They are all suspended in the past, road trip stops. They’re the places with a soft hum in the ceiling and chrome seats, with skill cranes that nobody changed the prices on, with regulars and the best damn butter pecan ice cream you’ll never taste again. They exist only in a plane filled with afterwards, with back-thens and do-you-remembers. From the moment we walk in ‘til the moment we leave, we know it’ll be left behind forever. It’s the only true forever in the world, really—a waning memory that grows dim in the exhaust of a retreating rental car. In each city, they’re something more. They’re places where all the high school kids have their first dates. Where families eat at on every special occasion. Where people have pictures at and paychecks from. But for us, they are a stop-off. Nothing more.
Some exist on two planes instead of one, though. They cross the afterwards with nows and you find yourself thinking in past-words—with is and sentences ending with “-ing” cutting in here and there. In these places, you don’t think about how much longer you’ve got to drive or how close the nearest motel is.
You just live.
There’s a place like that along the roads of Virginia, among scattered trees and a strip of lawn, a place of maybe stopping and definite leaving. It’s a Denny’s, a road trip Denny’s, one where you eat cheap and buy souvenirs as a courtesy for someone back home and send the annoying pocketful of change in your friend’s pants down an arcade machine with prizes you don’t have a chance in hell at getting. A yawning arch separates the restaurant from the rest; if you enter from the Denny’s side, you’d flow into sleepy light and murmured conversation, then pour into fluorescent glare washing halls colorless, drowning softly in the thrumming of vending machines.
There were just two tables of customers the day we stopped by. There was an old couple in a window booth, and some bikers in denim at a table too big for just them. Then there was us, five at a table for six, college kids in their first summer away from home. As we waited for our dinners, some of us talked about nothings we’d forget one day, stupid things that didn’t matter much to anyone who didn’t need to fill time. The rest of us let our eyes wander aimlessly from the brick bar to the bright little window that just barely peered into the kitchen. Eventually, we found ourselves on the drink menu advertising fruity cocktails for the Fourth, even though none of us were old enough to try. It wasn’t long before we all saw it, though, our eyes breaking the contact in conversation with other things.
It’s on the wall—a map of the States built up with license plates, all colorful, some scenic. Every plate’s there for somebody, in this wall of somewhere-else. We traverse the map with our eyes. Some of our table thinks of the Grand Canyon State and some of us reminisce Life Elevated and one of us thinks of Home Means Nevada and the girl there that he loves. As I look at it, it makes the scratched-up whitewood parts of the table under my palms all the more soft, the shaded light above my head all the more bright, the me at that road trip Denny’s in Virginia all the more there.
I wonder where the others lie among the map’s magazine-clipping alphabet. The bikers—perhaps they miss roaring across The Spirit of America, their hogs hot beneath them. If they’ve been away long, the people who drive down their usual route must wonder where they’ve gone, a brief pang of curiosity on their commute to work that’s small enough to disappear but sharp enough to make them think about how all things end someday. And perhaps the old couple off by the window packs away their leftovers so they can drive back to First in Flight. When they get back to their house that’s vacation-dark and smelling stale, they might put their takeout box in the fridge and ring their children on the landline that they’re home and yes, they’ll be there for dinner on Thursday night. We are puzzle-pieced strangers at different tables, and still, we all end up wanting home.
The air sharpens when a clatter comes from the kitchen. Home is away from here. Maybe it’s a few hours down the map or maybe it’s across the country, but home isn’t here. Here, we’re all stoppers and we’ll all eventually be goers.
I see the waitress coming with part of our dinner. She’s wearing a rainbow face mask dotted all over with sequins, but even though we can’t see her mouth she has that forever smile pinching the corners of her eyes. There’s a flash of the cook behind the swinging kitchen door. She is gone, but we hear her voice ringing sharp above the whoosh-clatter-whistle of appliances. Two dishes on hot plates are shoved past the kitchen window and James says he thinks one’s his fish fritters. All our senses buzz, unmuffled by the now. Our tastebuds leap with gravy and salt and our ears ring with kitchen-talk.
Every few minutes, the busser slides by our table, no more than sixteen and the youngest of the three-person crew. He’s hoisting containers of dishes into the white glare of the kitchen, then materializing by abandoned tables, still dusted with crumbs, scrubbing silently until it’s an image of the restaurant’s opening day. I’d like to imagine it that way, slick and sparkling, a wooden portal to some time far away. In between bites of breaded chicken, I wonder, when he’s on break or the place is dead, if the busser hacks away at homework. Trig, maybe. Or something equally unpleasant.
The busser, you know—he’s not a stopper or a goer. He’s the waitress and he’s the cook, the three who look at the license plate map not feeling much of anything when it makes people like us hurt for places that are days of driving away. They don’t look at it to search. They don’t look at it to miss. Their eyes always stop on the sliver of Virginia is for Lovers because that’s what’s on the back of their cars. Maybe when the busser’s shift is over, he eases into his car that he can finally drive all by himself, the car that still smells like childhood a little bit. It’s a decade of driving-smell and cheap cologne and smoke that will never go away, smoke left by Someone’s cig burns on underparts of the seats, underparts that Someone thought were hidden but that the busser runs fingers over from time to time. And once the car starts up with its tired rumble, he goes off down the lonely road watched over on both sides by forest, the one person going home among the travelers.
It doesn’t take long before forks scrape plates instead of meat and we discuss if we should get milkshakes or if it’s just too much for right now.
“Damn, they gave us one bill. Well, it’s Will’s turn to pay for something.”
“I don’t think I had something that good all week. Man, how’d we live on that gas station crap the past couple’a days?”
“Ma’am, ma’am? Can we split this five ways instead? Oh—thanks.”
The after-dinner mush of talk. Our pants rustle as we search for wallets and cards and cash. Lee’s twenty tears and he damns everything to hell, but as soon as the waitress comes back to collect, he’s all smiles.
Our hair is warm under the Denny’s lights, then turns harsh in the hallway. Outside, we’re brushed with summer-night darkness.
We all climbed into Will’s van, where our backpacks and duffel bags are piled up in the trunk, stuffed with clothes in need of ironing if we want to show ourselves in them again. After James pulled the crushed-up map out of the dash and convinced us the tear isn’t all that bad, that we just need to hold the pieces close and we’ll get to the next place just fine, we looked at it to see how far we can make it before we need to find a Motel 6. Then Will turned the key and started up the van after threatening it—for good luck, he always said, and so that it’ll work—then asked everyone if they’re all set.
“Give me a sec.”
When my friends looked back, they saw that one of the van’s doors was still open.
Night flows in. Crickets and highway cars and the distant crinkle of a radio that has bad signal. I’m sitting there with my legs dangling out, disposable camera up to my eye to take a quick photo of the Denny’s. In the viewfinder, it’s all blurred with misplaced light.
I feel eyes on my back and neck and I feel them all burn. The burning, sure, maybe it’s summer. But I don’t think summer judges you as much as the people you love.
“For the memories, guys,” I say in defense before shutting the door. “For the memories.”
Even though we won’t need it.
Safiyya “Saff” Bintali is a writer, researcher, and children’s illustrator. Her work has been featured in Drip, Bridge Eight Press, and Beyond Thought, among others. Also an educator, Safiyya has taught high school English and has completed a creative residency with Tiny Spoon literary magazine in Fall 2022, which featured a comprehensive study of adaptation and a workshop culminating in participants’ own “intermedium translations.” In her free time, she enjoys video games, reading (especially comics and thrillers), and hiking. You can find more of Safiyya’s work on her website at www.safiyyabintali.com.
