Jung Yun - Shelter

“Coffee while you wait?” she asks.

He’s had nothing but coffee for nearly ten straight hours. Another cup would kill him. “No, thanks.”

The girl seems confused by someone declining coffee at this hour, but she takes her carafe and moves on. Kyung spreads his map over the counter and stares at it, not looking for something so much as trying to avoid being looked at. He traces his route from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, disappointed that the distance he drove barely amounts to the width of his pinky.

“Waste of time,” he hears someone mumble.

On the other side of the counter, a middle-aged couple sits side by side, stirring their coffee in slow, sleepy unison. Husband and wife, he assumes, because of the matching gold bands on their fingers. They’re also dressed in matching plaid shirts — blue for him and green for her — that appear soft and broken in from years of wear. Both of them are heavyset and unhealthy looking, with oily pink complexions that remind Kyung of lunch meat.

“If all you wanted was coffee, then why’d we even stop?” the man asks.

The woman rolls her eyes and runs a hand through her hair, which looks fried from too many dye jobs and home permanents.

“So?” the man says.

“So, what?”

“So drink it already. Let’s go.”

The woman downs several gulps of coffee and slams her cup on the saucer. She wipes the drops that spilled on her shirt with the back of her hand, camouflaging them into the plaid. “You happy now?”

“No, I’m not happy. We just lost half an hour. I thought you wanted to eat.”

“Oh, quit your bitching.” She peels off some bills from a small wad of money held together by a rubber band and throws them next to their check. “I told you I’d take the next leg.”

They collect their things and head for the door, lumbering single file because they’re too wide to walk next to each other.

As they reach Kyung’s end of the counter, the woman looks at him in passing. “Are we so damn interesting?” she snaps, not stopping or slowing down to wait for his response.

The bell on the door rings as it opens and closes, but Kyung doesn’t turn to watch them leave. He didn’t mean to stare at the couple, but it was hard not to. The farther he drives, the stranger people seem to him, and the smaller the town, the more everyone treats him like some kind of alien, as if they’ve never encountered an Asian person before.

“Husband-and-wife driving teams,” mumbles another man sitting a few stools away. “Now, that’s my idea of hell.”

One of the cooks passes the galley window that opens onto the kitchen. He’s talking to someone Kyung can’t see, laughing as he waves a spatula in the air. How long does it take to make a sandwich? he wonders. He looks around the diner for the waitress, who’s standing outside smoking a cigarette and staring vacantly at her cell phone. He wants to get her attention and ask her to rush his order, but he worries it won’t help. The girl doesn’t appear capable of rushing. Everything she does seems lethargic and slow. She even smokes slowly, blowing misshapen attempts at rings into the air.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

Kyung doesn’t think so, but he nods as if he does.

“Kind of a space case, though.” The man picks at the oozing yellow egg yolks on his plate with a fork. “I asked her for scrambled.”

He glances at the man, alarmed by his overgrown mustache and beard. The cap on his head can’t contain his long hair, which spills out the sides and back in ragged salt-and-pepper strands. Kyung isn’t sure if he’s trying to make conversation, or simply observing out loud. He hopes it’s the latter and returns to his map. He finds Massachusetts again, a small patch of green no bigger than a postage stamp, crisscrossed by red and blue strands of interstate.

“You need directions somewhere?”

Kyung doesn’t need directions so much as a destination. “Maybe,” he says, following a long red line farther and farther west.

“Where you headed?”

“California,” he says, trying it on for size. It’s strange to hear the word out loud, which makes the idea feel more real than it did in the car.

“Oh, that’s easy.” The man doesn’t bother to look at the map. “You’re on 90 now, which’ll turn into 80 soon. You just stay on 80 all the way through Nebraska, and then right before you hit Colorado, it’ll turn into 76.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“Depends. Which half you headed to? North or south?”

Kyung names the first city that comes to mind. “Los Angeles.”

The man shrugs. “I’ve made it from Erie to L.A. in about thirty-three hours, but I was drinking coffee and pissing in a jug pretty much the entire way. What kind of car you driving?”

He points out the window at the bright yellow Mustang he rented. From a distance, the car looks even more ridiculous than it did on the lot, like a midlife crisis on wheels. The only reason he picked it was the price. As long as he was using a credit card that his father had just paid off, he decided he might as well do some damage, which has been his motto for the entire trip. Kyung intends to charge every tank of gas, every pack of cigarettes, every meal, every last everything on his cards. It feels like free money. Fuck-you money.

“A good V-8 like that should probably get you there by Wednesday if you’re in a hurry, but you’re going to be in rough shape for a while. Don’t plan on doing anything for a couple of days besides taking baths and getting back rubs.”

Kyung has no idea what he’s doing, no plan at all. When he left the house, he took a bus downtown and checked into the first hotel he saw. He couldn’t bring himself to unpack his things, so he sat on the bed, staring at the walls, the carpet, the pattern of the bedspread. There wasn’t anything wrong with his surroundings. The room was no different from others he’d stayed in before. He just couldn’t accept that this was where he’d landed, and suddenly, after hours of sitting and staring without purpose, he felt a desperate need to get out. One minute, he was signing the paperwork for his rental car. The next, he was on the highway passing signs for Albany, then Syracuse, then Buffalo. There was something comforting about the drive and being on the open road, which made him feel like he had a place to be, even though he didn’t. He blasted the radio for hours, polluting the car with noise to avoid thinking about his conversation with Gillian. When his head began to ache, he turned off the music and chain-smoked through his open window, littering the black interior with dusty gray ash. The thought of California came to him not long after he spotted the signs for Lake Ontario. It was nothing at first. Just a random idea among many that he initially dismissed, but the farther he drove, the more he began to think: Why not? Why not California? Why not now?

“You headed out there for a visit?” the man asks. He dabs his lips delicately with a napkin, littering his beard with toast crumbs.

“No.” He pauses. “I’m moving there.”

“You’re lucky you’re not towing all your stuff. Might not be easy to do in that car once you hit the Rockies.”

All Kyung has is a suitcase full of clothes. He has no job lined up, no place to live, no other belongings, and once again, he’s living on credit — a thought that begins to weigh on him now. Gillian knows their account numbers and passwords by heart. She could easily cancel every last card in his name when she realizes he’s racking up charges again. Where will he be when that happens? Sitting in this sad little diner? Or stranded somewhere on the side of the road? Kyung shuts his eyes, aware that he’s ruining the idea before it’s even real.