I’d seen him before. He worked at the gas station we all hate
to go to, especially during rush hour. The aisles for the pumps
feel claustrophobic and there’s not one time we’ve been there
as a last resort (usually running late and on ‘E’) where some guy
with a hand out and a sob story about being broke down
hasn’t asked us for some specific amount of change:
eighty-seven cents, a dollar forty-six, four nickels and two pennies,
to make a call, catch the bus, or a cab ride home on the other side
of town. Last time I was there alone just to buy two bottles of my favorite
green-glass ginger-ale on my way out of town and he was working,
and I thought him handsome, or maybe I thought about how he might
have been handsome once. His name tag read “Lincoln” and inky initials
and icons punctuated the skin on his fingers and wrists and descended
down the neck of his uniform polo shirt into course, brown, curling hair,
and he managed to call me “sweetheart” five times in about thirty
seconds but it sounded better with his tenor twang. A thin scar slithered
down his chin dividing the graying stubble of facial hair. And though he was in
a hurry, he looked up once from his register and took the time to smile at me.
And he made me feel pretty. And I pretended my ginger-ales were more
interesting than his hazel eyes. And I thought how silly and stupid I must be
to care what a gas station cashier thinks of me. And how I’d forget all
about him as soon as I hit the road. But I would have recognized him
even from five-hundred feet away on some downtown city block
when I was stopped at a red light. And I did. He was taking off his shirt
with a lit cigarette in his mouth, practiced like, you know? It was if he didn’t
care who saw him, as if he knew the sun, for two seconds, had turned
his soft body into a god’s. And as he made for the crosswalk,
he faced me. I couldn’t help myself. I lifted my hand to wave, at first
like we were old friends, or country neighbors passing one-another
down a spaghetti-noodle of a two-lane road but then, not in time,
to tell him to wait, to go back. To stop.

-Bianca Spriggs