Anna thought at twenty-nine years-old she would become a mother. Instead, she was a divorcee.
Yesterday she had signed the divorce papers at the lawyer’s office, then went to the liquor store to buy several bottles of wine, which she had consumed one by one. She was a miserable lady when her alarm went off at five am, a hour before her first shift at the Kangaroo Express.
Victor had already started the coffee when she arrived, her crimped curly hair pulled back in a loose bun and her polyester uniform unwrinkled because it was impossible to wrinkle it. She muttered a thanks while she poured a cup of coffee in her stained mug and swallowed a hand full of aspirins.
She began the beginning-of-shift routine – count the cash register, check the bathrooms, restock the coffee cups and lids – interrupted occasionally by Victor wanting to buy blunt wrappers or asking if it was time to put the Bud Light on sale. It wasn’t.
Eventually Victor scuttled out and Anna pulled up her favorite stool to the cash register and located the book she hid behind the drop safe where she also stored her coffee mug. She knew she needed to keep her mind off yesterday, Leonard’s face when she last saw him, and the golden wedding band still on her left hand, or else she would fall into a funk only interrupted by random customers.
She hoped to God no one did anything morose in her book.
It was indeed a slow morning. Only ten customers ventured inside from the beginning of her shift at 6 am to noon. Seven of the customers were normal citizens paying cash for gasoline, buying caffeinated beverages, or picking up various breakfast items.
One young man raced around the interior of the Kangaroo, knocking down a potato chip stand, yelling “WOOO!!!” while wearing a banana costume. He bought a package of Marlboros without further comment. Anna straightened the stand while shaking her head.
One anciently old lady paid for her chewing tobacco with nickles, leaving the cash register overflowing with five-cent coins.
A teenager playing hooky from school tried to use a fake id to buy a package of lady cigarettes, but there was no way on God’s green Earth she was 35 years old. Anna looked at her with her best Madea impression until the teenager left, rolling her eyes.
An alarm went off in the back storage room that printed a read out, but Anna had no idea what it meant. She crumpled it up and made three points into the nearest trash can.
A hour before her shift ended at two, a man in a white buttoned-up shirt sauntered in. She assumed he was another one of her good-citizen-mind-their-own-business type of customers until he smiled at her, pointed a knife her way, and demanded for all of the money.
This wasn’t Anna’s first robbery rodeo, though, so she followed company policy by handing over all of the money in the register.
“Where’s the rest of the money?”
“There’s money in the safe, but only managers have keys. I’m not a manager.”
Suddenly, he sliced the front of her shirt so that the bottom of her bra and olive-toned belly were exposed.
“Where’s the money, bitch?!”
Anna knew this man had to be on drugs or he wouldn’t act so irrationally. She wished for the first time that the Kangarooo wasn’t so slow.
“I do not have any money. I can call the manager, though, and he can open the safe for you when he gets here.”
The man actually looked like he was considering this asinine idea before bringing his knife down to slice the forearm of her left arm open and dashing out of the store.
Anna stood in front of the empty cash register with a torn shirt, watching the blood on her arm slowly rise to the surface and bubble over.
“Fuck this shit,” she told no one in particular, grabbed her purse under the counter, left the book in which too many people cried, and headed for her car behind the store.
She turned left onto Legion Road, right onto I-95 South, and didn’t even realize what she was doing until she saw the “Welcome to South Carolina” sign.
She was then aware of her physical state: injured, undressed, low on gasoline, and hungry. She needed to stop somewhere, but the nearest sanctuary was South of the Border. It was a cheesy, slightly racist, over-reaching rest stop featuring a mini-golf course, hotel, and restaurant. But Anna was interested chiefly in the gasoline station, where she could fill up her tank, buy some sort of bandage for her already-clotted cut, find a tank top (probably sporting a caricature of a Mexican man), and enough junk food to satisfy the growing emptiness in her stomach.
Finding the supplies she needed, she hunkered in the car with the keys in her hand. Fear suddenly immobilized her.
What in the hell was she doing?
Where did she think she was going? Of course, she knew where she was headed, but why? She probably didn’t have a job anymore and for all she knew the law was after all for the robbery.
The knock on her driver’s seat window brought her out of her growing anxiety attack.
“Hey!”
The cashier from inside the gas station was waving at her. Instinctively she read his name tag: Greg.
He then waved her wallet at her with a knowing smile on his face. She rolled down the window.
“I don’t normally try to find customers after they leave their valuables on the counter, but you struck me as a fellow gas station worker… and well… you look a little distressed.”
She managed a small chuckle and thanked him. She expected him to mosey on along then but he hesitated.
“You know that the police are after you, right?”
She avoided his gaze.
“Do they think I robbed the store?”
“No, I don’t think so. I watched the news on mute, but it looked like they think you’re just a witness. They know you’re injured.”
She shifted in her seat, fear filling her up again.
“Are you going to call them?”
“Oh, no.” He stretched his back then and looked toward the gas station. “My shift is almost over.”
She smiled truly then and waved as he walked away. Then, she cranked up her car.
While she drove, she thought about the life she was leaving behind in the rear view mirror. She wondered if Leonard was having the same crisis of consciousness. His face, full of indifference, flashed in her mind and as the pain filled her heart she was drawn back to a younger face, shined with moisture from the humidity in the air and smiling at her with promise in his eyes. She shook her head, trying to push the images deep inside her where they would take longer to show up again.
She passed over a long bridge over a lake. On one side of the bride was another older bridge that boasted numerous walkers, many of whom had fishing poles thrown over the side. The water twinkled so blue as she watched it race under the bridges and the trees surrounding the circumference of the lake past where she could rapidly not see.
She was struck by how the cars on the highway bride rapidly left behind the fishers, yet it seemed that the fishers never really changed: old men with multiple poles and children peering between wooden slats at the water below. How could she be sprinting so fast yet the bridge running parallel to hers never changed, but was immobile?
A sign declared to her that she had left Lake Marion as she reached dry ground.
The miles stretched out before her as the sun ran across the sky, inch by inch. She stopped once to acquire more gasoline and panic threatened to hold her stiff again. She considered the many years she was fleeing, like the miles she had passed. Every year, every mile, a memory – the first time they met while at a bar, his smile arrogant but his eyes young – when he showed up at the gas station one morning on on his way to work in his uniform, surprised and declaring it “fate” since he had lost her number – when he kissed her under the pine tree canopy after asking to marry her – the many days spent in happiness until the many more days spent in indifference, then hatred, then disgust. She was flying from them all.
As the sun began to fade in the blue sky, she felt a need to stretch and see someone else to fill her mind besides Leonard. On an exit near the Georgia border she spotted an exit to Hilton Head and remembered that the welcome center had the “best bathrooms on I-95.”
She ignored the beseeching of many polo-clad attendees to seek a night on the island in order to bathe herself in the clean sinks of the bathroom, rubbing an anxious sweat off the back of her neck, and looked for some refreshments in the florescent snack machines. Nothing looked appetizing.
Back on the road, just over the Georgia border, she spotted a produce stand, impossibly on the highway.
“Do you have anything besides peaches?”
“Hmph.” The old lady standing stooped behind the wooden table looked as if it was incredible that anyone could want anything besides peaches.
“I’ve got some yellow squash, cucumber, tomatoes… and boiled peanuts in the back.”
Anna was dubious of the safety of the homemade boiled peanuts but something hot was just what she needed.
“Do you have anything to drink?”
“Peach tea.”
Anna gracious accepted a serving of sweet peach tea and stood to the side of the stand, cracking open the peanuts, and watching the cars compete down the highway.
“You ain’t from around here?”
Anna eyed her, guessing her reluctance toward peaches made her a foreigner. “No, ma’am.”
“My name is Pasha and I grew up around here. Lived here my whole life on this highway.”
Anna didn’t know what to say. She had grown up on the highway, too.
“Where are you headed now?”
“I’m not sure…”
“Oh, you know. No one gets on the highway without knowing their destination.”
“Perhaps I am just here for the journey.”
“Like, you’re havin’ a road trip?” Pasha looked as if the word tasted bad in her mouth.
“It feels more like… a crossing.”
Pasha looked hard at Anna and saw something she hadn’t seen before.
“If it be a crossing… you must have the Lord on your side. For there can be no crossing without the Lord.”
“What if what I am crossing towards is not where the Lord wants me? Maybe He meant for me to stay on the other side.”
Pasha paused, as if confirming what she saw before.
“No, baby. You’re headed the right way. Comfort will be on the other side.”
Another car drove up just then and Anna took her leave, feeling as if she had met an angel. Her spirit soared, anyhow.
But the sun continued his descent and she began to wonder, during her next gasoline stop, if she would make it there before dark and even if she should. If the destination was really the goal, as some people believed, maybe Anna should sleep beforehand.
A hour later, jacked up on caffeine, she hit the Florida state line, with its chipper welcome she didn’t feel and knew she really did need to stop. Signs indicated she was near Jacksonville, which she figured was a good place to buy a hotel room without spending a month’s pay.
In a cross street that boasted many hotels she chose the cheapest-sounding one – the Holiday Inn Express – although it still looked very nice, with no motel-style doors. Her room was on the third floor and the elevator was broken, but the smell of clean linens and hotel soap in the hallways made her relax already.
The sounds of loud yelling and a slammed door startled her as she tried to figure out which way she was supposed to slide her card. An angry man bristled by her, still muttering words he had meant to scream, with hair continually falling in his eyes, which she did her best to avoid.
He stood waiting impatiently in the front of the elevator, too in his own head to remember it was broken. Her door finally allowed her entrance but she hesitated.
“Hey.”
He glared at her.
“The elevator is broken.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
He stormed down the stairs and she ventured into her room, nonplussed.
There weren’t any towels.
She considered just calling the front desk to send her towels but then she remembered the wild look in that man’s eyes and decided to make the trip herself.
Joan at the front desk left to find the cleaning staff’s hidden stash of towels, so Anna looked for somewhere to sit while waiting.
The angry man was sprawled on the longest couch, his feet still hanging off the edge, and his arm hiding his eyes.
“You look uncomfortable.”
He was startled, then looked sheepish.
“I’m fine.”
“You looked like you were fighting earlier.”
He looked at her left hand. “Are you married?”
“No.” He looked unconvinced, but also relieved. He covered his eyes again.
“Why are you here?”
“I need towels.”
“Why didn’t you just call down?”
“I wanted company.”
When he removed his arm off his eyes and witnessed the yearning in her eyes, he didn’t cover his face again.
When Joan came back with the towels, he followed her up the stairs.
She learned three things that night. First, Leonard’s lack of sexual interest in her had nothing to do with her appeal, as Cade made apparent many times that night. Second, she could still feel those warm feelings inside that made her feel more than alive. She wasn’t dead.
Third, there weren’t any boundaries left to cross.
When she awoke, Cade was gone, she assumed to make up with his wife. She enjoyed the hot shower water once more, toasted and smothered a bagel in cream cheese from the lobby, and prepared herself for the last hour drive with a bad cup of coffee.
Finally, she reached her destination, which she hadn’t known the whole time but knew, at the same time.
She parked her car at a meter and walked to the sea wall, where she had stood as a young child, and looked out over the expansive Atlantic Ocean meeting St. Augustine. She had crossed back here, to where she had first felt adventure in her soul, and removed the barrier that had reined her in until she had forgotten the endless possibilities.
She slipped the golden band in between two broken granite slabs and began to wander towards the pier.