The Intersection by Mike Miller
Bing bong. The electronic chime announced a new customer. The man approached the counter and fished a weathered wallet from his back pocket.
“Eight dollars on two.” He laid down a five and three ones and curtly walked back towards the entrance. Just like always, every transaction was swift and efficient. Only the truckers ever gabbed it up. The man placed his right hand on the door and pushed. His palm left a large sweaty mark on the glass as he left.
Bing bong. The chime also announced the exits.
Rebecca remembered how she used to not mind the sound. For a synthetic bell, it possessed a slightly charming and simple melody. But after two years of the noise, she grew to resent it. At this point the bell had trained her. She snapped awake from behind the register every time it rang across the empty store.
The bell did have its bonuses. It was a nice break from the monotony of the lifeless music which replayed the same songs every seventy minutes or so, a soundtack to bland banality. They were dull little pieces that never went anywhere. There were two different tapes she could choose to play, but that didn’t matter. She knew both tapes by heart, and didn’t really like either of them. These songs were so boring that they guaranteed to never offend even the most easily offended customer.
The chime at least told you something was happening.
Rebecca looked out through the front glass wall as the man finished pumping his gas. After replacing the nozzle, he drove away in his dusty red truck. He took a left and returned to the freeway. Most people only stopped by the station if they needed gas or had to go to the bathroom.
* * *
A new vehicle approached. It was a large family van. Rebecca could see the mother in the passenger seat turned backwards to handle her rambunctious children. The windshield was blurred lightly, probably from the dead bugs which would accumulate and splatter against the speeding car. Some cars stopped at the stand just to wipe them away.
The van stopped at pump number three and the family piled out: a young couple with two little kids, one boy and one girl. They looked tired and worn. Since it was almost sundown, they had probably traveled all day. They started walking for the door.
Rebecca waited for the electronic chime to tell her what she already knew.
* * *
“Excuse me, but your soda machine isn’t working.” The small boy held his empty seventy-nine cent cup anxiously while his father waited for a reply. Rebecca thought his roughly parted blond hair resembled her brother’s when he was younger. Now Rebecca’s brother combed it straight back like an attorney. He wasn’t an attorney yet, but would be one after law school.
“You have to pull the lever down all the way.” The man has said ‘soda,’ but Rebecca knew he meant the iced slush machine. The dried, sugary syrup which leaked over the machinery made the pump sticky and hard to use. Rebecca had to clean it at the end of every shift, but the tired old machine would never work well by about noon the next day anyways. Rebecca had wanted to fix it for awhile, but she just never got around to it.
She listened to the machine hum and fizz as it poured the slush into the little boy’s cup. “Thanks.” The father started filling his a cup with coffee. The little boy started to bounce away, leaving a trail of spilled drops of red goop across the tile floor. “You’ll need a top for that, Jason.” The father capped his own drink and caught up with his boy.
Rebecca looked over at the mother and daughter who were in the candy aisles selecting snacks for their trip. The mother clutched several pieces tightly to her chest. The girl carefully examined several different chocolates before deciding on a bag of Hershey Kisses. Rebecca leaned her tired head against her palm as she waited for the family to finish. She thought, would this have been her life if she was still with Carl? Two kids and a van, driving around together in wonderful, lovely happiness and messing up other people’s convenience stores?
The mother assembled the group at the register before Rebecca. “This’ll be it.” Rebecca knew all of the prices for the chips, candy, and drinks they were buying and rang it up.
“Jason, stop that.” The mom’s delicate features sharpened at the command. Jason slowly stopped teasing his little sister, then quickly rushed out the door behind his father. The little girl defensively wrapped herself around her mother’s side. “Kids can be such a pain. He’s always finding ways to get into trouble.” The mother looked to Rebecca while patting her daughter lovingly on the head. “I don’t know why I keep them sometimes.”
“Sure.” Rebecca politely smiled back and handed the lady her change. Rebecca instinctively pretended to understand what the young mother had said. When she thought about it though, Rebecca had no idea what the woman had meant.
* * *
The mop covered the white surface with a thin layer of gray film. It collected a crumpled napkin that had missed the garbage can and a few crushed potato chips. Rebecca always hated those customers that couldn’t wait to leave the store before eating their food. In their hurry they always left bits and crumbs, but still she was oddly grateful for the incosiderate act. At least it made the cleaning relevant. It was always tiring to mop an already immaculate floor.
Rebecca finished and dragged the mop back to its bucket, then rolled it into the utility closet. She grabbed the cleaning spray and a rag and moved towards the fountain drinks. It was time to clean the soda machine.
As she rubbed away the sticky grime of the day’s syrup, she looked outside at the night sky. Beyond the dim light of her station, and the giant red and yellow sign advertising her presence to the highway travelers, was a giant black abyss. She always thought the desert looked so much prettier at night when all you could see were the stars and the red and white car lights from the highway a quarter mile over. The dark uncertainty of the night was much more appealing than the harsh wasteland exposed by the sun.
The phony music had stopped playing half an hour ago when the station had closed. The only sounds were the squeaking of the rag against metal, and the gentle buzzes of the distant traffic and neon signs, all of which were so much better than the door chime and vanilla music. Rebecca smiled and wiped.
* * *
Rebecca took one last look around the store before leaving. Checking to see that every item was properly placed and in order, she surveyed the room just as she had for the past two years. The view was still identical to evey occasion before it.
She turned and began to head out of the store when she saw a pair of lights growing before her. A car had turned off the highway and was heading straight for the station. Hopefully it was heading for Hanford, but nobody did at this hour except for her on her drive home. Rebecca ducked back behind the counter and nervously peaked out at the car. Hopefully, the car would drive past her and head to town a good two miles down the road. It didn’t.
Something within her made her nervous. This guy didn’t need gas or have to go to the bathroom, the way the car hustled towards her. With her store’s main lights all blacked out, this stranger knew she was already closed for business but headed her way anyways.
Rebecca snatched the phone and had her finger poised over the buttons as the car slid to a stop just feet from the door. She could call the cops but they’d never make it; the nearest one was probably thirty minutes away. The fierce bright headlights bleached the room and cast long, thick shadows against the back wall. While the engine continued its fierce growling, Rebecca could barely hear the car door shutting closed. Covering her eyes, Rebecca tried to identify the motive of the silhouette that wandered in front of the headlights.
He knocked loudly on the door. Rebecca hoped that the stranger would decide to leave. Then Rebecca remembered that her car was still parked outside. He must know she was here.
“Rebecca!” Hearing her own name was a shock, but the voice that said it was disturbingly familiar. “Are you in there?”
Rebecca stood up and saw Carl Ventura, a little bit older, a little bit worn, but Carl all the same.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you all day.” His tone was unusually casual for a man she hadn’t seen for years. Rebecca studied the effect that time had had on Carl. His face had developed some thickness to it, although his eyes were still bright and luminous in their sockets. The t-shirt and jeans of yesterday were now a sweater and khakis, but not in a necessarily overdressed way. His once scruffy hair, always awry in homeroom and flattening itself out through the day, now seemed nicely coifed with some focus to it. Carl had certainly looked worse.
“You mind if I come in?” he asked, his face still pressed against the window and his hands cupped around his face to eliminate the glare of the headlights on the window. Rebecca realized she needed to say something.
“I’ll go out there.” She advanced towards the door. Bing bong.
* * *
The jingling of the keys had a relaxing rhythm to them. Since she quit smoking, Rebecca always played with her keys in her hand when she was nervous. It helped to release the tension.
“And after I talked to your mom for about, oh… maybe five, ten minutes, I drove over here to see you fast as I could.” Rebecca wondered how Carl could keep his cool like this. Sure he was already smoking his second cigarette, but Carl always smoked. He had helped her start in the 11th grade.
“So…?”
“So I wanted to see how you were doing. Nothing special.” His smile seemed genuine.
Rebecca sighed deeply. “I’m good,” she lied. “Nothing special.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.” Rebecca remembered when she could tell Carl exactly what she was thinking. She kept waiting and thinking, but couldn’t find the right words. Carl sucked back on his cigarette then flicked it to the side. “Me, I’m just working down in L.A. My band’s been playing some gigs around town. Ever hear of the Whiskey?”
“No.”
“Well, we play there a bunch.” Rebecca wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or not, but Carl’s assured delivery sure made it sound like a happening place. “Texas was cool too.”
“What do you want, Carl?” Rebecca grew instantly impatient with Carl’s small talk. Carl’s head suddenly jerked from her outburst. He started taking out another cigarette from his crumpled pack and tried to remember the speech he had rehearsed to himself for the past two hundred miles.
“What I want…” Carl lit his cigarette and took a pair of puffs, “is to take you with me.” Another inhale and Carl let out a small cloud of gray smoke. Rebecca twirled her keys around her index finger and waited for more. “I mean look at this. Everything here is dirt. The town’s filled with people who have no idea of the world that exists down the freeway. The beach, the city, the people, it’s incredible. And the whole time I spent thinking about you. About how if you had come with me, it would have made the whole trip better. And then just last night something snapped, I knew that this urge to come back and see you was the right thing to do. I just want to… rescue you from this place.” Carl finally calmed down and for the first time looked a bit, just a bit, nervous. The next cigarette intake would be an excuse to not talk.
Rebecca finally thought she found a way to phrase it. “You know, Carl, ever since you left me--”
“But you didn’t want to go,” Carl said in defense.
“I’ve been sitting here almost everyday thinking about how I didn’t go with you.” Rebecca’s eyes focused on the gravel of the parking lot, while Carl focused on her. “And I told myself that was… the biggest mistake of my life. And I waited, everyday, for you to come back and ask me again so I could do it all over again different. I never imagined you actually would. Today of all days.” Rebecca listened to her words and hoped they sounded right to Carl.
“So that’s a yes then?” Rebecca looked up at Carl, who smiled smugly with his cigarette burning short in his mouth. She looked at the dark store and imagined all of the items, nicely stacked and ordered. She couldn’t actually see them, but she had seen them so much that she dreamed of candy bars and potato chips. She looked over at the dark sign mounted on its bright red pole. Right now it was a dark black hole in the starlit sky. She looked at the pumps, and her five-year-old brown Buick parked to the side. The only light was the one outside the store mounted on the ceiling and casting a little halo of light down around Rebecca and Carl. It was on at night to help guide her to her car.
“No,” she said. Carl’s cigarette almost fell out from his lips, but then he recovered.
Carl, anxiously clearing his throat, replied, “Well, why not, Becky--”
“Because I got fed up with waiting for you to ‘rescue’ me.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, ‘No thank you.’” Rebecca coolly replied. She grasped her keys firmly and started walking towards her car.
“Listen, Becky. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life here, do ya? I’m offering you an opportunity to leave.” Carl had given up on the cigarette and followed Rebecca to her car. His pleading did not disturb her march.
“I said no thanks, Carl.” She opened the door and slid inside. Her key hit the ignition, and the car choked until its engine started purring smoothly.
“Come on, Becky. Don’t screw this all up again.” Carl put his fingers over the half rolled window.
“Listen to you.” Rebecca scolded, “You act like everything’s perfect for you.”
“It is. And I want you to have it too,” he pleaded.
“Don’t worry about it.” Rebecca gave one last smile, the second of the night, and drove away.
* * *
Carl was pissed. He told himself over and over how ridiculous it was. There would be no way Becky Schuman would just leap into his arms and ride off into the sunset with him. For the entire ride he tried not to think about the foolishness of his plan. Even at Becky’s house, Mrs. Schuman was pleasantly surprised at his sudden arrival, though she had no idea this man came to steal her daughter. Or tried to anyways.
And now the cold reality hit him: it was a ridiculous notion he could win her back. Things change, but maybe Becky Schuman just didn’t want to. He turned and watched Becky’s car reach the road and considered making one last heroic stab at it. Maybe if I run to her right now, she’ll remember the high school crush from long ago and the feelings that went with him. If he gave it one more shot, that would be the one to win her back.
Before Carl could make a decision he started thinking about why Becky had made a left to the highway instead of the right back home. Who knew what Becky was up to? Maybe she had something to do? “Crazy chick,” Carl muttered to himself as he stumbled back to his car parked awkwardly under the lone fluorescent bulb of the gas station.
* * *
Rebecca laughed to herself and slapped her steering wheel gleefully. Her windshield had just picked up its first dead bug.
Bing bong. The electronic chime announced a new customer. The man approached the counter and fished a weathered wallet from his back pocket.
“Eight dollars on two.” He laid down a five and three ones and curtly walked back towards the entrance. Just like always, every transaction was swift and efficient. Only the truckers ever gabbed it up. The man placed his right hand on the door and pushed. His palm left a large sweaty mark on the glass as he left.
Bing bong. The chime also announced the exits.
Rebecca remembered how she used to not mind the sound. For a synthetic bell, it possessed a slightly charming and simple melody. But after two years of the noise, she grew to resent it. At this point the bell had trained her. She snapped awake from behind the register every time it rang across the empty store.
The bell did have its bonuses. It was a nice break from the monotony of the lifeless music which replayed the same songs every seventy minutes or so, a soundtack to bland banality. They were dull little pieces that never went anywhere. There were two different tapes she could choose to play, but that didn’t matter. She knew both tapes by heart, and didn’t really like either of them. These songs were so boring that they guaranteed to never offend even the most easily offended customer.
The chime at least told you something was happening.
Rebecca looked out through the front glass wall as the man finished pumping his gas. After replacing the nozzle, he drove away in his dusty red truck. He took a left and returned to the freeway. Most people only stopped by the station if they needed gas or had to go to the bathroom.
* * *
A new vehicle approached. It was a large family van. Rebecca could see the mother in the passenger seat turned backwards to handle her rambunctious children. The windshield was blurred lightly, probably from the dead bugs which would accumulate and splatter against the speeding car. Some cars stopped at the stand just to wipe them away.
The van stopped at pump number three and the family piled out: a young couple with two little kids, one boy and one girl. They looked tired and worn. Since it was almost sundown, they had probably traveled all day. They started walking for the door.
Rebecca waited for the electronic chime to tell her what she already knew.
* * *
“Excuse me, but your soda machine isn’t working.” The small boy held his empty seventy-nine cent cup anxiously while his father waited for a reply. Rebecca thought his roughly parted blond hair resembled her brother’s when he was younger. Now Rebecca’s brother combed it straight back like an attorney. He wasn’t an attorney yet, but would be one after law school.
“You have to pull the lever down all the way.” The man has said ‘soda,’ but Rebecca knew he meant the iced slush machine. The dried, sugary syrup which leaked over the machinery made the pump sticky and hard to use. Rebecca had to clean it at the end of every shift, but the tired old machine would never work well by about noon the next day anyways. Rebecca had wanted to fix it for awhile, but she just never got around to it.
She listened to the machine hum and fizz as it poured the slush into the little boy’s cup. “Thanks.” The father started filling his a cup with coffee. The little boy started to bounce away, leaving a trail of spilled drops of red goop across the tile floor. “You’ll need a top for that, Jason.” The father capped his own drink and caught up with his boy.
Rebecca looked over at the mother and daughter who were in the candy aisles selecting snacks for their trip. The mother clutched several pieces tightly to her chest. The girl carefully examined several different chocolates before deciding on a bag of Hershey Kisses. Rebecca leaned her tired head against her palm as she waited for the family to finish. She thought, would this have been her life if she was still with Carl? Two kids and a van, driving around together in wonderful, lovely happiness and messing up other people’s convenience stores?
The mother assembled the group at the register before Rebecca. “This’ll be it.” Rebecca knew all of the prices for the chips, candy, and drinks they were buying and rang it up.
“Jason, stop that.” The mom’s delicate features sharpened at the command. Jason slowly stopped teasing his little sister, then quickly rushed out the door behind his father. The little girl defensively wrapped herself around her mother’s side. “Kids can be such a pain. He’s always finding ways to get into trouble.” The mother looked to Rebecca while patting her daughter lovingly on the head. “I don’t know why I keep them sometimes.”
“Sure.” Rebecca politely smiled back and handed the lady her change. Rebecca instinctively pretended to understand what the young mother had said. When she thought about it though, Rebecca had no idea what the woman had meant.
* * *
The mop covered the white surface with a thin layer of gray film. It collected a crumpled napkin that had missed the garbage can and a few crushed potato chips. Rebecca always hated those customers that couldn’t wait to leave the store before eating their food. In their hurry they always left bits and crumbs, but still she was oddly grateful for the incosiderate act. At least it made the cleaning relevant. It was always tiring to mop an already immaculate floor.
Rebecca finished and dragged the mop back to its bucket, then rolled it into the utility closet. She grabbed the cleaning spray and a rag and moved towards the fountain drinks. It was time to clean the soda machine.
As she rubbed away the sticky grime of the day’s syrup, she looked outside at the night sky. Beyond the dim light of her station, and the giant red and yellow sign advertising her presence to the highway travelers, was a giant black abyss. She always thought the desert looked so much prettier at night when all you could see were the stars and the red and white car lights from the highway a quarter mile over. The dark uncertainty of the night was much more appealing than the harsh wasteland exposed by the sun.
The phony music had stopped playing half an hour ago when the station had closed. The only sounds were the squeaking of the rag against metal, and the gentle buzzes of the distant traffic and neon signs, all of which were so much better than the door chime and vanilla music. Rebecca smiled and wiped.
* * *
Rebecca took one last look around the store before leaving. Checking to see that every item was properly placed and in order, she surveyed the room just as she had for the past two years. The view was still identical to evey occasion before it.
She turned and began to head out of the store when she saw a pair of lights growing before her. A car had turned off the highway and was heading straight for the station. Hopefully it was heading for Hanford, but nobody did at this hour except for her on her drive home. Rebecca ducked back behind the counter and nervously peaked out at the car. Hopefully, the car would drive past her and head to town a good two miles down the road. It didn’t.
Something within her made her nervous. This guy didn’t need gas or have to go to the bathroom, the way the car hustled towards her. With her store’s main lights all blacked out, this stranger knew she was already closed for business but headed her way anyways.
Rebecca snatched the phone and had her finger poised over the buttons as the car slid to a stop just feet from the door. She could call the cops but they’d never make it; the nearest one was probably thirty minutes away. The fierce bright headlights bleached the room and cast long, thick shadows against the back wall. While the engine continued its fierce growling, Rebecca could barely hear the car door shutting closed. Covering her eyes, Rebecca tried to identify the motive of the silhouette that wandered in front of the headlights.
He knocked loudly on the door. Rebecca hoped that the stranger would decide to leave. Then Rebecca remembered that her car was still parked outside. He must know she was here.
“Rebecca!” Hearing her own name was a shock, but the voice that said it was disturbingly familiar. “Are you in there?”
Rebecca stood up and saw Carl Ventura, a little bit older, a little bit worn, but Carl all the same.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you all day.” His tone was unusually casual for a man she hadn’t seen for years. Rebecca studied the effect that time had had on Carl. His face had developed some thickness to it, although his eyes were still bright and luminous in their sockets. The t-shirt and jeans of yesterday were now a sweater and khakis, but not in a necessarily overdressed way. His once scruffy hair, always awry in homeroom and flattening itself out through the day, now seemed nicely coifed with some focus to it. Carl had certainly looked worse.
“You mind if I come in?” he asked, his face still pressed against the window and his hands cupped around his face to eliminate the glare of the headlights on the window. Rebecca realized she needed to say something.
“I’ll go out there.” She advanced towards the door. Bing bong.
* * *
The jingling of the keys had a relaxing rhythm to them. Since she quit smoking, Rebecca always played with her keys in her hand when she was nervous. It helped to release the tension.
“And after I talked to your mom for about, oh… maybe five, ten minutes, I drove over here to see you fast as I could.” Rebecca wondered how Carl could keep his cool like this. Sure he was already smoking his second cigarette, but Carl always smoked. He had helped her start in the 11th grade.
“So…?”
“So I wanted to see how you were doing. Nothing special.” His smile seemed genuine.
Rebecca sighed deeply. “I’m good,” she lied. “Nothing special.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.” Rebecca remembered when she could tell Carl exactly what she was thinking. She kept waiting and thinking, but couldn’t find the right words. Carl sucked back on his cigarette then flicked it to the side. “Me, I’m just working down in L.A. My band’s been playing some gigs around town. Ever hear of the Whiskey?”
“No.”
“Well, we play there a bunch.” Rebecca wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or not, but Carl’s assured delivery sure made it sound like a happening place. “Texas was cool too.”
“What do you want, Carl?” Rebecca grew instantly impatient with Carl’s small talk. Carl’s head suddenly jerked from her outburst. He started taking out another cigarette from his crumpled pack and tried to remember the speech he had rehearsed to himself for the past two hundred miles.
“What I want…” Carl lit his cigarette and took a pair of puffs, “is to take you with me.” Another inhale and Carl let out a small cloud of gray smoke. Rebecca twirled her keys around her index finger and waited for more. “I mean look at this. Everything here is dirt. The town’s filled with people who have no idea of the world that exists down the freeway. The beach, the city, the people, it’s incredible. And the whole time I spent thinking about you. About how if you had come with me, it would have made the whole trip better. And then just last night something snapped, I knew that this urge to come back and see you was the right thing to do. I just want to… rescue you from this place.” Carl finally calmed down and for the first time looked a bit, just a bit, nervous. The next cigarette intake would be an excuse to not talk.
Rebecca finally thought she found a way to phrase it. “You know, Carl, ever since you left me--”
“But you didn’t want to go,” Carl said in defense.
“I’ve been sitting here almost everyday thinking about how I didn’t go with you.” Rebecca’s eyes focused on the gravel of the parking lot, while Carl focused on her. “And I told myself that was… the biggest mistake of my life. And I waited, everyday, for you to come back and ask me again so I could do it all over again different. I never imagined you actually would. Today of all days.” Rebecca listened to her words and hoped they sounded right to Carl.
“So that’s a yes then?” Rebecca looked up at Carl, who smiled smugly with his cigarette burning short in his mouth. She looked at the dark store and imagined all of the items, nicely stacked and ordered. She couldn’t actually see them, but she had seen them so much that she dreamed of candy bars and potato chips. She looked over at the dark sign mounted on its bright red pole. Right now it was a dark black hole in the starlit sky. She looked at the pumps, and her five-year-old brown Buick parked to the side. The only light was the one outside the store mounted on the ceiling and casting a little halo of light down around Rebecca and Carl. It was on at night to help guide her to her car.
“No,” she said. Carl’s cigarette almost fell out from his lips, but then he recovered.
Carl, anxiously clearing his throat, replied, “Well, why not, Becky--”
“Because I got fed up with waiting for you to ‘rescue’ me.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, ‘No thank you.’” Rebecca coolly replied. She grasped her keys firmly and started walking towards her car.
“Listen, Becky. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life here, do ya? I’m offering you an opportunity to leave.” Carl had given up on the cigarette and followed Rebecca to her car. His pleading did not disturb her march.
“I said no thanks, Carl.” She opened the door and slid inside. Her key hit the ignition, and the car choked until its engine started purring smoothly.
“Come on, Becky. Don’t screw this all up again.” Carl put his fingers over the half rolled window.
“Listen to you.” Rebecca scolded, “You act like everything’s perfect for you.”
“It is. And I want you to have it too,” he pleaded.
“Don’t worry about it.” Rebecca gave one last smile, the second of the night, and drove away.
* * *
Carl was pissed. He told himself over and over how ridiculous it was. There would be no way Becky Schuman would just leap into his arms and ride off into the sunset with him. For the entire ride he tried not to think about the foolishness of his plan. Even at Becky’s house, Mrs. Schuman was pleasantly surprised at his sudden arrival, though she had no idea this man came to steal her daughter. Or tried to anyways.
And now the cold reality hit him: it was a ridiculous notion he could win her back. Things change, but maybe Becky Schuman just didn’t want to. He turned and watched Becky’s car reach the road and considered making one last heroic stab at it. Maybe if I run to her right now, she’ll remember the high school crush from long ago and the feelings that went with him. If he gave it one more shot, that would be the one to win her back.
Before Carl could make a decision he started thinking about why Becky had made a left to the highway instead of the right back home. Who knew what Becky was up to? Maybe she had something to do? “Crazy chick,” Carl muttered to himself as he stumbled back to his car parked awkwardly under the lone fluorescent bulb of the gas station.
* * *
Rebecca laughed to herself and slapped her steering wheel gleefully. Her windshield had just picked up its first dead bug.