Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1000 Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here

I drove to the gas station but I didn't relish the thought of standing in the cold to talk to Ziggy. I didn't know where else to go, though.

So I asked the attendant, who at that time was a dark-haired, somewhat dark-skinned man. I couldn't have told you what ethnicity he was, only that after seeing mostly white folks around there, he looked a little surprising to me.

He suggested I try a truck stop about fifteen or twenty miles down the interstate, or maybe a lunch counter about ten miles down the county road. I thanked him and got back in the car and dithered. If I tried the lunch counter and it was one of those little places where the phone didn't actually work, or he was wrong about there being one there, then it was a 30 minute drive to turn around and try the truck stop. The truck stop seemed more likely to have working phones, and probably more of them, but it was farther away.

And it felt like every minute counted. For every minute it took me to reply to Ziggy's page, he might be one minute closer to having to go somewhere. Plus Claire had chirped anxiously at me as I was leaving and I'd promised I wouldn't be too long.

"Is he still angry with you?" she had asked.

"I assume so, but who knows."

"He does seem very... changeable." She had dark circles under her eyes. "But I get the feeling he has a long memory."

"Yeah." I truly believed that if Ziggy convinced himself he should be happy about something, he could make himself be happy about something. But the opposite was probably also true. "I better go call him right away."

She was sitting on the loveseat (there was no couch) and she lay her head on her folded arms on the armrest. "He's not going to want to come out here, is he? To this... swamp?"

"It's not a swamp."

"I know it isn't. It's rather lovely here. But that's what he's going to say when he sees it. You know he will. And he's going to look at the bed in your room and..." She made a face that was a strangely credible imitation of Ziggy's sneer. "And you'll end up sleeping on the floor. Or out here. You won't be gone long, will you?"

"I'm going to call him and then I'll come right back. I might talk to him for a while though."

"Just don't be too long."

"And it'll take me a while to get to and from a phone."

"I know. But you know. No woman likes to be left alone and defenseless. No matter how lovely the surroundings."

What I thought as I got into the car was, she thinks it's lovely? That's amazing. She'd called it lovely twice, in fact. I guess it was dawning on me that I had been expecting a string of complaints, just like she had complained constantly about Janine's house.

The truck stop, on the other hand, was not what I would call lovely, but it did at least have a couple of indoor payphones, and they each had an actual booth like you'd find outdoors except these were mounted inside along a wall, near the restrooms.

It was the middle of the day which wasn't the busiest time for truckers to be there. I got into a booth and started typing in numbers. There was even a little fold-down seat inside there.

And then, wouldn't you know it, I got his machine.

"Hey, got your page," I said, trying hard to sound normal. What does it mean to sound normal at a time like that? I just imitated a calmer, less upset version of myself. Maybe if I acted like we weren't about to have another heart-cavity eviscerating argument, then we wouldn't.