Life Turn at the Truck Stop

by Shauna Checkley

part 1

Inflation had recently hit the Ruby Red Diner where Emmy worked. Increased prices had spread like a cancerous tumor across the land, affecting cafes and stores both big and small alike. It meant one more day with few sales, Emmy knew. Maybe the odd batch of fish & chips. Or chicken nuggets, if very young children dragged their parents through the door.

The menu rarely varied. Burgers. Pie and Coffee. Fries. These were their staples in an area that had been mostly agricultural and mining but now with a bit of tourism thrown in. One would think that business would be brisk, but inflation got in the way.

Elbows resting on the scratched and cracked orange Formica tabletop, Emmy stared into space. Even though it would have been a stance surely corrected by her harried mother, the one busy with two sets of twins, aged ten and twelve respectively. Presently, her stance carried only bits about Mrs. Dalloway, an even more formidable presence, all things considered.

My day will be as essentially plotless as well, Emmy thought forlornly. Looking about her, Emmy noticed the knife-carved grooves on the Ruby Red’s countertop:

Emily loves Zac. Carter loves Emmy.

What would a small-town café be without those telltale scratches? Of the epithet that pertained to her, Carter loves Emmy, she was somewhat ambivalent.

They had dated for several years. Been young lovers. But she wanted to live beyond his empty, predictable consciousness. She had her books, her studies, her spirituality — earlier dalliances with Zen Buddhism and Sufism but now a return to her Christian faith — plus an emerging esthetic of hyper-modernism.

Yes, it all served to keep her distracted, busy. Still, she would get through the day. She would endure as ever, whether her day turned out to be plotless after all.

Her eyes swept across the café. The long, thin, ornate-looking chalkboard read:

Today’s Special — Coffee & Lemon Pie $ 11.99.
Big Rig Burger & Fries $19.99.
Minestrone Soup $9.99.

How long am I going to be stuck in this job? For this summer at the very least, she knew. Perhaps Rittinger, her Master’s thesis advisor, would finally relent, and she’d come to the end of it. Hopefully, sometime next winter. Though how likely that was didn’t give her much hope. He seemed to be contrary by nature. A character at the very least. But maybe he was just a little stubborn or eccentric. The fact remained that he was notoriously difficult to deal with. Everyone on campus who knew him said as much.

Tracing her finger on the carving of Carter loves Emmy, all she could ask herself was: Why? They had nothing in common. He was a brash young farmer who had inherited all that he needed to succeed, set up by his father with machinery and the farm, even a house. All Carter believed that they needed was one another. That’s it: himself and Emmy. Nothing more and nothing less. She was the one missing piece in his life. He had told her so many times.

Still, she had reservations about Carter. Though they had had little kid crushes on one another years ago, he had not become the man she truly wanted. Besides, he had been virtually clueless in school, in the bottom drawer of the small country class, so to speak.

* * *

Right then, Carter was in the midst of doing daily chores, gathering eggs, burning refuse in the burning bin, doing the welding that had been piling up, fixing fence, working on the truck and an assortment of other duties that had been weighing on Nelson Nash, his father. Unless he got it all done in a timely manner, there would be no dates or girls or any such things. It was a burden for a twenty-two-year old like Carter.

Outside of farming and sports and Emmy, there wasn’t much else that occupied Carter’s consciousness. He wasn’t unintelligent, just uninterested in the greater world that he held as inconsequential to him. He had the farm, the outdoors, his parents. What else did a country boy need? Well, Emmy, for this country boy.

Sometimes Carter imagined Nelson to be a hard-ass, but Nelson was really no different than the other farmers around them. Carter just liked to see himself always as the victim, always hard done by. He was nursing a cut on his left hand. It was in between his first two fingers.

His thoughts turned to Emmy. Why is she so on and off, so hot and cold? Sometimes we date happily then she gets preoccupied with school. It just makes no sense. Her mind seems elsewhere most of the time.

Sucking on the two long digits like he was giving himself fellatio, he licked the wound clean.

* * *

Imaging Rittinger in her mind, Emmy had recently begun referring to him that way instead of Dr. Rittinger, or Pierce Rittinger, just Rittinger, as when you encounter a stranger in the street or a drunk in a bar.

She wondered at the image. He looked “academic,” she thought, with slightly rounded shoulders, a small stoop in his upper back. There was nothing about his physique that inspired terror or exploration. Though nearly baby-faced, there was nothing in this face that suggested a baby’s proclivity to relent. Rather, it was his demeanor that seemed markedly stubborn and fixated. He seemed pleased with himself. Overall, he looked like a man well under his years, and his years weren’t many after all.

Emmy tried not to obsess about either him or the Master’s degree that she was in the business of trying to defend, the degree that she had been stymied upon a handful of times. It was too all-consuming and, let’s face it, she was rather obsessional by nature.

Could that have been reflected by the non-stop knitting of say Grandma Waverly? Or Uncle Pete’s junk car collection? It seemed possible anyhow. Maybe I’m the one who needs meds after all, Emmy thought. And just maybe I’d be well advised to abandon my thesis before I end up offing myself like Virginia Woolf did.

Still, she mused, How am I ever going to get through this? When Rittinger seemingly won’t let me through it? The truth was that she fully believed in her thesis topic, an examination of the subconscious in Woolf’s work.

Virginia Woolf had invented the stream of consciousness after all, and Emmy wished to examine its nuances. Emmy loved Woolf’s writing and would sometimes imagine herself as the writer. Though when she caught herself in such bold imaginings, she quickly reeled herself back in.

She had read and re-read the entire Virgina Woolf library repeatedly and voraciously consumed several biographies. Even watching the Hollywood movie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, though she had been much too young to remember anything from it except a couple shouting at each other.

* * *

Recalling her last encounter with Rittinger, Emmy was clearly let down. She watched as he ran his hand through his chestnut-brown hair. Her eyes fell on his framed degrees on the wall. Master’s degree. Doctoral Degree. The hallway she had just emerged from was teeming with students.

“I don’t think you’re quite there yet,” he said. “I like how you’ve examined the subconscious in the major characters, but the minor characters still need some work.” He shook off a yawn and rolled his shoulders like a hallucinated character from Mrs. Dalloway.

Emmy felt her heart sink. His office was neat and tidy and smelled strangely sweet like that of vaping. Suddenly she felt like a number in a store, like the kind on printed stubs. “Could you explain please?” Emmy’s tone was near that of a plea.

He shrugged. “Just reread your thesis. Dr. Morris, also agrees.”

“How would a snake expert know, anyhow?” Emmy asked.

“Don’t worry about her, she’s just a secondary advisor. I’m the one that you need to satisfy things with.” Glancing at his watch, he said, “I’ve got a two-thirty now.” Leaning forward in his Eames chair, he stifled another yawn.

Spilling back out in the busy hallway, Emmy was jostled repeatedly. But no one even bothered to mumble sorry or look at her. Emmy dragged herself back to her car and drove the half hour back to Dead Lake.

* * *

Thankfully, a customer, a slim-looking woman, walked in and pulled Emmy out of her funk.

“I’ll have the minestrone soup and a glass of ice water please,” the woman said, seating herself by a window.

“Coming up!” Emmy replied.

Emmy was nearly rubbing elbows with an older woman, Shirley, the cook. Shirley frowned. Since her hair had begun thinning with a change in medication, and her cat began batting her hearing aid off the nightstand, her world and circumstances had changed abruptly. She knew that she was no longer the vibrant young short-order cook she had once been.

Emmy disappeared into the back of the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with the soup, which she served to the customer with two packages of crackers. Then she set the glass of ice water beside the soup. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

Meanwhile, a large, corpulent man came in and seated himself at the back of the restaurant, near the washroom. “I’ll have the Big Rig special,” he said loudly as Emmy approached to take his order. He picked up his napkin and mopped his forehead with it.

Ugh! Emmy thought. That’s repulsive. But then her good nature kicked in as it always did. Maybe he has a heart condition or God knows what.

Anyhow, she immediately placed his order in with the cook. Soon the place sizzled with the smell of hamburger and fried onion and French fries.

Emmy’s stomach rumbled. She realized that she had forgotten to eat. Since these hyper-inflationary times began, they had been forbidden to eat as freely as before, but perhaps she could score a serving of something. Maybe soup, even? Luckily, Shirley agreed, and she smiled when Emmy helped herself.

No longer did they schedule big crowds in these times. Gone were the days of pushed-together tables and chairs and large raucous crowds placing big orders. Rather, the people were taken as they came, and they seemed to be getting fewer and fewer all the time and spending less and less.

There were times when Emmy even feared for her job. Just wish Rittinger would get off the pot, she thought disconsolately. Why can’t he just decide already? Will he approve my thesis to go ahead or what? If he does, then I can put the finishing touches on it. I can start applying for jobs elsewhere. Colleges and universities are unlikely, but maybe I can get into an ad agency or some place like that. But none of that is likely to happen any time soon without the thesis going forward.

Proceed to part 2...