I felt defeat. My eyelids were heavy, but my thoughts were fully formed and my speech was still intact. I wasn't beyond the ability to drive further into the night, toward a safe place to sleep, preferably with a friendlier face than the stuffed shirt who stared at us while we each formed an opinion about what to do next.
L sat on the loveseat across from the desk. She sighed and said, "The Lord provides."
The stuffed shirt's eyes widened. You could see the flicker of recognition light up his face.
"That he does," he said. He pulled a phone book from behind the counter and handed it out toward me. I resented the assumption that I was a believer; that because my traveling companion had made mention of her faith, I must share the same compulsion. I resented that it took a reference to the popular deity to get the man, who by all means should have been kind to us before because it was his job, to be nice and helpful to two lone travelers on a dark road in a foreign state. If he was a Christian, then wasn't it his duty to be kind in the first place? I felt myself start to seethe a little. Instead, I took the phone book.
"You'll have to drive on into Minot," he said, pronouncing it "My-not." I'd been saying, "Minnow" since I saw the word on the map. Hearing it said aloud by people who'd been there gave me a sliver of insight into what the place was like. French words Americanized meant one thing. I knew it closer to home in Kentucky. Versailles was "Ver-sales." It was deflating, but at least a little more familiar. Like my anger.
No comments:
Post a Comment