There was a truck stop in Amarillo

Houston to Fontana is fourteen hundred and thirty-seven miles the way I run it now. The machine in my dash gives me eleven hours of driving inside any fourteen. It sends all of it to the office while it's happening.

For three years my lane didn't go that way. It went north out of Houston to a drop in Fort Worth and then up the 287, which is two lanes for most of it, through Vernon and Childress and Memphis and Clarendon. DPS sits in those towns and waits for you. It's about a hundred and ninety miles longer than the interstate. I told dispatch I preferred it because of the scale at Sierra Blanca and they didn't argue. That customer paid by the load.

The 287 brings you into Amarillo from the southeast. There's a big stop out that side with a restaurant in it and a hundred and ninety-odd spaces. My ten-hour break landed there on a Thursday, near enough every week for three years.

Albuquerque to Dallas is six hundred and fifty-two miles. Amarillo is two hundred and eighty-eight of them. His ten landed there too.

The first time was February of 2019. They closed the I-40 at Tucumcari for ice and the whole lot filled by seven in the evening, trucks on the ramp, trucks sitting on the grass. The restaurant had a forty-minute wait and the girl put me at a table with a big man who was already eating. He moved his cap off the other chair before I asked. His name was Rubén and he said it with the weight on the end. I said it back wrong for most of a year before he corrected me. Nobody in Texas has said mine right since 2004.

He wasn't a talker. I asked what he pulled and he said dairy. Albuquerque to Dallas and back twice a week. That night my APU wouldn't start. He had a fifteen-millimetre deep well in a roll-up pouch and he stood out in that wind with me for half an hour. That socket is still in my box. I never gave it back. I said well done to him while he was under there, the way you say it at home to a man who's working. He said it back to me every time after that.

The Thursday after, he was parked two rows from me. I didn't plan that and I don't believe he did either. The one after that I got in at six and there was a space beside him with a cone standing in it, and he came down and moved the cone.

He could back a fifty-three-foot trailer into a hole between two reefers with one hand on the wheel and not get out to look. Then he'd get out anyway and stand there looking at it. I've been driving fourteen years and I still get out twice.

We ate at that same table for three years. He'd tell me about a receiver in Dallas that keeps you four hours and won't let you use the bathroom. I told him about Lagos. I ran the eight hundred for my school in Surulere, one fifty-six point two. That was enough for Surulere. I haven't run anywhere since 2011.

One Thursday in the second year he wasn't there. I stayed my ten and rolled at four. The week after he told me his mother-in-law had passed in Belen and I said sorry for your loss and we ordered.

That April he came into my bunk after the restaurant shut, and after that he came most Thursdays. I was still rolling by four, because Fontana takes you at ten and they charge you two hundred dollars if you miss the window.

A truck out of my own yard came in one Thursday about eight and parked four down from me. I did orientation with that driver in 2015. He got on the CB and asked if I wanted coffee. I told him I was already down for the night and ate in my own seat with the light off. Rubén didn't come down.

We never took each other's numbers. He wore a ring.

My wife packs me a cooler for the first two days out and I buy after that. The boys were six and three that first winter. The note on the house in Katy is two thousand one hundred and six dollars.

My wife has never asked me what I do on a Thursday. There'd be nothing to tell her. I sleep ten hours in a lot in Amarillo.

I know the company. It's painted on his door about nine inches high with the yard's town underneath it. I could telephone that office tomorrow morning.

Dispatch called me on a Tuesday in April of 2022. The Fort Worth customer had gone to another carrier. They were putting me on a dedicated run to Fontana, straight out on the I-10, five cents more a mile. Five cents is around six thousand a year the way I turn. I said thank you.

The last Thursday was the seventh of April. I know the date because the office keeps the logs six months and I looked it up in May, sitting in the yard at Baytown with the engine off. We ate. He paid, because it was his turn. He went up to his truck around eleven because he had a five o'clock at a place in Wichita Falls. I don't remember one word either of us said.

The I-10 is an easier road and I'm home an extra night most weeks. My mother calls from Lagos every Sunday at six in the morning my time, which is after her church, and I take it out in the truck in the driveway so the house can sleep. She asks after the boys and she asks when I'm bringing them. I tell her next year.

Twice last year I took loads I didn't want because the routing went up the 287. There's no money on that road. The first time I got in about nine at night. I walked the lot for twenty minutes and read the doors as I went. There are maybe two hundred trucks in there on a Thursday.

The second was October. A shower is free with fifty gallons and I'd only put in forty, so I paid the fourteen dollars for one I didn't need. They'd moved the lockers to the other wall since I was last through. I ate the rest of what my wife had packed in my own seat.

Diesel was four eleven nine. There's a television over the fuel desk and it had golf on it with nobody watching. The girl at the register wasn't the same girl. I asked her for a phone card and she said they stopped carrying those in the spring. There was a man behind me with a case of water on his shoulder, so I moved out of the way.