Maple was ordinary. The light loved me. Twenty minutes, Luis had said, if the light loved you. The light loved a dead man’s van and that felt like a joke the county was telling without me.
I kept checking the mirror as if a patrol car could be born from nothing. None was. People drove the way they always drove, too close, too fast, eyes on rectangles, missing shingles sliding past like a repeating pattern. A woman in a minivan sang without shame. A man in a pickup ate fries from a paper boat and changed lanes with two fingers. Life went on being hungry and slightly late.
I thought about pulling over and walking into a field and never coming back. I thought about turning myself in at the station by the courthouse, the one with the flag that hangs limp in any weather. I did neither. Thought is not action. I had learned that today in the most expensive way possible.
A school zone sign flashed even though school was months away. I slowed anyway. Obedience felt like camouflage. A runner in bright shoes crossed at the corner and lifted a hand in thanks. I lifted mine back. The van and I performed being decent.
I passed my own street without turning. The garage was back there with its rattle and its blanket and its chemical weather. Looking at it from Maple would have been a kind of waving. I did not wave. I kept the speedometer honest. A postal truck blocked a driveway and I waited, patient, a man with nowhere urgent to be except a food court that did not know my name.
The light at the four lane took forever. I used the forever. I checked the rag around the phone. I checked my face in the mirror. Ordinary. Tired. A driver covering a route. When the light changed I merged like a person who had passed a test.
The mall rose out of the heat, a brick box surrounded by cars that had come for air conditioning and pretzels and the feeling of being among other bodies without having to know them. I parked under the sticky tree, the one that dropped sap on windshields and made people swear in July. I turned the engine off. My pulse tried to climb into my throat and I swallowed it like a pill.