Dryden, the End of August 1995

SUSIE TAYLOR

The diner was full of dissatisfied families. Only the dregs of summer remained, but it was still hot. Even late into the night everyone sweated and the air had a weight to it when Jenna drew it into her lungs. It was the kind of heat where no one could sleep and instead sat out on stoops and porches smoking cigarettes and killing mosquitoes.

The families she served were returning from road trips. They were headed back to suburban houses. You could tell the kids were tired of sitting in the backseats of cars and staring out at endless swaths of trees. Couples would be arguing. Unused to spending unbroken days together, mothers and fathers would long for the solitude of the morning commute or the quiet office cubicle. The truck stop food that seemed romantic at the beginning of their journeys would sit heavily in road-tripping guts. Jenna’s customers tried to settle their stomachs with coffee served in thickrimmed white mugs and tea from leaky metal pots.

Late in the afternoon on her last shift of the summer, Jenna stood behind the counter with her mother, Karen. They looked at the familiar scene of vacation’s end. The place was still full up with one-timers, people who didn’t really belong in the North, who only understood Northern Ontario as a place of clear lakes and giant plastic waterslides.

Karen draped her arm around Jenna’s slack shoulders. Karen always got sentimental when Jenna was heading back to school. Jenna let her leave her arm there although the heat of it was unbearable and an unpleasant odour came from Karen’s armpit.

“Get outta here. I can’t bear looking at you knowing you’re leaving me. I know you’ll be with Hank tonight but come home early in the morning. I’ll make you breakfast before you go.” Jenna’s departure was close enough that Karen had spent most of the day dewy-eyed.

Jenna kissed her mom on the cheek, changed out of her burgundy polyester waitress dress, and pulled on her tight cut-off jeans and a loose white tank. The armholes of the tank top gaped open, and you could see into them and get a glimpse of her black bra. Hank liked this outfit. She thought the jeans made her look fat but at

least the big shirt hid her gut. She always gained weight over the summer working at the diner. Her mom stayed skinny living on cigarette breaks and Diet Coke, but Jenna found herself hungry serving food all day. The diner salad consisted of iceberg lettuce with a paltry wedge of tomato. You would pick your dressing and it would come on the side in a little metal cup. Jenna tried to stick to salad with Thousand Island dressing but it left her wanting more, and she would find herself giving in and eating a plate of fries or a piece of badly cut coconut cream pie; it would go to waste if she didn’t consume it. Hank said he didn’t mind. He wasn’t interested in dating a skinny woman. Hank told her he thought her appetite was sexy and he liked the way she enjoyed putting things into her mouth. Hank was going to meet her when her shift ended that evening but she decided to surprise him and walked slowly down the dusty highway in her pink flip-flops, her toes turning grey, to the strip motel where Hank stayed when he was in town. When she got to the motel she waved at Kelly in the office, they’d gone to high school together, and Kelly waved and held up four fingers before turning her head back to the TV she kept on all day. The door to unit four was propped open with a wooden chair. She could hear voices, and she knew that Hank was not alone. The men, Hank and three other truckers who she didn’t know well but had served coffee and Coke and pieces of meat and pie to, were drinking beer and playing poker. They were sitting around a cheap portable table they must have borrowed from Kelly. They sat in fold-out lawn furniture made of aluminum and woven vinyl. They had taken the chairs from the tiny porches of their motel rooms. “Jenna, you’re early. Come here and give me a kiss for luck.” She stood beside Hank, and the hand that wasn’t holding his cards rubbed up under her tank and his fingertips brushed up and touched her breast. The three other men smirked at her. “What you doing with Grandpa over there? He can hardly keep you satisfied,” said one of the guys, Paul. He looked younger than the rest and had an Expos hat crammed onto a curly-haired mullet and a French Canadian accent to match it. “Does she look unsatisfied?” Hank quipped and patted her ass. They weren’t really talking to her, just about her. She half-smiled. Alone with Hank she might call him on his sexism, but she didn’t in front of the guys he worked with. “You can’t go emasculating a man like that,” her mother had once said. “Hank has to work with those guys and if you get on your high horse in front of his friends they’ll tease him for being whipped.”

“She’s a fine one. A fine figure your girl’s got if you don’t mind me saying,” Gary tipped his Blue Jays cap at her in a way that she supposed he thought was gallant. He was older. Maybe even sixty. He was a patter; patted all the waitresses on their hips in a too-familiar manner when they put down the bill at the end of the meal. Jenna’s mom always said she took it as a compliment, a little attention at her age. The third guy looked around fortyish, same as Hank, Uncle they all called him. Uncle didn’t say anything, just looked Jenna up and down, his head on one side, assessing. Jenna grabbed a beer from a cooler full of bottles and melting ice and went and sat on the bed. She looked out the propped-open door, listening to the men drinking, gambling, and telling dirty jokes. It was so hot. Even as the evening darkened, it stayed hot and Jenna seemed to be able to drink beer after beer without feeling drunk. It was like she was sweating them out before they could have an effect on her. She went outside and smoked. She held a cold bottle against her temple as she surveyed the trees on the other side of the highway and the cars headed south along the road back to civilization. Tomorrow she would be in one of those cars. Jenna would be headed away from Dryden and back to Guelph where she went to university. Jenna looked at the stars that were starting to come out, butted out her smoke on the pink stuccoed outside wall of the motel, and went back inside the room. She wouldn’t see Hank come September. She’d started sleeping with him earlier in the summer. Her mother was pragmatic about the affair: waitresses slept with truckers. It was just how things went, and as they went, Hank wasn’t a bad guy. He had a kid and an ex-wife, Carly. Most of them did, but he didn’t have another woman waiting at the next town. Hank tipped well and said thank you. He knew the names of the waitresses’ kids. And yeah, Jenna knew when she served him he was staring at her ass as she walked away from his table, but it was like he couldn’t help it, not like he was doing it to make her feel uncomfortable. The first time they fucked had been exciting and urgent in the cramped back of his truck’s cab. The first time she came fast, just from the subversive thrill of it. She’d been feeling fat and adolescent until Hank showed up. Hank made her feel voluptuous; the way he looked at her made Jenna like her body again. Hank was confident when he touched her. With Hank there was none of the fumbling incompetence in finding her vagina or sticky early spillage that seemed to accompany so many of Jenna’s encounters with randy teenage boys. He’d pick her up from work, and they’d spend the nights he was in town in his motel room.

The motel was like a film set, people coming and going, no one ever staying. People went there to get sleep before continuing their drive east to Toronto or west to Winnipeg. She and Hank were the only ones lounging naked. He liked to rest his head on her stomach, his beard scratching her pale skin as his fingers combed through her pubic hair. Hank liked people to know he was fucking her. He liked keeping the lights on and the curtains open. He liked her to be hanging out in a T-shirt and underwear and have his friends come by to borrow a wrench or some WD-40 he kept around for the truck. He liked her to walk around the motel room naked. Got her to change the channel on the TV and bring him a beer naked. Once he ordered a pizza and made her sit in view of the door with nothing on but a silky robe he’d given her, loose and gaping open. “The sight of you will be some tip,” Hank said when he opened the door. Sometimes when he was coming into town, Hank would call ahead and tell her to make herself ready for him. He would call and tell her he had a hard-on already, as she stood trying to look calm while she cashed someone out, the phone cradled to her ear. Other times, he’d show up and get her to serve him his dinner and then leave her a big tip. Those days he would hardly acknowledge that he knew her, but when she finished work, he’d be waiting in the truck snoozing, smoking, or reading a book about cowboys. He’d usually fuck her straight off on those occasions. He’d tell her he’d been imagining her sitting on his lap as he drove through Ontario. He would tell her that he imagined her perched up on his dick. These words would make her so wet, she’d be literally dripping as she climbed into the cab of his truck and kicked off her underpants. Hank liked to feed her and fuck her and leave her sleeping in a messed-up motel bed. None of his routes took him to Guelph and Hank was not the kind of man to go out of his way for a woman. “I got a girl,” Jenna could imagine him saying, “sweet piece of ass out in Dryden.” But she knew he wouldn’t come her way in September, he’d find someone else to keep him warm at night once it got cold in the fall. Jenna suspected he might go back to Carly for a while, until they had another fight that would keep Hank out of Carly’s apartment and back into motels along the highway. The men were getting loud. They had started playing cards in the afternoon and there were more empties in the two-four cases than full beers in the cooler beside them. Jenna wanted them to go. She was here to fuck Hank one last time. It might be the last time ever or maybe just the last time until next summer and she wanted

to get it over with. He was another thing to tick off as she transitioned from smalltown Jenna to university Jenna: pack clothes, cash last paycheque, fuck Hank, and kiss her mother goodbye. “I got nothing else boys. You cleaned me out,” Hank said, leaning back in his chair spreading his arms wide. “Me too. I’m toast.” said Paul. “Come on, one more hand. You got to have something to bet. What about that hat of yours? I’ll take that from you just so I don’t have to see you wear it anymore. And it’ll give you a chance to win back some of that cash I just took from you,” said Gary. “What the hell,” said Paul taking off his hat, his hair flattened down where it had been. “Well, I got no damn hat, so I guess we’re done here,” said Hank. “You got something you could bet, Hank. You got something real sweet.” He had hardly said a word all night, but Uncle spoke now, and although she pretended to be reading a magazine she’d picked up from beside the bed, Jenna knew his eyes were on her. “Fuck you, Uncle. Jenna isn’t a whore,” said Hank but he didn’t really sound angry. Jenna could see there was a big pile of cash in front of Uncle and nothing left in front of Hank. “I don’t expect you to let me fuck your women, Hank. Jesus. Just a little blow job. Just a little kiss below the belt buckle. Sweet set of lips like that I’ll come so fast she’ll hardly even notice I’m there. And you can watch, of course. What a beautiful sight it would be.” Jenna could have walked out then. Just waltzed straight out the door. Paul was uncomfortable; you could see he was twitching a little. Even Gary was avoiding Uncle’s eyes. Hank owed Carly support payments from last month still. Hank always owed someone. He told Jenna it was because he was such a big tipper. He walked over to the bed and sat beside Jenna. He spoke real quiet. “I’ll win this, for sure. You won’t have to do it. You don’t have to agree, but I’m in a real tight spot, sweetheart, and if I lose this, Carly will be late on her rent again and she won’t let me see Brett. I promise I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” Jenna didn’t speak. Instead, she just nodded her head slightly.

She felt Uncle’s eyes on her as they dealt the cards out. The men were silent, intent now that the game had taken on a new gravity. Jenna couldn’t help but think of it, the weight of his cock in her mouth. You could tell that he would be the kind of man to grab your head and pull you forward, the kind of guy that would make you choke. She knew he would smell too, that when he pulled down his white Y-fronts, he’d be sweaty and taste sour. Paul lost his hat fast and Gary also folded. Paul tried to get up and leave, but Uncle put his hand out and pushed Paul back to his seat. “Bad sportsmanship to leave before the end of play. Sit back down son.” Paul sat, looking miserable. Neither Gary nor Paul looked at Jenna; she knew they felt ashamed, but not ashamed enough to stop the thing that Uncle and Hank had started. She didn’t see the cards as they hit the table, but she knew from the way Paul exhaled that Hank had somehow won. “Give me my money, Uncle! You should have got out when the going was good.” She didn’t say goodbye to any of them. She sat on the bed staring at the same page of the magazine and tried not to cry. She felt drunk now. The beer that had gone down so easily hit her like a wall and she knew she would have to spend the night here with Hank because she was too drunk to go about the business of getting home. When Uncle left he came and stood beside the bed. He looked down at her, “Bye, Jenna,” he said and kissed his hand then placed it on her head. Hank turned out the lights. She climbed under the covers but didn’t take off her shorts. “You’re a lifesaver, Jenna. You are just amazing. I knew I was going to win, but you are truly one in a million.” She had just started to feel aroused, despite herself, at his hand teasing at the crotch of her tight shorts when Hank fell asleep. She lay awake as Hank snored, but the beer knocked her out eventually. She woke in the morning as soon as the sun started in through the windows. She did not wake Hank. She put on her flip-flops and slipped out the door. Jenna knew her mom’s goodbye would be bad enough and she couldn’t face Hank who she suspected, when sober, would be both remorseful and a little turned on by his own behaviour. “You must have had some night,” her mom said when she came in the door looking hungover and dirty.

Jenna sat down at her mom’s kitchen table and ate pancakes. Her mom cried as she stood at the stove, smoke in one hand, and a metal spatula in the other shaping batter into hearts. Karen served the pancakes with Cool Whip and sprinkles, just the way Jenna liked them.