Steering Clear
The Meeting Place. TWENTY-TWO.
It wasn’t that she had run out of money. She hadn’t. It was that she had run out of patience. For city living, for all that abundance of movement and metal. For all the scheduled events that drew her eye but not her heart. Phoebe had intuited the arrow with two pointed ends — backwards and forwards, this way and that. She would travel both into the past and out toward the future in the same motion, disbanding her urban personas — the lady on the corner living alone now that her other half was dead, the woman with the theater subscription for two that left an open seat beside her, the mortgage payer with a house that was always adding to her “to do” list, the library groupie, the thrift store junkie, the gal with the predictable routine that felt as monotonous as the grooves on the interstate causeway under her tires.
Was she steering toward destiny or demise? At her age, BOTH. Life had given her much to serve over the past forty years and nothing was tugging at her time anymore or threatening her sense of obligation — except her sickly mother two thousand miles away and that couldn’t be her singular reason for being. She decided that long ago. She settled into the rhythms of the open road, her dreams and her death strapped in for the ride. Nothing felt better than that.
The trucks in the right lane rumbled over the asphalt, agents of delivery made ubiquitous even on gravel country roads. From the driver’s seat of the moving truck rental, she felt lifted, a heightened spirit, like being on a landing one flight up from the rest of the world and wanting to step higher still, to see even more and live to tell about it. Her arrogance was lofty, she knew.
Phoebe pulled in at the next rest stop to stretch herself and the dogs. The transience appealed to her — the common humanity of whomever, all needing to stand upright, to pee, to dispose of coffee cups from unnamed sources and fast food wrappers of the same. Her banana peel and the wax paper that had wrapped around her almond butter sandwich hit the opening of the trash bin that was already spilling with energy drink cans and baby diapers. Don’t do the math, she told herself. This battle will never be won. She had made the sandwich as a final act of sustenance in the house where she had lived for decades before she locked the door for the last time.
The place awaiting had done its work drawing her in. The two-ended arrow landed there, backwards and forwards, this way and that, in the clearing by the river with Val.
The Meeting Place note: New characters have appeared, so I’ll be tracking them here. Check out last week’s post as a companion to this one. The Meeting Place is a jigsaw of fictional vignettes hosting several female characters destined to cross paths. The series began with The Meeting Place. ONE. (May 12, 2022).
