Was that what awaited me, too? Would I be forever like someone traveling through a continuous night of her own making, afraid to stop here or there, eventually coming to hate her own inner voice? Did I hate myself already? Maybe I wasn’t exaggerating when I first told him that wherever I belonged was somewhere out there, somewhere away from everything I had known. No, I thought, I wasn’t exaggerating when I told him I was running away from myself. I really did wish I could slip off and out of my body the way a snake shed its skin. If I could only find a way to do that, I might save myself.
Moses nodded at some lights ahead of us. “That’s the restaurant and the bus station.”
“Okay.”
He pulled into the parking lot. “How about I buy you some dinner?”
“Didn’t you eat dinner back where you picked me up?”
“No, too early for me,” he said. “C’mon.”
He got out, and I followed him into the restaurant, one of those very homey kinds you just knew were frequented by the same people, a family outside of their family. It was fairly crowded, but a couple had just gotten up from a booth, and the hostess recognized Moses.
“Hi there, Moses. You haven’t been around for some time.”
“They had me deliverin’ south of here for a while, Shirley. Can we get that booth?” he asked, nodding at the one becoming available.
“Sure thing,” she said. She went to it and supervised a quicker cleanup. Then she smiled at me. “All set.”
“Thank you kindly,” Moses told her.
We sat, and the waitress brought the menus immediately.
“I bet the hostess was curious about my being with you,” I said.
“Naw. People around here mind their own business. Besides, she knows me well enough to know nothin’ bad’s going on, even though she’s never seen me with a girl young as yourself.”
“Don’t you have any family?” I asked after we ordered. “A wife, children? Anyone else who might ride with you on one of your trips?”
“I have a daughter who lives in Oakland now. She’s not married, but she’s seein’ someone steady. I never took her along on one of these deliveries.”
“And your wife?”
“My wife and I came to a fork in the road and made different turns, if you know what I mean. That was nearly fifteen years ago now. She remarried and then got another divorce. She doesn’t even see our daughter that much anymore. She never wanted to ride along with me, and I guess I wasn’t home enough to make her happy. But some people can’t ever be happy no matter what. I hope you ain’t one of them, because if you are, you won’t find the solution on the road. Take it from a real citizen of the highway.”
“I’m not sure if I am that sort of person who can’t be happy,” I confessed. “But I don’t want to be and will do everything I can not to be.”
“Well, that’s somethin’, at least,” he replied. He signaled to the waitress, who came over quickly. “Could you get us a bus schedule, Janet?”
“Sure thing,” she said.
“Might as well check to see how long you would have to wait to get to San Francisco,” he told me.
When the waitress brought it, we saw there was close to two hours before the bus that would take me to San Francisco arrived. We spent nearly an hour and twenty minutes of that time eating and talking. Moses described the places he had been in his travels, where he thought was the nicest area, and where he hoped to settle when he retired. I was grateful that he didn’t ask me too many more personal questions. He seemed to understand that if he did, I wouldn’t be very forthcoming anyway. Before we had dessert, he went to the bathroom and to make a phone call. When he returned, he told me he had to go because he had to be somewhere sooner than he had expected.
“I’ve already paid the bill. You sit and enjoy your dessert,” he told me.
“Thank you very much,” I said. “For everything, Moses. I was lucky to have met you.”
“Promise me one thing,” he said before he left.
“Okay. What’s that?”
“Don’t let anyone convince you that you can’t be what you want to be.”
I smiled.
Did he come along just at the right time by coincidence, or was there someone else out there looking over me, some angel specifically assigned to helpless creatures like myself? That was how I saw myself, as a creature.