Chapter 5: The Road East
They left Ohio on a Thursday with everything they owned in a six-year-old Subaru and a storage unit's worth of decisions behind them: Poppy's bike, the good skillet, the box of Christmas ornaments Sarah had not been able to leave. Poppy, seven, rode in the back with her feet on a cooler and a library book open on her knees, reading the signs aloud in the voice she used for announcements. "Welcome to Pennsylvania," she read, at the line. "Mom. It says the turnpike is a toll road. Did we bring tolls?"
"We brought tolls," Sarah said.
Poppy had heard the story of the biker the way other children heard about a relative in another state — in installments, at kitchen tables, always with the same architecture. There was a man, a very big man, bigger than a door, who had lost his wife and his little girl in a car accident on a rainy night. Mom had held the wife's hand. The wife had left a message, like a letter you carry in your body instead of an envelope, and Mom had been carrying it four years, and carrying a thing that long made your arms tired in a place that wasn't your arms.
"Do you know where he lives?" Poppy asked, somewhere past Youngstown, in the tone of a girl reviewing logistics.
"Approximately."
"Approximately is not an address, Mom."
"It is if you're brave," Sarah said, and Poppy accepted this the way she accepted all her mother's professional vocabulary, by writing it on the inside of her head for later examination.
They stopped at a rest area where the trucks idled in long patient rows, and Poppy, who feared nothing with wheels, fell into conversation with a driver from Erie while Sarah bought coffee from a machine that steamed it into a paper cup. The driver had a granddaughter Poppy's age and a CB handle he offered like a business card. When Sarah came back he was saying, "...biggest man in three counties, and quiet? Quiet like a church with the doors shut. Fuels up at Otis's, there at the Crossing, every Saturday, pump seven. My nephew works the lot. Says you can set your watch by him, only nobody does, because he'd know."
Sarah's coffee went still in her hand. "Pump seven," she repeated, in a voice she got under control quickly. "Every Saturday."
"Weather don't signify," the driver said. "Man keeps his appointments." He bent to Poppy. "You tell your momma: if she ever needs a tire changed on that road, she wants pump seven on a Saturday."
In the car, Poppy said, "Mom. That's him. That's the door-sized man."
"It might be."
"It's him. Stories know." She settled back with her book, satisfied, and then, a mile later, without looking up: "When you give him the message, will it be sad, or will it be the good kind?"
Sarah drove a while before she answered. The interstate unspooled ahead of them, white lines arriving like something being knitted. She thought of June Hartley's hand, deliberate as a signature. She thought of the notebook in her coat, of the four years of almost-rooms and almost-hours, of a man setting his watch by a gas pump because grief, like nursing, was mostly a matter of showing up at the appointed place. "I think," she said, "it will be both kinds at once. Most true things are."
"Okay," Poppy said. "I'll stay in the car for the sad part and come in for the good part."
"That's a plan," Sarah said. "Most grown-ups never get that far." Poppy considered this praise with professional calm and asked whether the plaza had pancakes, because an errand of this importance should probably have pancakes somewhere in it.
Poppy was quiet for whole counties, which in her economy meant she was assembling something. At a fuel stop she supervised the windshield squeegee with the gravity of a building inspector and reported that the bugs of Pennsylvania were bigger and should be respected. Sarah bought her a postcard of a covered bridge and watched her print, in letters of increasing size, HAVING A — and then run out of card, which Poppy considered a design decision and mailed anyway.
That night they slept in a motel outside Clarion with the Subaru's nose pointed east, and Sarah lay awake listening to her daughter breathe in the other bed and to the trucks changing gears on the interstate below the hill. On Saturday, she thought, she would not drive to State College and unpack a kitchen. On Saturday she would drive forty minutes the other way, to a travel plaza on I-80, and arrive before twenty past seven, and stand by a gas pump with a four-year-old sentence in her pocket — and her hands, on the motel blanket, were not shaking, which surprised her more than anything else about the whole long errand. They were a nurse's hands. They knew how to deliver things.