Doris Lane

“I’ll wait 20 minutes and that’s it,” Ruby said to herself, checking her watch.

“That’s it,” she said louder without realizing it.

“What?” the waitress asked a bit snappish.

“Coffee, please.”

Ruby watched the girl walk up the aisle between the long lunch counter and the booths lining the windowed wall. A real Jersey Girl, big hair and all, long fingernails painted blue, with little somethings in spots near the tips. Ruby had read about Jersey Girls and listened to Bruce Springsteen sing about them. Who knew? If her father had stayed with her mother, she might have been a Jersey Girl herself.

Ruby loved the father she did have, the man who married her mother after she was born; this had nothing to do with him. Her caring stepfather would always be part of who Ruby was; she wanted now to know the part she never knew. She needed to know it. The need had grown inside her until she was heavy with it.

So here she was at a truck stop on a highway in Neptune, New Jersey.

The parking lot was big enough for a truck stop, she considered, looking out the window. There were some rusty gas pumps and some overgrown weedy strips that looked like concrete might be underneath. It was a huge lot for such a small diner and mostly empty, graveled in front, grassy everywhere else.

The interior of the diner looked like something out of a magazine spread on 1950s Roadside America. It even had those little jukeboxes at the end of the tables in the booths and every few feet along the lunch counter. Ruby recognized the voice of Fats Domino only because her mother played oldies all the time back in Pittsburgh. Ruby’s mother wasn’t that old, but she liked the music.

The diner was shaped like an old railroad car. Behind the lunch counter the wall was paneled in diamond-shaped aluminum tiles in an intricate pattern that looked set by hand. The kick-wall beneath the counter was covered in the same aluminum tiles. The countertop and the tabletops were all the same tan color Formica worn soft looking.

Men in work clothes sat along the counter on red leather stools with aluminum trim. The glassed-in entrance separated two sections of booths with seats and backs in the same red leather. A family took up the largest booth. That was it for clientele. Ruby studied the green paint on the walls and woodwork. It looked at least 50 years old, but somebody kept it clean.

A song Ruby didn’t know started playing, “I was dancin’ with my darlin’,” and the whole place suddenly erupted in noise.

Shouts of, “Oh, no, not again,” and “Maryann, shut that thing!” “Ahhh, Cecil!”

An old man at the counter hung his head, but it didn’t stop the ribbing.

Another man said surprisingly, “Cecil, don’t mind these heartless ignoramuses who are lacking in romance of the soul.”

There was an abandoned motel across the highway. An oddly fresh-looking sign had no words, only a picture of a big comfy pillow. Ruby stared at traffic passing on Route 33, noticing not one truck. Some truck stop, she thought, scanning the parking lot. A few pickups, a dusty old Chevy, and her rented whatever-it-was. The ramp to the Garden State Parkway was in view. Ruby had time on her hands on her way here and had taken the shore route along the ocean. The Parkway would get her back to Newark Airport a lot faster.

“Don’t any real trucks come to this truck stop?” she asked the waitress.

“No,” the waitress answered and left.

Ruby noticed the girl was friendly with everyone else in the place. The door opened and a group of men crowded in. They received a big welcome. One of them got a friendly hug. Ruby looked out the window again and saw another pickup pull in with a gang of men in the back.

Her mother had told her he drove a big rig. When Ruby called him and said she wanted to meet him for the first time since she was two days old, he told her himself he drove a big rig.

Ruby’s mother had known all along where he was. The child support came every month with a clear return address until last year when Ruby turned 21. Last year was when Ruby’s mother told Ruby her father was not her father.

Ruby’s mother was so unnerved and so clearly in pain, Ruby couldn’t ask too many questions just then. But she began surfing web sites about New Jersey, subscribing to New Jersey magazines, and playing the songs of Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi and Patti Smith, over and over and over.

The only question she had asked of her mother: “Why did he have to go?”

Her mother started crying and answered softly, “He had a family of his own, Ruby.”

The new arrivals took the booth just behind Ruby. They were all dressed like farmhands and wore work boots dusted with red clay. Sun-weathered men, they were, with strong-looking hands and ropy muscles on their arms. She began to feel vulnerable in this place out of another time, a strange place where she was the only stranger. But she kept to her schedule and took a sip of coffee.

“Damn, that’s good,” she said in surprise at the coffee.

One of the men had his arm across the back of the seat. When Ruby leaned back, her bare neck touched the bare arm. She jumped forward at the warmth of skin. The man moved his arm out of her way and apologized. Ruby smiled and nodded. She saw the hair on the man’s arm was sun-bleached blond against a deep tan. He wore a plaid shirt with his sleeve rolled up at his elbow. Ruby found she was staring at the bare arm and blushed deep red. The other men in the booth laughed and poked each other.

“Good coffee here,” the man with the arm agreed pleasantly.

Ruby nodded again. She stood up and went through a small hallway directed by a rest room sign. The ladies’ room door was locked and a voice called, “Be out in a minute.” Ruby stood there thinking the woman really did mean a minute.

It was a small space, this vestibule, claustrophobically small, windowless, and airless. There was a Miss Rheingold 1959 poster on the wall nobody had ever thought to take down. It was yellowed and fly-specked. The men’s room was immediately next to the ladies room with only a thin wall between.

When the man with the bare arm stepped in from the diner, he and Ruby were very close. She couldn’t smell hard labor on him as she’d expected. She could see disconcertingly deep into his hazel eyes. She could feel the heat again on the back of her neck. She looked down in confusion and saw his shoes were clean and only the one arm was tan. What a silly thing to notice, she thought.

“We got to stop meeting like this,” he said with an easy smile.

“Excuse me,” she said and started back out to the diner.

She couldn’t very well stand there and listen to him piss. She felt the eyes of everyone in the place turn on her as she sat back down in her booth. She wished she had dressed down a bit, at least worn jeans.

More people had come in, even a few women, but no men alone. Surely he wouldn’t bring his wife and kids, not the way he had suddenly rushed her off the phone in the middle of a sentence.

“Truck stop, Route 33, Neptune, next to Stewart’s Drive-In, west of the Garden State-”

And he hung up.

Her coffee had been refilled and she drank more, thinking whoever was in the ladies’ room would be out any time now. She felt rather than saw the man with the one tanned arm sit down again. She wasn’t sure he had flirted with her or not. He was twice her age. Usually she’d be more courteous to an older person, but there was something about him. No, she decided, he wasn’t flirting. He was just attentive; the air between them was just filled with his attention. She could feel his eyes on her slanted out the sides.

She was getting uncomfortable, between him and the coffee. She thought she could have missed the woman leave the ladies’ room. She stood, but the whole bunch of men in the next booth, all at once, assured her it was still occupied.

Ruby looked at her watch and saw that five minutes had passed. She went toward the restroom, anyway, and knocked sharply on the door. Again the same voice said, “Be right out.”

Ruby stood there and just couldn’t take the stress on her bladder. She slipped into the men’s room and took care of the problem quickly. On her way out, she got a round of applause from her neighboring table. She imagined the sound of her urination, a stream like a horse, she remembered, had traveled throughout the diner. She sat down and motioned to the waitress for her check.

“Pay at the counter,” the girl all but snapped.

“Don’t mind her,” one of the men behind her said. “Had a fight with her husband over a pretty girl with short hair and hazel eyes.”

Ruby didn’t bother to smile, or respond, or even nod, just looked out the window. There was a streaky red sunset and the sky looked way down low, but night wasn’t near ready to fall. She watched the off-ramp of the Garden State Parkway, a steady stream of cars, but no trucks.

She considered extending her allotted time at the so-called truck stop. He could be stuck in traffic. He could have gotten cold feet. He could have died this very day. She wracked her brain thinking of things that could keep a man from his child. But then, she reasoned, he’d had no trouble keeping himself from her all her life so far.

The door to the ladies’ room finally opened and out walked, of all things, another waitress. Her big hair and a strong scent of hair spray told Ruby what the girl had been doing in there all that time. The men teased the waitress and she flipped them the finger. “Ohhhhh,” they roared, it seemed to Ruby, in a never-ending wave of sound.

Her eyes filled with tears that the waitress could be so mean to her without ever having set eyes on her. Just inconsiderate, she told herself, not mean, not really.

She hurried into the ladies’ room and washed her face. She looked at her short hair. It was a little spiky, but not really punky, naturally darker at the roots than at the ends. Usually she liked it around her high-boned face. Momentarily she felt a strong and ridiculous regret simply stab at her that she did not have Jersey Girl hair, that she lacked romance of the soul.
She took a deep breath and went to the door. As she started opening it, she heard the men’s room door click shut. It was then she noticed a public phone hanging right there behind the door in the tiny lavatory. She had her calling card in her skirt pocket. At first, her mother was asking where she was calling from with a calling card. Ruby had left a note saying only she’d be gone for the day.

“Mom,” Ruby said shortly, “how did you meet him? Where did you meet him?”

“Oh, Ruby, it was all so long ago.”

Ruby said nothing and just let the silence go on until her mother spoke again.

“I was at the Shore with some girlfriends. You know, back when I worked in Philly. We always took a few days and drove to the Shore. My car broke down on a highway there and he fixed it for me. I waited in a diner and he bought me dinner. There was a place across the street. We went there, okay? Is that what you want to know?”

“A sign with a pillow on it?”

“Ruby, where are you?”

“A truck stop?”

“Well, no, it started out to be a truck stop, but it was just a diner, his grandfather’s diner. It had been their farmland, he told me, and the state took a lot of it for the Garden State Parkway. His family thought a new highway would bring a lot of trucks, so they opened the diner. He was going to sell it once his grandfather died. He said he wanted no part of it, wanted to be on the road.”

“Mom, did he ever come to see me after that one time?”

“If he did, honey, he never told me about it.”

Ruby hung up on her mother and tore out the door. The booth with the men in it was still the booth with the men in it, but where there had been three men on one side, there were now two. She tried to remember if he had actually come in with them or if he had only joined them at their table.

She threw some money down and walked furiously to the door. The waitress yelled, “Pay at the counter!” Ruby stormed through the door, smashing it against the entry frame. Angry shouts came from behind her. If it hadn’t been thick old glass, that door would have shattered.

She jumped into her rented car and roared across the highway, horns blaring from both directions. She sped up the entry ramp to the Garden State Parkway. Once she stopped crying and started breathing normally, she realized she was going in the wrong direction for Newark Airport. She got off and on again and headed north.

The Parkway overlooked the truck stop and she could see in a field out back the big rig pulling out and around the side of the diner. It headed west on Highway 33 away from the Garden State Parkway. She saw the plaid sleeve, the bare forearm reaching out the window, the hand resting on the rearview mirror, out where the sun would hit it next day, bleach the hairs, and darken the skin.

She saw a directional sign come up fast on the Garden State Parkway: No Trucks.