Hardly Children: Stories by Laura Adamczyk

Author:Laura Adamczyk [Adamczyk, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Literary
ISBN: 9780374718688
Google: rDtIDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0796XZ6ZW
Publisher: FSG Originals
Published: 2018-11-19T22:00:00+00:00

HERE COMES YOUR MAN

T HE MAN DRIVES A TRUCK and has a glorious beard. It’s leather brown and looks impenetrable, like the after of a Just for Men commercial. He says, You probably wouldn’t be interested in someone like me. We’re in a bar on the edge of a college town, and my friends and I look like the grad students we are. They don’t understand why I like to come here, where there will be people we don’t know.

What department are you in?

History, I say.

I would have guessed science.

Because of the glasses?

They’re dark-rimmed and thick—massive. Someone once told me I looked like Woody Allen in them. Not the exact compliment a woman wants to hear, but I don’t mind. It’s kind of true.

What kind of truck do you drive? My dad used to work for Peterbilt.

Oh yeah? It’s a—

How much room is there in the cab?

* * *

IT’S COZY IN THAT little bed area behind the seats. The cushion takes up the whole space except for small cubbies in the walls. One has a tiny TV/DVD player in it; another is tall and holds a rack lined with Carhartts. The trucker places our shoes in an empty recess, tucking in the laces. He’s taped up a bunch of old-fashioned postcards on the walls. Lots of pronouncements from states that don’t get enough attention. Iowa: You Make Me Smile. Missouri: Let us show you the Show Me State! I like when young people collect old things. A way to say: everything used to be just a little better before. It makes the trucker seem interested in his world but not overly clever, like he’s not going to be making any jokes I don’t get.

I came straight up from Missouri, he says. Didn’t even stop at home. I just needed to be around people. He looks at me and smiles, scratching carefully beneath the rim of his dark knit cap. I’ve suddenly grown shy, always more interested in good lines than in actually delivering on them. It’s crowded with the two of us back there, and when he finally puts his arm around me and we take off our clothes, it is as though our lovemaking is all a complicated way of saving space. You know, we’d have more room if I could just put this here and you put that there … It feels like Tetris, like packing boxes in a different kind of truck, and I think maybe I should have gone into the sciences. All that spatial reasoning, something about conservation of energy.

Afterward, we lie perfectly creased into each other’s bodies.

I say, You must be really good at folding maps.

He says, You’re beautiful.

I bite my lip.

I could get used to this, he says, and I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.

* * *

HE JUMPS OUT of the truck then helps me down, and I have a vision of women wearing laced-up boots and full, complicated skirts, of a man pulling them from horse-drawn carriages. What kind of hat would I wear?

He wants my number.

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