The sound of her own voice was important. She was in control here.
She reached down and checked for a pulse, like she had done with Don when he ODed. She put a hand on their chest to feel them inhale. It was probably bad air. The dummies probably didn’t know about outgassing.
“Bucky?” she shouted once more, but if he’d had been here he’d have tried to pull them out. Tiff felt light-headed, like the oxygen was being pulled from her, too.
She stepped over a bag of aluminum nitrate, compressed oil canisters strewn about, a ladder with metal rungs, going lower, went back out to get air.
After a few minutes she went back for the men. She drug them one at a time by the arms, resting outside to catch her breath. They were both skinny but their limpness made it hard to move them. Dead weight, she repeated in her head. She was carrying so much dead weight.
She wouldn’t be surprised if she pulled something out of a socket, but she really didn’t care. They’d be alive and out of the mine, so her job there was done. What they chose to do after that was on them.
There was no light, but Tiff memorized her path back, was used to keeping track from when she was cooking in Grubber John’s mineshaft.
“Always know exactly where you are,” he’d taught her. “Memorize that shit, imprint it in your mind, because if you know where you are, you know how to escape it.”
Tiff had a throbbing headache. Getting those fuckers up the short ladder was a fucking pain, but she went back once more for the copper. The men had stripped a lot of it already, taking apart old machinery, fans and transporters and such. And Tiff felt like a pack animal, like a she was lugging the weight of every year since Don died—out and into the open.
At the entrance, a leftover sign that read “100 days since last accident.” But that was a lie. The last blast had taken out 54 workers and they’d shut it down. They’d never updated the sign, and the land sat there untouched and unwanted.
Tiff left the men at the mine entrance, took their wallets and a whopping seventeen dollars in cash. She shoved the copper beneath the gate. Used her feet to push it up and out, then drug it like a deer carcass down the trail. The birds were shouting. In the woods everything darkened early. She loaded the copper into the trunk of her still-running car. It took her a long time—that shit was heavy—maybe an hour passed. But the copper would pay for most of a new car battery. If she went back some day, she might find enough to buy a radiator that didn’t leak. She might be able to get somewhere.
She’d left the engine running on account of the battery, but now the gas was low again. The sunset glinted a deep burning rage. She swerved for a rabbit, then for a possum. The darkness swarmed the valleys, this quick absence, as the sun emptied out. It was chilling to watch and it pissed her off.
She wondered if Bucky got scared at night the way he used to, if he missed his own bed. When she’d begun running away, all she focused on was how to get out. Shit, her parents had tied her to her bed at night with a bike chain, and even that had not worked. Tiff busted free of every cage they’d ever put her in. But once she was finally free, she had no idea what to do with her life.
Then Don came along, and Bucky came after that. And for a short period of time, she thought she was free of the cage. That she was right where she was supposed to be. But that was a trap, too.
She kept her eyes peeled for lights in odd places—along a creek, in a barn loft. The sky took on a color like someone was field dressing a campfire, then went deep blue.
The gas light came on three miles later, and she rolled the windows down, turned off the AC. Coasted when she could.
For a second, the air and the deep light, the scent of honeysuckle was the exact same as another time many years ago, when Don was still alive they were driving to the river to swim, and Tiff knew she was going to be someone some day—there was no question. Tiff felt the excitement of a life that was still forming—one in which she was with Don and they both had the rest of their lives together. The wrongs of their lives would right themselves with enough time like an inflatable bed filling with air. And then—everything collapsed. Within a few years, Don died, her parents got custody of Bucky, and she’d stopped trying to find work, because what was the point, after Grubber John got arrested and she got probation, after she was told she’d never get full custody of Bucky back, what was the point of it all?
Caring took too much energy. That was the thing. Most days she woke up exhausted, like she’d been running all night, and yet she was right back where she started: shit out of luck and jobless and without any path but the one she was on. And every time she found something she loved, it was taken from her.
She had twenty miles to get home, and Tiff coasted hills with the four-ways blinking. But even that couldn’t save her.
The coolant tank melted out right as she got to the Conoco lot. The heat gauge sprung, coolant was leaking green everywhere, and then a few minutes later, the engine started smoking. She could feel the car emptying itself onto the asphalt, could smell burnt chemicals. And when Tiff finally popped the hood, there was a small fire in the center of it.
The other people getting gas just stood there gaping. Tiff was always the one who did something—the first person in a room with a loud talker to tell them to shut the fuck up, the first person to tell a parent whipping at their kid that they were about to have bigger problems if they didn’t quit. “Stop rubber-necking and call the fire department,” she snapped at the fatty standing at his pickup a couple spots over.
Tiff’s body tightened like a slingshot, like a fence line. For the first minute she tried to blow the fire out like a birthday cake. It was sheer stupidity, she realized, screamed “Mother fuck!” and stormed into the Conoco. She grabbed two baking sodas from the foods aisle, stormed back to the clunker and dumped it onto the engine, which seemed to momentarily snuff the flame to a blue-grey smoke. Then she pulled out her purse, grabbed the papers from the glove box, Grubber John’s gun she’d never parted with, a knife, some chapstick. She walked into the gas station and said, “I need to use your phone.”
“Oh god,” The attendant gasped, finally seeing everything through the glass door, the smoking vehicle by the gas pumps. He pulled out his cell phone to call for help. “It’s fine,” Tiff said, but that idiot didn’t know fine if it hit him upside the head. “It’s taken care of now.”
And when no one—not her parents or Some Bitch or Feather or Ralph or her brothers answered Tiff’s call, she threw the phone onto the plastic counter and started walking towards the highway, because fuck that car, and fuck all the people who never lifted a finger to help her. She was wearing the same black tee shirt as the day before, flip flops were so worn she might as well have been barefoot.
She thought about how she’d make the whole world pay. Once she found Bucky, she would get a lawyer and get custody back, or she would take him and run for another state. She clutched the purse close to her.
When the blaring semi pulled over, she wasn’t thinking about anything but getting home.
“Where ya headed, young lady?” the driver said like he had better things to do, adjusting his ball cap—and Tiff wanted to tell him she was no longer young. But then—she felt all of it, every age she’d ever been inside of her, tangled like the copper in the trunk now burnt and worthless. That was her future.
“Snickers?” he offered, and she waved him away. You never got caught taking the things you wanted. You lifted them from pockets, stole when they were sleeping; that way, you went through life never owing anyone a thing. “Have you seen my kid?” she asked, holding out a crumpled picture. “He sometimes hitchhikes around here.”
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t pick up boys.”
Tiff glared through him, out the driver’s side window, at the prison complex nestled beside the farmland, a bright, beckoning abscess. Her head hurt, like someone had sliced from her forehead to her shoulder blade. Her purse was heavy on her bare legs.
“You got any of that upper shit?” she said to the driver.
“Oh, lady, you don’t want what I got. It is too much. I don’t even want it.”
“Give it to me anyway.”
“I don’t think so. Lay back. You can sleep while I drive,” the trucker said. “Take a little cat nap. Hit the snooze button.”
She didn’t want to listen to him, but she was so tired.
Don used to say the same kind of thing to Tiff, after a long day. She felt a chill, imagining it that way—Don at the wheel of the semi, him listening while Tiff would berate everything he loved—the music, the Steelers, the zebra stripe gum, the dirt caked to the dashboard he never cleaned. And Don always just laughed and said, “You’re so prickly. Like a porcupine.” He would say: “Stop acting tough. You’re just a big softy deep down.” And back then, maybe he was right. She’d say something like, “Wrong,” and he’d take her hand, and she’d allow it, and after a few minutes of huffing and pretending to be annoyed, she’d kiss his fingertips, fall asleep to the vibrations, knowing that wherever they were going, they’d get there safely.
She felt waves, that stretching feeling of being in two places at once. She wondered if Bucky was warm. When she found him she wouldn’t even whoop his ass, that little shit she loved more than life itself who wanted more than anything, to be free of her. She would hug him and tell him it would be okay, that life had a way of working itself out, all of those lies people needed to survive.
She was jarred awake by the semi’s horn.
“Sorry, toots,” the driver said. “This guy thinks he’s James Bond. I swear, everyone on the road is either an asshole or asleep. Can you believe the nerve of this guy? All these young bucks think they’re stunt devils. You know I saw a biker hit a jersey barrier, fly off his bike the other day, straight into an oncoming trucker?” He snorted. “There was nothing left of him. Meat.”
“Did you stop?” Tiff said.
“Nothing to stop for.”
“You stopped for me.”
“For the life of me, I don’t know why.”
He was greasy, wrinkled like someone had suctioned the life right out of him—ten or fifteen years ago he would have been good looking. He might not even know he wasn’t anymore. She adjusted the bag on her lap, pressed her cheek against the window, closed her eyes again. Everyone was the same. That was the problem. No one surprised Tiff—not with how they acted or what they wanted, or what they said. It was so predictable. That was the problem. Tiff knew why he stopped, why all these men stopped, but to be honest there was nothing left of her, either.