I grew edgy inside the truck stop at two a.m. with my thirteenth cup of coffee. The waitress wore white and sported a handmade tattoo of a bat on her cheek but still looked as appetizing as a buttered biscuit. I picked the twangiest country tune they had on the box. By this point, the maudlin atmosphere had crept into me like the faint blue smoke from everybody’s cigarettes.
My car had slid off the road, that’s why I was there. I had stood at the phone booth to call Triple A and they told me it would be morning before the wrecker would come to pull me out of the ditch.

My dad always told me that there’s nothing you can say to a man on his way. Truthfully, I never got it. There isn’t much that’s clear about it, really, given that he would say it in this deliberately vague way, out of any kind of context and while looking off into the distance. That’s the sort of man he was, though, and it didn’t hit me until recently that, probably, in some goofy way, he was talking about himself.