I didn’t move from Chicago to get married or start a new job. I decided to nurse a robin heart by getting away from the stink of Lake Michigan, and stopped by the travel office in Lincoln Square where a young woman with stringy braids and an armful of tattoos mapped out and handed me a “scenic” route. I’d never traveled to the South, but liked the idea of being a fish in a whole new body of water.
If Route 66, the Mother Road, had been good enough for the thousands who had migrated across the country during the Depression, or after World War II, counting Burma-Shave signs along the way, then it was good enough for me. Route 66 had everything: romance, history, and fast food. I shifted past camel-colored assemblages of rocks, windmills and ghost towns of pecan groves with orchards of plastic bags caught on branches. Saw Dollar Stores duking it out next to the Family Dollar. Saw scarred remains of what used to be, and imagined myself an old-timer in a Gabby Hayes movie thumping the ground in my dusty boots.
Everything along that drive was hot hot hot, trekking during the height of summer with dozens of empty plastic water bottles rolling along my back seat for company.I worked up an appetite past fast food outlets serving crunchy fried niblets of things; gas stations stocked with corn dogs and fried chicken wings. I pulled into a place called the Half & Half, which reminded me of something my mother used to say: “half a loaf is better than no bread,” opened the screen door, heard a bell jingle, and saw a line snaking behind a register where a single woman held court wearing a jeans jacket and a red headband that matched her nails.
I waltzed in, woozy from being hypnotized by a white line down the middle of a highway, and watched people scoop cartons of beer from a tower stacked on either side of the door, along with whatever else they were buying—cigarettes, beef jerky, cans of this and that—and finally reached the cashier. Asked for a five-wing special and a can of Coke.
“Where you from?” the woman behind the counter asked. Even to myself, I sounded so Yankee, could feel everyone behind me listening.
“Chicago,” I said.
“Chicago!” She laughed. “You lost, honey?”
It was a good question and one that I wasn’t sure how to answer. “No, not really.”
“Where you staying?”
The idea of staying anyplace hadn’t occurred to me. “No where special.” I tried to make my voice sound as southern as I could.
She seemed amused. “Come back after five, maybe I can help you out.” Turned out that her husband had died and she had an extra bedroom. Both her girls were grown and had moved out. I said yes without thinking about what I was going to do in Hentsbury, the last place on earth I’d ever expected to land. I’d heard about Governor Bill Clinton, but it was 1995 and I had no idea who was the current governor of Arkansas. I was tired of driving and felt that her offer was the best one I was going to get.
We hadn’t discussed prices, a situation unheard of anywhere 200 miles north, east, west, or south of Chicago. Didn’t know what this poor woman was thinking; I didn’t look independently wealthy, not in my beat-up Ford Escort, but that didn’t seem to matter to her. I figured six months was a safe bet, long enough to check if things were going to work out, agreed to come by over the weekend.
“Rae-Ann,” she extended her hand.
“Beth. Nice to meet you.”
In the meantime, I decided that the first order of business was eating lunch. I took my white paper sac back to the car and laid out a picnic on the passenger seat: wings, fries, ketchup, and a Coke. Bit into the wing, juices pouring over my tongue, hot and spicy, grease dribbling over the side of my chin. Best food in the world.
I congratulated myself for making a new start, or maybe arriving at the possibility of one, and hoped to find a cheap motel until I moved into Rae-Ann’s place. Somehow I wasn’t concerned if the room she promised turned out to be a shed in the back of a chicken processing plant. But what if she was a Bible-thumper and secretly wanted to convert me giving her extra points for catching a Yankee? I didn’t care. For the first time since the break-up, I could breathe.
I moved in the following weekend. There was a tangle of big blue morning glories looped along a fence. Her house was clean and lovely with pictures of her daughter and her deceased husband on every ledge. No door of the house closed properly. But my expectation about a shack in the swamp did not materialize. Instead, her place was located five miles from a pulp and paper mill that was credited for having been started by an enterprising easterner who saw rows of trees and imagined they had to be good for something. By this time, the mill had changed hands more than once, which had done nothing to improve the air quality.
But I’m from Chicago and summers with thousands of dead perch washing up on the shores of Lake Michigan didn’t smell too good either. I settled in and got myself a job working at the one library in town. I was lucky. After the agreed upon six months, I stayed. We began to trust each other, and shared things about our lives, fellow travelers on the outskirts of a hurricane.
It took a while before I found out why she had decided to take me in on that very hot day in August.