The Meadow 175 would have given Jim a lecture on race, the same lecture he’d given last Thanksgiving. Jim put his phone back in his pocket and pulled a twenty from his wallet, leaving it on the bar. He walked outside into a warm, dark night and was comforted to see the Big Dipper and the North Star above it. Even when he couldn’t see them, he knew they were there, reliable and constant. Jim thought sadly that his son probably had a book that would tell him otherwise. He walked back to the Flying J’s parking lot, which was lit up like a Christmas tree, the metal of his rig reflecting all the lights. He hopped up into the cab and laid down on the bed behind the driver’s compartment. He wasn’t anywhere near sleep, feeling anxious and itchy. Ed was wrong about him. One of the ranchers he picked up cattle from was a Mexican, and Jim and he would have coffee together. And he regularly chatted with a Black driver he ran into at his stops. It pissed Jim off to be falsely judged and misunderstood. His son did it too, calling him closed-minded and conservative, like “conservative” was a bad word. Wait until Jimmy had to start paying taxes! He’d see then how much the government took and how little we got in return. The boy was naïve. Jim rolled onto his side. Karen used to agree with him. Now he suspected they laughed about his ideas when he wasn’t around, like a third wheel. He dug in his bag for the books Jimmy had given him. The first book he pulled out was the one about why his brain was wired to ignore climate change, which felt like just another way of Jimmy calling him closed-minded. He put the book back and pulled out the animal one. A hardcover, the binding creaked when he opened it. He scanned a page: “We go through a long process of watching our animals, being intrigued and surprised by their actions. Consider the related question as to whether animals say goodbye as well as hello.” Oh, geez, he thought, tossing the book back into his overnight bag. Karen must have already read this one. She’d hired a cat communicator when her tabby had gone missing last year. The
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