Cathy and Mike

His mother never questioned his desire to drive so much. She said he was like his father that way. His father. Someone he never knew. His mother was never married, and folks were polite not to talk about it. He never asked, and she never said. Yet sometimes when a song was on the radio, or some old show was on the tube, she would get a faraway look in her eyes, probably dreaming about this boy she once loved, who never came back.

"What’s this?" Mike spoke to himself, coming to his senses, and wondering where he was, all of a sudden. To his right, as he stopped his car, was a road he hadn’t remembered being there before.

There were always abandoned side roads, gone back to the desert from long lack of use. He had traveled some of those bumpy, barely passable roads turned trails, curious about the few derelict buildings and ramshackle stores that used to have some meaning decades ago, along side these abandoned roads. Mike always wondered about the stories of those places, but there was never anyone around to tell them.

The desert is full of such places, where there was once a life and a business, but only for a time. Once somebody’s monthly receipts got below a certain figure, they walked. It was easier that way. Maybe they all moved to California, skipping out on defaulted bank loans, hopeful that their creditors could sell the place. Banks would put up For Sale signs, but no one ever bought such places. Investors, seeing the prospects there, had better sense to look elsewhere for a business investment. So those places just sort of sank into the sand as time went on in the desert, and their stories sank into a nameless history, unwanted and untold

This road beside him, however, was nearly new. Mike wondered if someone had recently made a new paved road out to the North, without his knowing about it. The asphalt was smooth under his wheels as he turned onto it. He just couldn’t resist seeing where it went. In the starlight, he tried to figure out where this road was on the map of the valley he kept in his head. There were no road signs, of course. There never were, out here in the desert.

It wasn’t long as he was driving before he saw an old faded truck stop with a café, its dim lights barely casting shadows on the empty desert round about.

"How odd!" He said that out loud, for there couldn’t be any business out here already, especially one that had been here for many years. He had to stop and see, so he pulled into an empty parking spot in front of the café. There were plenty of them to chose from.

Getting out, he noticed the creaky neon sign in the window. "Mac’s Place" is all it said. When he got home he would have to ask about all this, for he could have sworn that he knew every place there was out here in the valley, and this was no place he knew about.

He walked in and sat at the counter. "Coffee, please."

The pretty red headed girl behind the counter turned from what she was doing, sat a cup in front of him and poured. "That’ll be a quarter."

He grinned at her joke about the extra cheap coffee, as he pulled out the change for her., giving her the quarter and another one for a tip.

He thought she was pretty. Being seventeen, he thought all girls were pretty. Living in the empty desert, he knew they all were, at least the few he actually knew. Yeah, his supper was waiting for him at home, but his mind was not on food at the moment.