Chapter 1: Pump Seven
The lot at Otis's Travel Plaza began to fill before the sun cleared the ridge, and by seven on a Saturday it held the usual arithmetic of the interstate: reefers idling in a white row, a livestock hauler washed down and dripping, two state boys drinking coffee in a cruiser with the engine running for the heat. The plaza sat above I-80 like a ship at anchor, all glass and chrome and fryer smell, and the men who worked the lot had long ago sorted everyone who stopped there into kinds. There were the regulars, the lost, the hurried, and then there was Boone.
He came down the ramp at twenty past seven, the Electra Glide's headlight still on in the grey morning, and the lot made its small adjustment to him the way water adjusts to a stone. Truckers who had been lounging against their doors found reasons to check a mirror. A man fueling a Peterbilt stepped back from his own pump though Boone was nowhere near it. It was not anything Boone did. It was the size of him arriving โ six foot five in the boots, shoulders like a doorframe, a beard gone the color of road salt โ and the silence that arrived with him, which was bigger.
At the register inside, the new cashier, a girl named Denny with her hair still wet from a shower at the drivers' lounge, watched him through the glass and said, "That one come in every week?"
Marv, who had pumped fuel and fixed tires at the plaza for nineteen years, said, "Every Saturday God made."
"He pay inside?"
"He pays at the pump. He'll come in for coffee. Don't talk to him unless he talks first."
"Why not?"
Marv considered. "Nobody's told me why not," he said. "It's just how it's done."
Boone took pump seven. He always took pump seven, and would idle at the back of a line of three trucks rather than fuel at an open island, and no one who knew him found this strange enough to mention. Seven had been Willa's number. She had counted things in sevens the year she was nine โ seven porch steps, seven freckles on the dog, seven minutes allowed for a bath before it became swimming. Her school locker had been 107 and she had treated the last digit as the part that counted. Boone had explained none of this to anyone. He put the bike on its stand, wiped the pump handle with the paper towel from the dispenser โ he always wiped the handle first, truckers' hands being what they were โ and filled the tank to the same mark, and stood looking east down the interstate while it filled, as if the road owed him a report.
The coffee was the second part. In the diner he took the last stool at the counter, the one with the torn seam he had patched himself with a staple gun one February and never mentioned. Otis Feldman came out of the kitchen drying his hands and set down a mug without asking, and Boone wrapped both hands around it, though his hands were never cold.
"Road's dry," Otis said.
"Road's dry."
"June's roses would've liked this sun."
"They got fed Tuesday," Boone said, which was true; he fed his dead wife's roses at the cemetery plot where the groundskeeper allowed a bed along the fence, and he did the feeding on Tuesdays whether it rained or not. Otis nodded as if this were news about weather and went back to his grill, and the two of them had conducted, in forty seconds, the whole of their friendship's Saturday business, which had been sufficient for some years now.
He ate nothing. Otis had stopped offering years ago; the offer had been retired with honors, like a flag. The mug was always the same mug.
What no one in the lot understood was that the ritual was not the leavings of Boone's life. It was the structure of it, load-bearing as a wall. Fuel at seven. Coffee at the counter. The ride out Route 322 to Fairhill Cemetery with the tank full, because June had hated running low, had hated it cheerfully and on principle, and he would not arrive at her stone with the gauge in the red. He brought nothing. He cut nothing, laid nothing down. He stood the length of one cigarette's worth of time though he had quit the year Willa started school, and then he rode home by the river road and was in his kitchen by eleven, and the house held still around him until Monday.
Denny the cashier watched the big bike pull out for the highway and said, "He looks like the saddest man in Pennsylvania."
Marv said, "He looks like a man who keeps his appointments," and went out to sweep the diesel lane, which was the truest thing anyone at the plaza had yet found to say about Elias Hartley.