The No-Truck Truck Stop


"I'll wait 20 minutes and that's it," Ruby said to
herself checking her watch. "That's it," she said
louder without realizing it.

"What?" the waitress asked a bit snappish.

"Coffee, please."

Ruby watched the girl walk up the aisle between the
long lunch counter and the booths lining the windowed
wall. A real Jersey Girl, big hair and all, long
fingernails painted blue, with little somethings in
spots near the tips. Ruby had read about Jersey Girls
and listened to Bruce Springsteen sing about them.
Who knew? If her father had stayed with her mother,
she might have been a Jersey Girl herself.

Ruby loved the father she did have, the man who
married her mother after she was born; this had
nothing to do with him. Her caring stepfather would
always be part of who Ruby was; she just wanted now to
know the part she never knew. She needed to know it.
The need had grown inside her until she was heavy with
it.

So here she was, at a truck stop on a highway in
Neptune, New Jersey.

The parking lot was big enough for a truck stop, she
considered, looking out the window. There were some
rusty gas pumps at one end and some overgrown weedy
strips that looked like concrete might be underneath.
It was a huge lot for such a small diner and mostly
empty, graveled in front, but grassy everywhere else.


The interior of the diner looked like something out of
a magazine spread on the topic of 1950s Roadside
America. It even had those little jukeboxes at the
end of the tables in the booths and every few feet
along the lunch counter. Ruby recognized the voice of
Fats Domino, only because her mother played oldies all
the time back in Pittsburgh. Ruby's mother wasn't
that old, but she liked the music.

The diner was shaped like an old railroad car. Behind
the lunch counter the wall was paneled in
diamond-shaped aluminum tiles in an intricate pattern
that looked set by hand. The kick-wall beneath the
counter was covered in the same aluminum tiles. The
countertop and the tabletops were all the same tan
color Formica worn soft looking.

Men in work clothes sat along the counter on red
leather stools with aluminum trim. The glassed-in
entrance separated two sections of booths with seats
and backs in the same red leather. A family took up
the largest booth. That was it for clientele. Ruby
studied the green paint on the walls and woodwork. It
looked at least 50 years old, but somebody kept it
clean.

A song Ruby didn't know started playing, "I was
dancin? with my darlin'," and the whole place suddenly
erupted in noise. Shouts of, "Oh, no, not again," and
"Maryann, shut that thing!" "Ahhh, Cecil!" An old
man at the counter hung his head, but it didn't stop
the ribbing. Another man said surprisingly, "Cecil,
don't mind these heartless ignoramuses who are lacking
in romance of the soul."

There was an abandoned motel across the highway. A
surprisingly fresh-looking sign had no words, only a
picture of a big comfy pillow. Ruby stared at traffic
passing on Route 33 noticing not one truck. Some
truck stop, she thought, scanning the parking lot. A
few pickups, a dusty Chevy, and her rented
whatever-it-was.

The ramp to the Garden State Parkway was in view.
Ruby had time on her hands on her way here and had
taken the shore route along the ocean, but the Parkway
would get her back to Newark Airport a lot faster.

"Don't any real trucks come to this truck stop?" she
asked the waitress.

"No," the waitress answered and left.

Ruby noticed the girl was friendly with everyone else
in the place. The door opened and a group of men
crowded in. They received a big welcome. One of them
got a friendly hug. Ruby looked out the window again
and saw another pickup pull in with a gang of men in
the back. Her mother had told her he drove a big rig.
When Ruby called him and said she wanted to meet him
for the first time since she was two days old, he told
her he drove a big rig, too.

Ruby's mother had known all along where he was. The
child support came every month with a clear return
address until last year when Ruby turned 21. Last
year was when Ruby's mother told Ruby her father was
not her father. Ruby's mother was so unnerved and so
clearly in pain, Ruby couldn't ask too many questions
just then. But she began surfing web sites about New
Jersey, subscribing to New Jersey magazines, and
playing the songs of Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi
and Patti Smith, over and over and over.

The only question she had asked of her mother: "Why
did he have to go?"

Her mother started crying and answered softly, "He had
a family of his own, Ruby."

The new arrivals took the booth just behind Ruby.
They were all dressed like farmhands and wore work
boots dusted with red clay. Sun-weathered men, they
were, with strong-looking hands and ropy muscles on
their arms. She began to feel vulnerable in this
place out of another time, a strange place where there
were no strangers. But she kept to her schedule and
took a sip of coffee.

"Damn, that's good," she said in surprise at the
coffee.

One of the men had his arm across the back of the
seat. When Ruby leaned back, her bare neck touched
the bare arm. She jumped forward at the warmth of
skin. The man moved his arm out of her way and
apologized. Ruby smiled and nodded. She saw the hair
on the man's arm was sun-bleached blond against a deep
tan. He wore a plaid shirt with his sleeve rolled up
at his elbow. Ruby found she was staring at the bare
arm and blushed deep red. The other men in the booth
laughed and poked each other.

"Good coffee here," the man with the arm agreed
pleasantly.

Ruby nodded again. She stood up and went through a
small hallway directed by a rest room sign. The
ladies' room door was locked and a voice called, "Be
out in a minute." Ruby stood there thinking the woman
really did mean a minute. It was a small space, this
vestibule, claustrophobically small, windowless, and
airless. The men's room was immediately next to the
ladies room with only a thin wall between.

When the man with the bare arm stepped in from the
diner, he and Ruby were very close. She couldn't
smell hard labor on him as she'd expected. She could
see disconcertingly deep into his hazel eyes. She
could feel the heat again on the back of her neck. She
looked down in confusion and saw his shoes were clean
and only the one arm was tan. What a silly thing to
notice, she thought.

"We got to stop meeting like this," he said with an
easy smile.

"Excuse me," she said and started back out to the
diner. She couldn't very well stand there and listen
to him piss. She felt the eyes of everyone in the
place turn on her as she sat back down in her booth.
She wished she had dressed down a bit, at least worn
jeans. More people had come in, even a few women, but
no men alone. Surely he wouldn't bring his wife and
kids, not the way he had suddenly rushed her off the
phone in the middle of a sentence.

"Truck stop, Route 33, Neptune, next to Stewart's
Drive-In, west of the Garden State." And he hung up.

Her coffee had been refilled and she drank more,
thinking whoever was in the ladies' room would be out
any time now. She felt rather than saw the man with
the one tanned arm sit down again. She wasn't sure
the man had flirted with her or not. He was twice her
age. Usually she'd be more courteous to an older
person, but there was something about him.

No, she decided, he wasn't flirting. He was just
attentive; the air between them was just filled with
his attention. She could feel his eyes on her slanted
out the sides. She was getting uncomfortable, between
him and the coffee, thinking she had missed the woman
leave the ladies' room. She stood, but the whole
bunch of men in the next booth, all at once, assured
her it was still occupied.

Ruby looked at her watch and saw that five minutes had
passed. She went toward the restroom, anyway, and
knocked sharply on the door. Again the same voice
said, "Be right out." Ruby stood there and just
couldn't take the stress on her bladder. She slipped
into the men's room and took care of the problem
quickly. On her way out, she got a round of applause
from her neighboring table. She imagined the sound of
her urination, a stream like a horse, she remembered,
had traveled throughout the diner. She sat down and
motioned to the waitress for her check.

"Pay at the counter," the girl all but snapped.

"Don't mind her," one of the men behind her said.
"Had a fight with her husband over a pretty girl with
short hair and hazel eyes."

Ruby didn't bother to smile, or respond, or even nod,
just looked out the window. There was a streaky red
sunset and the sky looked way down low, but night
wasn't near ready to fall. She watched the off-ramp of
the Garden State Parkway, a steady stream of cars, but
no trucks. She considered extending her allotted time
at the so-called truck stop. He could be stuck in
traffic. He could have gotten cold feet. He could
have died this very day. She wracked her brain
thinking of things that could keep a man from his
child. But then, she reasoned, he'd had no trouble
keeping himself from her all her life so far.

The door to the ladies' room finally opened and out
walked, of all things, another waitress. Her big hair
and a strong scent of hair spray told Ruby what the
girl had been doing in there all that time. The men
teased the waitress and she flipped them the finger.
"Ohhhhh," they roared, it seemed to Ruby, in a
never-ending wave of sound. Her eyes filled with
tears that the waitress could be so mean to her
without ever having set eyes on her. Just
inconsiderate, she told herself, not mean, not really.


She hurried into the ladies' room and washed her face.
She looked at her short hair. It was a little spiky,
but not really punky, naturally darker at the roots
than at the ends. Usually she liked it around her
high-boned face. Momentarily she felt a strong and
ridiculous regret simply stab at her that she did not
have Jersey Girl hair, that she lacked romance of the
soul.

She took a deep breath and went to the door. As she
started opening it, she heard the men's room door
click shut. It was then she noticed a public phone
hanging right there in the tiny lavatory. She had her
calling card in her skirt pocket. At first, her
mother was asking where she was calling from with a
calling card. Ruby had left a note saying only she'd
be gone for the day.

"Mom," Ruby said shortly, "how did you meet him?
Where did you meet him?"

"Oh, Ruby, it was all so long ago.?

Ruby said nothing and just let the silence go on until
her mother spoke again.

"I was at the Shore with some girlfriends. You know,
back when I worked in Philly. We always took a few
days and drove to the Shore. My car broke down on a
highway there and he fixed it for me. I waited in a
diner and he bought me dinner. There was a place
across the street. We went there, okay? Is that what
you want to know?"

"A sign with a pillow on it?"

"Ruby, where are you?"

"A truck stop?"

"Well, no, it started out to be a truck stop, but it
was just a diner, his grandfather's diner. It had
been their farmland, he told me, and the state took a
lot of it for the Garden State Parkway. His family
thought a new highway would bring a lot of trucks, so
they opened the diner"?

"Anything else?"

"He was going to sell it once his grandfather died.
He said he wanted no part of it, wanted to be on the
road."

"Mom, did he ever come to see me after that one time?"

"If he did, honey, he never told me about it."

Ruby hung up on her mother and tore out the door. The
booth with the men in it was still the booth with the
men in it, but where there had been three men on one
side, there were now two. She tried to remember if he
had actually come in with them or if he had only
joined them at their table. She threw some money down
and walked furiously to the door.

The waitress yelled, "Pay at the counter!" Ruby
stormed through the door, smashing it against the
entry frame. Angry shouts came from behind her. If
it hadn't been thick old glass, that door would have
shattered.

She jumped into her rented car and roared across the
highway, horns blaring from both directions. She
speeded up the entry ramp to the Garden State Parkway.
Once she stopped crying and started breathing
normally, she realized she was going in the wrong
direction for Newark Airport. She got off and on
again and headed north.

The Parkway overlooked the truck stop and she could
see in a field out back the big rig pulling out and
around the side of the diner. It headed west on
Highway 33 away from the Garden State Parkway. She
saw the plaid sleeve, the bare arm reaching out the
window and resting on the rearview mirror, out where
the sun would hit it next day, bleach the hairs, and
darken the skin.

She saw a directional sign come up fast on the Garden
State Parkway: No Trucks.


- Doris Lane 2000