Big Bend by Bill Roorbach

Author:Bill Roorbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2001-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Tracy is there exactly at nine, exactly as planned, fed and ready, with a single small duffel bag that wouldn’t hold enough socks for George. George is exhausted already, hungover. He gets behind the wheel and Tracy sits way down the long seat from him, and he’s sorry he likes her so well. They smile at one another and off they go, down the highway, slowly in front of the full load, a few laughs about the breakfront and Carl, some silence as the trip begins. Then Tracy picks up on something George must have said in the bar, something he wishes he hadn’t.

“Will we get to your sister’s by tonight?”

George thinks a while, says, “I guess we shouldn’t stop.”

They are quiet a good half hour then, listening to some pop political talk on the radio, the kind of stuff George always listens to alone. Luckily, the subject is corporate greed, and George kind of agrees—the blood stays out of his face. Tracy, she’s thinking about something else.

By lunch they haven’t said ten words, but the ride is companionable enough. George has the idea that Tracy likes him, too, and he’s trying to decide what to do about it. In the bar she’d talked the way kids will about what age people said she looked, had said she thought George didn’t look any older than she, if you thought about it. She was wrong, George thinks. I look exactly forty, and she looks exactly twenty-six, and that’s exactly fourteen reasons why the two of us are not going to get mixed up. Immediately he pictures his sister, realizes it’s her voice saying all this, throwing all this doubt into the air. Why should a small age gap matter? Then again, who said this person wanted anything to do with him anyway at all?

George and Tracy eat lunch at a truck stop off the highway, and George notices how the waitress assumes without the least judgment that he and the girl are some kind of item.

Back in the truck, Tracy seems to get off on the three cups of coffee she’s drunk, clicks the radio silent, starts in: “Why don’t we stop at your sister’s? You haven’t seen her in how long?”

George remembers all he’s told this voluble young woman, this strong, lovely woman who is suddenly his partner on the trip.

“Not that long, really.”

“Do you guys talk on the phone?”

“Not that much. Some.”

“Were you close when you were kids?”

“I think so.”

“What kind of close?”

And George finds himself talking, talking at length, his childhood, his little sister, his struggles with girlfriends, his sister’s brainy boyfriend, the death of his dad, his mother’s way of being, which he’d never quite seen how curious it was—the kind of conversation you have with someone you want to see again, someone you want to date, someone you want to love and wake up with and cook for and brag about and have small jokes with and tell your day to.

“You were injured. That’s what’s wrong. That’s exactly it.

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