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  There isn’t a lot of space for extra stuff at a Catholic funeral. Both my parents were super-Catholics and so all of that came first at my mother’s funeral. My oldest sister went up to the altar to say some words, sixty years of marriage, God, love, God. I sat clutching my paper, waiting my turn. There were nods and looks and ahems, but the priest hadn’t been cued and maybe the service was going on too long anyway, and he went back to praying and I never got to read the words I had prepared to say at my mother’s funeral.

  My parents were super-Catholics, but this was not the side of them I understood. I felt I was at someone else’s funeral, not my mother’s, and that was the hardest part. If I could have read the words on my paper out loud, a tiny memory—her downstairs painting, me upstairs writing, the two of us meeting in the kitchen for tuna fish sandwiches, comparing notes on the anxiety of the blank canvas and the anxiety of the blank page—I could have shown people who she and I were together, and apparently I needed the witness. The memory of wanting to read, and not getting to read, is relentless as a toothache.

  My father was the funny one, and half the time the rest of them were moving so fast they didn’t catch his jokes. He was slow, I’m slow; together we would sit back observing. Already I’m grieving the fact that I’ll never get the funny into his funeral, not with all the other hoopla, not with all this high drama of love, sixty years of marriage, God, love, and how beautiful it is to have your parents dying in each other’s arms.

  He would have had something so funny to say about that. Not snide. Not mean. Just something to suggest that everyone was looking at the picture head-on, and if you tilted your head and looked at it again—ha! I know he would find something funny, or I would first, and we would laugh. Right now I can’t find it. The perspective is missing. A whole way of looking just—poof. They say pigeons have a lens over their eyes, some special membrane that allows them to see patterns of colors and stripes in the sky, and that’s how they so easily find their way home. Remove the lens and they wander aimlessly in circles and go mad.

  “You falling asleep?” Sputter says to me.

  “No, no, I’m good.”

  She asks me a favor. Will I ask Michael two questions when I meet him?

  “Of course.”

  “Do you want to write them down?” she asks.

  “I think I can remember.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Ask him, ‘When did he know Sputter was the one?’ Ask him, ‘What does he love most about Sputter?’”

  —

  IOWA 80, the world’s largest truck stop, goes through fifty-five miles of toilet paper each month, according to promotional materials. The megaplex is set on 220 flat acres under a giant sky with parking for 800 rigs, a movie theater, a museum, a truck wash, two game rooms, an embroidery center, a vinyl graphics shop, a custom T-shirt shop, a laser engraving center, a barber, a dentist, a 300-seat sit-down restaurant with a 50-foot salad bar, and the 30,000-foot Super Truck Showroom where balcony seating overlooks The Place for Chrome®.

  “Can-you-believe-all-this?” Sputter says to me. She has her camera out. She’s trying to get a set of seven-foot chrome exhaust pipes into a single frame.

  “You like the bent or the straight pipes?” she asks me.

  “Um . . .”

  “You have to pick,” she says.

  “But I don’t—”

  “Everybody has an opinion!” she says.

  “Okay, bent,” I say.

  “Do you? Really? Oh, wow, and here I am all about the straight!”

  The Place for Chrome® sends our reflections beaming back at us in distortions and multiples—chrome mud flaps, fenders, bug deflectors, filter housings—and Sputter stands before it all wearing her purse crisscrossed over her middle and shaking her head back and forth, and the splendor only elevates her pro-truck spirit.

  “What if all the truckers woke up one day and decided to stop driving?” she says to me. “Where would this country be? Where would it be?”

  If all the truckers woke up one day and decided to stop driving, Walmart’s 617 million square feet across 3,800 stores would soon empty. The 46 million chickens, 175,000 cows, and 443,000 pigs that Tyson slaughters each week would sit stranded on some highway. Amazon’s $34 billion worth of stuff would remain in warehouses, and we would continue to pump 378 million gallons of gasoline each day until the pumps went dry, and then we would all have to stay home and America would grind to a halt.

  The pro-truck spirit is infectious, and at the enormous gift shop I buy two World’s Biggest Truck Stop T-shirts for my kids, and one for my husband. Sputter buys a World’s Biggest Truck Stop shot glass for Michael, a Peterbilt hat for Elaine, and a book, Men Are Slobs, Women Are Neat . . . and Other Gender Lies That Damage Relationships.

  Outside, the heat has made the blacktop soft and the people slow and damp. We head toward the Super Truck Beauty Contest, which involves the personal stylings of more than one hundred entrants. Many of these trucks have names, like racehorses, or perhaps rodeo bulls—Pure Attitude, Bustin’ Out, Flirtin’ with Disaster. Big and small, they sit with their hoods propped open and their families in lawn chairs beside them, the people fanning themselves and offering to answer any questions you may have. Sputter has only one, over and over the same one: “Can I take your picture?”

  We amble past a big rig painted bubblegum pink and all done up with breast cancer awareness ribbons, and Sputter charges up to the skinny woman showcasing it to compliment her on it. Then she reaches into her purse and hands the woman a twenty.

  “No, no, no,” the woman says. “That’s not what this is for. This is just for awareness.”

  Sputter shoves the money into the woman’s pocket. “Now, would you mind if I took your picture?”

  A thick man in a red T-shirt comes from behind and announces he has a working fireplace in the cab of his tricked-out rig.

  “No, sir! A fireplace?”

  He leads us to a shiny blue truck called Working Class with white horses galloping over ocean waves airbrushed onto the side.

  “It’s a Peterbilt,” Sputter turns to me and says, making her eyes droopy and bored.

  “Bent pipes,” I say to her proudly. She climbs into Working Class first and I follow, and there it is: a gas fireplace framed in shiny oak spitting a tiny blue flame over ceramic logs. The rest of the cab, fully upholstered in black padded leather, is drenched in pink and purple mood lighting swirling with the movement of a smooth saxophone sound track, and over the bed hangs a mounted statuary of horses galloping over ocean waves.

  “You got yourself a love shack in there!” Sputter says to the guy as we climb back out.

  “I can show you some other things,” he says, his eyebrows dancing pathetically.

  Sputter does not register any of it—she seems determined to save this man from his own odiousness—and his companion, a woman with long gray hair and a cowboy hat, says, “I-did-not-raise-him-like-that,” and claims to be his mother.

  We learn quickly that neither of them has anything whatsoever to do with the truck with the fireplace in it. (Apologies to Colin Stuart, of Harvard, Illinois, the real owner, who lovingly created Working Class.) The showman in the red shirt is simply taking advantage of the location to find himself a woman. (And the mother?)

  “Okay, now let’s get a picture,” Sputter says anyway, holding up her camera, waving her hand for mom and son to stand together in front of the love shack.

  “Lord, lord, lord,” Sputter says, for much of the rest of the day as we go about visiting trucks. “Lord!” If she could take it all in she would, but she can’t, and so she keeps snapping pictures to savor later. In the tired evening air at the Tracy Lawrence country music concert she stands on a hay bale to get a picture of the band, which is impossible from way back here. “Even though he hurt you he’s still the one you want.”
She knows every word, so she sings and sways and bops as the beat picks up, then comes off the hay bale. “Hold this?” she says, handing me her camera.

  “It was Sunday morning, I was seven years old / In the backyard playing in a big mud hole . . .” She throws her arms into the air, wags her hips, twirls, fist-pumps the sky, and the dancing makes her stick out. She may be the only black person in this entire jamboree and now she is the only dancer. She is not like these people. She is the opposite of the trucker stereotype, and in that way I suppose she is the true fit: independent, a maverick carrying the torch of the American mystique of freedom and mischief and topless nights.

  People perched on hay bales eventually take Sputter’s dancing as an invitation, or some kind of permission. A woman with long frizzy hair gets up, yanks at her companion; then a trim couple in cowboy gear; soon a small crowd twirls around Sputter, everybody throwing their heads back and embracing the sweat. “Pedal to the metal, let your motor run, / ’Cause he’s gonna live forever if the good die young . . .” Fireworks unload into the sky, and all the trucks in the Super Truck Beauty Contest put their lights on display—a shower of blinks and pulsating truck lights—and then they blow their booming truck horns in unison in great cacophonous celebration. You would have never known this was an industry in crisis. The people at the jamboree rejoice in spite of their world falling apart, or maybe in the face of it; I suppose history, if it goes deep enough, can keep any culture alive and kicking.

  That night, we stay at a motel instead of in the truck, and right before bed Sputter turns the TV to Nancy and she squats in front of it and has me take a picture of her and Nancy together. She asks me if I know that Nancy’s fiancé was murdered way back when, if I know how hard Nancy works, and if I know that Nancy got fertilized, didn’t have her babies until she was forty-eight years old.

  —

  “YOU NAP A LOT,” Sputter says to me one morning, hollering back toward the bed, where I’m curled up. She tells me we’re in Ohio.

  Ohio?

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “You don’t understand—I can never sleep. This is really unusual. . . .” I feel like an infant in a car seat, having thrown a life-altering tantrum and just now awakening after the subsequent soothing collapse.

  Apparently, while I “napped,” we drove three hundred miles, stopped to drop off our haul, stopped to pick up a load of beer, pulled over for Sputter to sleep an hour, drove two hundred more miles, got breakfast, and bought a man a cup of coffee and a honey bun because it was his birthday and he was all alone.

  “This all happened?” I say, crawling to the front of the cab and trying to adjust to the harsh light.

  “You nap a lot,” she says. We’re passing through city streets, and there are banners for a rib fest and people spilling out of church. A woman wearing a hard hat and an orange vest is directing traffic. Sputter rolls down her window, shouts, “You go, girl!” and takes in the hot breeze.

  Her lips are puffy and her eyes are bloodshot, and I think she’s been crying. She makes a left, and boom, just like that, we’re back at the Kmart parking lot. This is now happening too fast.

  A blue Chevy Tahoe comes racing toward the truck, stops abruptly. Michael. He doesn’t open his door to get out. She doesn’t open her door to get out. “Let’s see how long he sits there,” she says. We keep waiting and finally she honks the mighty rig horn. Hoooonk. Hoooonk. Hoooonk.

  “Forget it,” she says. She opens her door and climbs down onto the pavement and begins reaching into the cab for her things.

  Michael has a round, welcoming face and short, tight curls. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a photo of himself on it. “This is me when I was thirty-five,” he says, announcing himself.

  “Well, you looked good,” I say clumsily. “You still look good—”

  “I can’t believe you just sat there,” Sputter says to him.

  “I can’t believe you were honking at me,” he says to her. “That’s a good way to get yourself Tased.”

  “A good way to get you to help,” she says. “Did you miss me?”

  “No.”

  “Did you shampoo the carpet?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see I left the shampooer out for you, right in the middle of the room so you would fall on top of it?”

  “Yes.”

  We make a few trips carrying our stuff to Michael’s car, and then Sputter goes back to the truck and fills up a small trash bag with used wrappers and cups. The heat is still fierce and the sun has the sky paralyzed in the lazy afternoon position.

  Sputter is quiet on the ride back to the house, looking out the passenger-side window, bouncing her knee. She’s holding her camera, all those new friends and all the splendor of the jamboree locked inside. She makes the mistake of asking Michael how the cats are.

  “Oh my God, she is so out of control with those cats!” he says to me, looking up in the rearview mirror to catch my eye. “She tell you about those damn cats?”

  I don’t say anything. She wanted me to ask him questions. When did he know Sputter was the one? What does he love most about Sputter? I’m supposed to ask these questions.

  “That one without the tail is spoiled rotten,” Michael continues. “That’s the one that barfs everywhere. I even told her, I said, ‘I’ll get you a brand-new kitten if you just get rid of that thing.’”

  Sputter continues bouncing her knee. I want to get her out of here. I don’t want to let her go back into her real world, and I certainly don’t want to go back into mine. I now understand trucks. I understand wanting to never stop hauling.

  When we pull up to the house, we get out of Michael’s car, stand at the curb, and Sputter opens her arms and we fall into an honest embrace. Her body is soft and solid at the same time, warm and familiar. She reminds me of Lucille. I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve even thought about Lucille. She had ribbon curls just like Sputter’s. She danced with me in the basement next to the ironing board. She used Lubriderm. Lucille was the woman my mother hired to help care for her four kids when I was a baby. She was with us until I was twelve. She cracked her gum and she used that hand lotion constantly. We drove her to the bus each day after dinner and I would hold her hand in the backseat, and when she got out I would bite my lip and pray for tomorrow when I could be with her again. We would hug long and hard. Later, when I turned into a surly teenager, I would torture my mom by saying, “Yeah, well, what do you know? Lucille raised me.” I didn’t mean it, but I did. I was the baby, so I got more of Lucille than anyone.

  When women of my generation debate about caregiving and caretaking—Should you stay home? Should you go to work? Should you have a nanny?—I never have anything to say. Having Lucille in my history taught me all I needed to know in that regard. You could have two moms, probably four or maybe even six, and not run out of love. If Sputter reminds me of Lucille, I suppose it’s because I need her more than ever now.

  —

  WEEKS GO BY. Sputter and I call, text, reminisce. Then she abruptly stops. For months I hear nothing.

  “Girl, I am so sorry,” she says one morning, finally emerging. “I just couldn’t bear to tell you.”

  Her words tumble awkwardly. Michael broke up with her. One day he just up and walked out. She says she couldn’t talk about it. “I’m sorry,” she keeps saying. It is an odd reaction to sorrow—the need to apologize to others for disappearing into a cave ten thousand miles deep, and I understand it exactly.

  I ask her what happened. Nothing happened. He packed up his vast piles of stuff, left. That was it. After two years, that was it.

  She tells me about the cave ten thousand miles deep. I open up and tell her all about mine, and I thank her for taking care of me.

  We talk about grieving, about how it’s supposed to give you wisdom. “But how long does it take for the wisdom part to kick
in?” she asks me, and we sit with that one for a while, the blind leading the blind.

  She buys a rusty old Cadillac without wheels and an engine that almost works. She invites her dad to come over to help rebuild it, so he comes over, and that’s what they do.

  THIS IS PARADISE

  Puente Hills Landfill

  City of Industry, California

  Herman asks me if I smell anything, and the way he says it I can’t tell if I’m supposed to lie. He says he loves being part of nature, enjoys watching the sunrise, and then he says it again. “Do you smell anything?”

  “Well, it is a landfill,” I say, finally. I’m trying to be polite. He is old, wiry, chewing a toothpick. He’s been at this for decades, always the first to arrive, pulling no. 72, the thirty-foot-long tractor-trailer full of trash assigned to him each day. Dumping is permitted to begin at 6:00 a.m., and he keeps his finger on a red button inside a panel on the truck and constantly checks his watch.

  “Women smell things men can’t smell,” he says.

  At this hour the landfill looks nothing like what most people picture when they imagine a landfill. Nothing messy, nothing gross, nothing slimy, no trash anywhere at all. It looks, perhaps disappointingly, like an enormous, lonesome construction site, a 1,365-acre expanse of light brown dirt hiding buried trash from yesterday and thousands of other yesterdays. The scale of the thing alone boggles the mind. To stop and ponder the fact that nearly fifty years of trash forms a foundation four hundred feet deep is simply to become fretful with some unnamed woe about America’s past and the planet’s future, and so I am trying not to do it. When fellow truckers arrive, pulling up next to Herman, the ground—so deep with trash—is so soft it bounces.