The Night the School Gym Opened

I was standing at the coffee counter of the truck stop at exit 212 when my husband’s cousin flipped the sign from Open to Closed.

It was five minutes to nine on a January night. The bank sign across the frontage road said minus twenty, and the wind was pushing snow sideways under the pump canopy.

The state had shut down I-90 at four that afternoon. Nobody could go east, and nobody could go west. Forty semis sat in the gravel lot with their engines running.

“Dwight,” I said. “You can’t lock up. Those drivers have nowhere to go.”

He didn’t look up from the register. He was counting the drawer into a zippered bank bag, the way he did every night, with his lips moving.

“Owner wants the night shift cut,” he said. “I’m not paying two girls to babysit truckers on a closed road.”

Dwight Rooney is my husband’s first cousin. His mother and Mark’s father were sister and brother, and we had eaten Thanksgiving at Dwight’s table eight weeks before.

He is not a cruel man by habit. He had been written up twice that winter over labor costs, and he was afraid of losing the job he had held for eleven years.

That is the one line I will give him. It did not make what he did right.

“They’ve got bunks,” Dwight said. “They sleep in those cabs every night of their lives.”

“Not at twenty below, with the road closed.”

“Then they should have stopped earlier.”

He walked past me to the wall behind the register and flipped the switch that ran the fuel pumps. Four green lights over the lanes went out, one after another.

Most people don’t know what that does. A truck at twenty below has to idle all night, or the diesel gels and the batteries die. A truck that can’t refuel can’t idle. A cab with no heat in that cold is a freezer with a person inside.

An older man stood next to me at the counter holding a hot dog and a paper cup of coffee. He wore a canvas jacket with Arkansas stitched on the back, and he had white stubble and thin gloves.

“It’s all right, ma’am,” he said. “We’re used to it.”

His hands were shaking so hard that the coffee slopped over the rim and ran down his wrist. He didn’t seem to notice.

The restroom lock clicked. The lights above the pumps went dark. Dwight took his keys off the hook and held the front door open for us like a man closing a church.

“Out,” he said. “Please. I’m sorry. It’s policy.”

I will tell you what I felt. I did not feel angry yet. I felt the way you feel when you see a child step off a curb in front of a truck, and your body starts moving before your mind has caught up.

I put my coffee on the counter and walked out. The old man followed me. The door locked behind us.