Patti Standard - Say You'll Stay And Marry Me

Sixty-three thousand two hundred and fifty-eight miles—plus some odd tenths.

In two years.

Sara felt a combination of pride and dismay at the thought of all those miles, hard, compulsive, seldom-stopping miles from Canada to Mexico, east coast to west. And so many miles still ahead of her. She dropped to the ground and carefully tucked the edge of her T-shirt into her jeans. She surveyed the empty asphalt that snaked in both directions before disappearing in a shimmering haze of heat at the horizon. Not a car in sight.

Wyoming surrounded her, desolate, with only sparse grass and sagebrush corralled behind the miles of barbed wire fence that edged the narrow, two-lane highway. A stray gust of wind brought a windmill creaking to life behind her, forcing its rusted blades to make a desultory turn, movement enough to shake its weathered wooden frame all the way to the ground but not enough to raise so much as a drop of water to fill the empty stock tank at its base. Just looking at the alkali deposit that ringed the tank made her thirsty. She licked her lips as she tried to decide what to do.

A well-worn rut cut off the highway and crisscrossed its way to the distant mountains. It looked tempting, especially since Yellowstone National Park lay behind those mountains. She’d planned to reach Yellowstone sometime tomorrow after spending the night in Jackson Hole. But she knew that rut could just as easily peter out at some gully as lead to a house and telephone. Better to backtrack to that gas station she’d passed, Sara decided, hoping it was only a few miles back.

She took a long drink from the thermos in the cab, then grabbed her credit card and driver’s license from her purse and stuffed the leather purse under the seat. She locked the truck’s doors, double-checking that the door to the white camper covering its bed—her home for the past two years—was also securely locked. She started down the road, the asphalt under her feet soft from the afternoon sun, well aware that she left her entire life’s possessions behind her.

The little gas station was closer than she remembered. It sat at the junction of two rural highways, alone except for a big white farmhouse ringed by shady cottonwood trees about a hundred yards behind the station. It was little more than a wide spot in the road, but the station’s neat white siding and green shutters looked wonderful after a forty-minute walk. Two gas pumps squatted on a paved mat, sharing space with rainbow oil slicks and a pothole or two. The door to an attached garage yawned wide, and she could see a hydraulic lift inside, workbenches stacked with tools and thankfully, a collection of belts and hoses on hooks near the ceiling. She should be on her way to Yellowstone in a few hours, after all.

She pushed open the glass door to the station and set a bell jangling somewhere inside. A boy, perched on a stool behind the counter, looked up from his comic book at the sound. Maybe twelve or thirteen, he had an open, friendly face with freckles and a slight overbite that braces were trying to correct.

“Hi. I didn’t hear your car.”

“I’m on foot,” Sara told him. “My truck’s about two miles up the road with a blown water hose. I was hoping you could help me out.”

“What year?” He dragged a dog-eared book from a shelf over the cash register and flipped it open on the scarred countertop.

She told him and described the location of the hose—by now she knew her truck intimately, inside and out. The boy thumbed through the pages, stopped at one, then followed a line of type across the page with his finger.

“Bingo! We’ve got one of those.”

“Great.” She relaxed and smiled with relief. She’d stubbornly tried to ignore her nervousness as she’d walked to the station. It hadn’t helped that her daughter’s warnings had come so easily to mind, keeping her company with each step. I told you so, the voice had said. A grown woman driving around the country like some middle-aged hippy. It’s just not safe, Mother. And her mind had spun out the word mother in a perfect mimic of Laura, in that exasperated and exasperating tone her daughter had adopted since graduating from college.

Sara had only broken down once before, and it had been a simple flat tire. But she would think seriously about trading in her faithful blue truck for a new model when she passed through Denver this fall. A breakdown in the winter was something she didn’t even want to contemplate.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll use your rest room for a minute while you ring that up. Add a bottle of that orange juice, too. It’s going to be a hot walk back.” She pointed to a cooler against the wall filled with drinks.

The boy’s mouth fell open slightly, revealing even more of the braces. “You’re going to walk to your truck?”

“I guess so.” Sara smiled. “I didn’t pass many taxis on my way here.”

“But you’re not going to fix it yourself,” he protested.

“Sure I am. I’m pretty handy with a screwdriver. It shouldn’t be hard.”

He shook his head, adamant. “You can’t walk all that way alone.” He sounded truly concerned, and Sara was touched.

“It’s not that far.” She gave him another reassuring smile.

But he kept shaking his head, and fine brown hair sifted into his eyes. “If my dad found out I let a woman walk off alone to fix a truck by herself, I’d be mucking stalls for a month. No, ma’am, you better wait here while I go get my dad. He’ll drive you back.”

“No, really, I’ll—”

But he seemed determined. “You wait right here, ma’am. I’ll go fetch my dad. He’s up in the north field fixing some fence so it might be a minute or two. You just make yourself comfortable. Have that orange juice. I’ll be right back.”

He locked the register, grabbed a hat from a hook near the door and disappeared into the attached garage. Sara heard the roar of an engine and looked out the door. The boy had appeared in front of the station riding a three-wheeled motorcycle, a sturdy all-terrain vehicle with heavy, wide tires. He gestured to her and she pulled open the glass door and stepped outside.

“If anybody comes wanting to buy gas, you better have ’em wait for me to get back,” he yelled over the engine. “There’s not another gas station for forty miles, so they’re not going anywhere.” With a metallic grin and wave, he skidded around the side of the station and disappeared.

Sara rounded the corner after him and watched him head up a gravel lane toward the house. She had to smile at the sight of the boy, in jeans, cowboy hat and scuffed boots—every inch a cowboy—seated on the noisy machine as comfortably as on a horse. S-shaped irrigating tubes and a muddy shovel were strapped to the back of the ATV, bouncing at every rut.

Modern ranching. All helicopters and three-wheelers and million-dollar equipment. Not like when she was a kid growing up on a small farm on the outskirts of Denver, she thought with a twinge of nostalgia, when Denver still had traces of the real, honest-to-goodness cow town it used to be. Denver certainly had its share of cowboys even now, but that had more to do with fashion than with livelihood. She knew most of the Wranglers she saw had never touched a saddle.

Sara got a juice from the cooler and returned to the wooden bench that ran along the side of the station. She stretched out her legs to wait for her rescuer. It appeared chivalry wasn’t dead, after all, she thought, taking a sip of the cold juice. Or at least not up here in the middle of Wyoming. Maybe there was still a sliver left of that famous cowboy code of the West. In spite of the ATV, the whole place seemed to be caught in some kind of 1950s time warp. She fanned aside a fly that buzzed lazily near her ear. The big old farmhouse, with its wide veranda just made for a porch swing and its huge swath of lawn, complete with shaggy lilac bushes, looked like something out of an old black-and-white western.