West Virginia by Joe Halstead

Author:Joe Halstead
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944700317
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2017-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Janice said she wanted an eggs-in-the-basket sandwich from Cracker Barrel, so he took the Jeep and drove down the road to Cracker Barrel. Inside, they were playing a Johnny Cash song, or maybe it was Willie Nelson, and there were a lot of nostalgia products for sale. The girl standing behind the podium was maybe nineteen, twenty—blond, pale, unremarkable—and he said he wanted to place an order and she sent him to the checkout counter, where he paid the cashier seven or eight dollars for the eggs-in-the-basket sandwich. She said it’d be about a fifteen-minute wait. He walked around and the place was packed with fat people looking indifferent or sick, eating breakfast, all of them or at least most of them staring at him, and some people even seemed to recognize him, and then for a moment the slight weirdness he felt turned into a sort of paranoia. He picked up a magazine about West Virginia and struck a few notes on a toy piano, and then he saw Jen from the gallery standing in the corner and figured she must’ve lived close by and that was why she was standing alone, like him, and he walked over to her.

“Hey,” he said, “I thought that was you.”

“Oh, hey,” she said, smiling, “good to see you. What’re you doing here?”

“Oh, you know. Just… enjoying Cracker Barrel?”

She was wearing a sweater that looked like an ACE bandage and he thought it made her look very futuristic, like someone from the “real world” in The Matrix.

“How did everything go with… ?” she asked, looking serious.

He paused and then said, “OK, fine,” and looked down. “Yeah, there was a lot going on, but I definitely got somewhere. I mean, I either got somewhere or I made myself get there. I mean, everything just flipped, y’know? The guy I thought he was, uh, I don’t know.”

“So do you think you got there or made yourself get there?”

“Not sure there’s a difference.” There was a pause. “OK, so the guy, Cortis, I went to visit him, and he told me all this stuff. Well, the weird thing is is that he sort of suggested my dad might’ve just run off or something. Other than that I don’t know. I think about it and… what if he’s right? I mean, the body is still missing.”

“Oh, gosh,” she said, pausing with such a comical awkwardness that it seemed like a parody of something. “That’s, um, so—I don’t know. You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, no—I want to. Hey, you feel like Cracker Barrel? To eat. Tell me you’re hungry.”

“No, I actually just ate—I mean, it’s work, you know.”

“OK, all right. I mean, like, would you like to do something? I’d like to talk to you more. We can get some dinner or maybe a coffee afterward? I thought we could go.”

She blushed and said, “That’d be great. If you want.”

“You want to?”

She blushed once more and said, “Sure.”

They decided on a place—Secret Sandwich Society in Fayetteville—and they

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