There’s a shepherd’s hook hanging next to the security grille, but Lucy Cooper ignores it. Instead, she stretches on tip-toe, and, after three or four swipes, catches her fingertips on the fraying braided loop. She pulls the rope and the gate rolls down, the churning clunk of steel walling her and The Bay Family Restaurant from the rest of the truck stop. It’s the quiet after-dinner hour, most long-haul drivers settling into their sleepers for their 10-hour breaks. In the KarMart across the tan-tiled lobby, Marge, the Mart’s proprietor, leans on the counter, chatting with a trucker while they watch her mini black-and-white. Lucy studies him through the grate. He wears the same company polo Coop wore his first few years on the road: red with a gold collar, gold rings around the arms.

“You bout ready?” Gloria asks, her purse already slung over her coat. Gloria’s worked here longer than anyone, and feels she’s earned the right to skip out on some closing side work. She’s just freshened up in the bathroom after their double shift; her dark brown curls are down and fluffed, with a crimp halfway down from the day’s ponytail, and she wears a fresh bloom of magenta lipstick.

“You go ahead,” Lucy tells her.

“Jim picking you up?” Jim is Lucy’s husband. They had to sell her car after Jim lost his regular job at the middle school, so Jim drops her off before her breakfast shift on days he picks up sub work, and Gloria drives her home.

“I’m gonna walk,” Lucy says.

Gloria cocks her head like a seagull. “Walk? That’s, what—an hour? It’s cold, and it’s about to get dark.”

Lucy crouches to open the padlock. “So I can smoke in peace.”

Gloria bores a gentle knee into her side, but Lucy keeps steady. Gloria’s legs are shaved so smooth they shine like supermarket fruit. Lucy’s need mowing.

Lucy twists the dial to the right three times, and the metal plates inside quietly scrape and whir. Across the lobby, Marge’s driver leaves the counter. Lucy tracks him as he moves from the fridge wall, to the prepped food, to the jerky aisle, a cardinal in the snowy light. She notices Gloria watching her, and turns her eyes back to the lock.

“I can hang around, you know,” Gloria says, her tone is softer now, “if there’s something you need to take care of.” She waits for Lucy to meet her eye, but Lucy misses a turn in the combination, and starts over.

“Just want some fresh air,” she says.

“Which is why you’ll need cigarettes.”

The lock pops open, and Lucy hooks it through the metal loops and clutches it shut. “Gloria,” she says, standing. “I don’t even like the mother I’ve got.”

Gloria sniffs, tugs at the cuffs of her coat. “Suit yourself. Freeze,” she says. She turns, then picks over the freshly mopped floor, back through the kitchen, through the clatter of silverware and Carl and Ernesto’s laughter.

Once the door fuffs behind Gloria, Lucy darts into the maintenance closet and switches on the light. Inside, she grabs a pair of wire-cutters and a kitchen bag, and tucks them into her apron.

Back at the counter, she wipes down menus, keeping an eye out The Bay’s picture window. It’s only a minute until the dome light of Gloria’s Ford Probe flicks on in the lot, yellow in the early evening light. Her friend applies another layer of lipstick, caps it, and turns back to look inside one last time. Lucy looks down. Gloria pulls away.

Lucy shuts the lights for the dining room, each switch triggering a quiet cluck as the lamps go dark. Across the lobby, her driver in red migrates from the KarMart to the vending area. He removes his red company hat, pulls a large wood crucifix on a string from his shirt, kisses it, replaces the hat, and feeds a quarter into the claw game. There’s a large teddy bear with a red satin bow wedged deep in the back of the tank, its soft fur fanned against glass. Lucy watches through the security grate’s staggered-brick windows as he steers the crane to the back right corner, his cross dangling from his neck. The pincers close around the bear’s head, but its body is buried deep in plush, and it doesn’t budge. The driver takes off his mesh hat, brings the cross once more to his lips, replaces the hat, and inserts another quarter. He steers again to the back of the tank, where the satin bow slips through the claw. He runs his ritual and tries a third time, grasps for the bear, again comes up empty. Could he be playing for Coop? Lucy wonders.

Sometimes, Lucy plays an A/B game at work: she takes whatever story immediately comes to mind about a person, then flips some part of it. She likes seeing how it changes her understanding of them, but more than that, how it changes her feelings about them. That is, what it tells her about herself, the beliefs she might otherwise not even know she had.

These people are newlyweds / These people have just run away from their spouses.

            This woman enjoys a carefree life of solo travel and leisurely restaurant lunches / This woman is caring for a sick parent and this magazine and chicken pot pie are the sole comfort she’ll allow herself all week.

            This garrulous driver has a network of friends that runs from coast to coast / We are the only people who might notice if he died.

She knows that the A story, the more likely story, in this case, is not Coop: it’s a little girl at home, who hasn’t seen her papa in days. But still Lucy watches, and doesn’t need to wonder why. Because: what if?

He feeds more quarters, tries a few more times to hook the bow, and when that fails, he tries for the ears, then the snout. Each time: cap off, cross kiss, cap on, quarter.

Three bucks later, he surrenders, and settles for a pink ballerina mouse knocked loose in battle. The claw closes on her tutu’s gauze, and she floats up and across the machine in full spotlight before swan-diving into the prize area. He delivers the doll from the rubber flap, runs his thumb against her satin slippers. He purses his lips and nods—fully pleased, it seems. Lucy tries to feel happy for him.

At her locker, she pulls on her jacket, and stuffs the kitchen bag and wire cutter into her purse. Carl and Ernesto are still laughing in the kitchen, their faces damp with dishwasher steam and tears. “I swear to God,” says Carl, “I swear to God, it’s this”—he spreads his thumb and forefinger wide as they can go—“this big. I could not believe. I just could not believe.” Ernesto is shaking his head—no, no. Carl wipes his eyes on the meat of his palm, then spreads his fingers again, stretching them until they shake. “This big! Can you imagine?” Ernesto cracks up all over again.

“Goodnight, guys,” Lucy says.

“Goodnight, Lucy,” says Ernesto. “You take care,” says Carl.

Lucy ducks out the back door, walks down the loading dock steps, past the dumpsters, past the semis herringboned in the lot, and heads left onto Route 37. It's a minor highway in Delaware, just two lanes in each direction, a route for local drivers and the oddballs who prefer The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to glossy 95.

It’s forty minutes down the narrow gravel shoulder, past bare fields and winterbent cattails, until Lucy arrives at Coop’s spot. She hasn’t visited since January, since the one-year anniversary of his death. There's a white plastic cross bungeed to the buckled I-beam, with COOP Sharpied on the left bar and 1978-2008 on the right, the 8 stretching tall and thin as the writer ran out of space. Jim's family name—Lucy and Jim’s family name, now—is Cooper, but only his younger brother (baptized Daniel) went by Coop. Coop was Lucy’s oldest friend, the one who introduced her to Jim. He even got her the job at The Bay. Today would have been his 31st birthday.

Coop had a dedicated run for a furniture company in North Carolina—drove an eighteen-wheeler from High Point up as far as Boston, dropping deliveries in D.C., Philly, and New York along the way. When Lucy imagines who else visits this place, she pictures grizzled drivers with their Peterbilts pulled to the shoulder, kneeling in the grass in prayer. But she’s never seen another person here, nor the heavy tracks of double tires pressed into the ground.

In the twilight, she looks for fresh offerings, footprints—any sign someone else might have visited today. The grass is long and untrampled, though, with the smooth gray rocks she’d left on past visits scattered by the base. The edges of the cross’s plastic are chipped and ragged from a harsh winter. An old prayer candle’s blown over, and there’s a teddy bear someone zip-tied to the beam around Christmas, soggy from a season’s rain. Up close, she sees it’s different from the one from the one in the lobby’s claw game—no ribbon, dark brown nubbly fur. No one has left a ballerina mouse.

The other gifts are old and familiar: a single plastic-stemmed rose; a pinwheel with American flags shimmering on each wing; a Psalm bookmark looped with a fraying silken tassel. Lucy’s not sure if an emptied bottle of Southern Comfort is tribute or litter. It’s probably the only one Coop would’ve liked.

Or so she imagines. Maybe whoever left these things knew more about Coop than she ever did, she thinks. She still doesn’t know who put this cross here. Maybe a lover. Maybe someone he knew from The Bay. Maybe Lorraine, Coop and Jim’s mom. Not Jim, though. She used to think it would be Jim’s way to visit alone and leave no trace, but she’s grown to believe he doesn’t visit at all.

Lucy and Jim pass this spot nearly every day, often twice, or more. Coop drove thousands of miles each week, but it was this road, this beam—Mack truck, jackknife—that killed him. It’s always felt like both a gift and a haunting, it being so close.

Lucy pulls the wire cutters from her purse, ready to throw away that waterlogged bear, who smells like mildew and looks like he’s choking. When she grasps his body, feels the wet foam inside, she remembers the sponge of lawn chair cushions after rain—summer evenings in the Cooper boys’ backyard, her shorts growing damp at the seat, ignoring the damp because Jim’s arm was around her, watching moths swarm the orange flood lights and bump against the screen while Coop picked out Nirvana on his guitar.

She slides the clippers under the zip-tie on the bear’s neck, and cuts. The bear drops to the ground with a quiet splat. She reaches for the kitchen bag, rubs it between fingers to unstick the plastic. With its mouth wide, it snaps like a flag in the wind.

But Lucy can’t throw the bear away. What if she’d be taking something sacred from someone else who loved Coop? She satisfies herself with molding the bear back into shape, working some fiber into its neck so the head stays upright. She arranges it with the other offerings against the pole. She figures no one would object to trashing perishables, so she tosses the shriveled bouquet and the empty bottle of SoCo and a pack of Hostess cupcakes, the brown ones with white squiggles of frosting, the package hazy with condensation. The stiff flower stems spike the kitchen bag.

Lucy straightens the cross, rights the candle with the Virgin stippled on its jar. From the look of the wick, it’s never been lit. It’s good to know others who remember Coop are sensible enough not to start a grassfire, Lucy thinks. But still they believe that a stuffed bear from an arcade claw machine might be visible to the afterlife.

Coop didn’t believe in heaven, or God. But maybe, Lucy thinks, it doesn’t matter if he sees it. Maybe it only matters that they see it, that others who know what this spot means see it, too.

When she’s done, she kneels—not with hands pressed together or anything, just kneels. A car passes, and she ducks her face away from the road. Bent at the base of the beam below the cross, she imagines she looks like one of the women in the altar painting at the Catholic church she attended as a child. I probably look more like a rogue Adopt-A-Highway volunteer, she thinks. Another car passes, then another. With each rush of air, she recognizes a flickering hope that someone might stop, might join her. She kneels, waiting—if not for someone to pull over, then maybe just for a feeling. But she only feels the damp ground through the legs of her pants.

She gets up after only a minute or so, then picks up some bottles and wrappers and cigarette butts. She finds another smooth gray rock, caresses its curves with her thumb, places it with the others, and walks away. She can’t say why she leaves them, exactly, marking visits like beads on a rosary.

*

She walks another fifteen minutes down Route 37, pauses as she waits for a sedan and two box trucks to pass, then jogs across the highway to Main Street. Lucy’s house is one of five houses on Main, a pot-holed offshoot of 37 sunk in marsh. Whoever named the street had either delusions of grandeur or a perverse sense of humor. Most people in the area haven't ever heard of it. The numbers jump around from house to house—Lucy’s in number 86, and the next place, about a quarter mile of cattails down, is 304. There's room between houses, sure, but Lucy doesn't know who they think they're going to lure here. You can't build on ground like this.

Lucy’s is a doublewide unit, hoisted on stilts so the marsh doesn't sop up into the floors. “It's a real house with siding and a stoop and everything, just formed from trailers originally,” Lucy said to her sister Helen, when Jim let the word “trailer” slip. “We're not like those people you see on the news after tornadoes.” Rent is six-ninety a month, plus utilities, and Jim's internet. They pay the rent on time, mostly.

Behind their house is a plain of cattails dredged in marsh. Jim lost a lot of baseballs in that muck the summer they moved in, when he still played. Year-round, the water creeps up onto the roads, icing over in the winter, stinking in the summer. Now, in the early spring when the ground is thawing, the mud sucks at Lucy’s shoes with every step, leaving footprint craters like in the pictures from the moon landings. She keeps a separate pair to change into at work. Sometimes, she imagines she’s a businesswoman who works in a city.

Jim’s Nissan is in the driveway, and the kitchen light is on. She slides the kitchen bag from her shoulder, then stuffs it into the curbside can outside her neighbor’s house, so Jim won’t see.

The storm door creaks like a swing set. Inside, Jim leans against the kitchen counter, the phone wedged between his shoulder and cheek. He’s wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a red tee from the 2004 eighth grade carnival at Dover Plains Middle School. A winning student drew the design, caricatures of teachers lined up for a dunking booth. Jim is recognizable as third in line, a crew-cut giant holding an Erlenmeyer flask.

“I know, I know,” he murmurs into the phone.

Your mom? Lucy mouths, and he nods, and turns to the counter. “I know,” he says, “me too.” Of course Lorraine would have called today, teary, not knowing what to say, not wanting to say goodbye. On the counter in front of Jim, there’s an open clamshell of Carl’s meatloaf, another split of mashed potatoes and spinach, two waiting plates.

He’s still for another minute, but then his leg begins to bounce nervously. “Okay, mom. Mom? I’m gonna let you go. Lucy’s home.” He pauses, listens, pumps his heel. “I know. I know. Take it easy, okay? Okay. Love you too. Bye.”

He beeps the phone off, returns it to its cradle, and sighs. “Hey,” Lucy says, and they step into a hug. She presses her nose against his chest, breathes in the cedar scent of his deodorant. Tears start to press her throat, and she swallows.

“How are you?” she asks. “How’s she doing?”

Jim steps back. “Eh,” he says. “You know.” Lucy waits, but Jim doesn’t say more, just turns to the cutlery drawer. She does know, though. For the past 20 minutes, or hour, however long ago she called, Lorraine will have asked, do you remember, do you remember—about Coop’s tornado-themed fourth birthday party, or the crow who brought him a sapphire earring after he fed it Doritos for a summer, or the time he flipped the neighbor’s ride-on lawnmower—and Jim will have patiently said yes, yes, and when she cried, said he knows, he knows, until Lucy came home, and gave him an excuse to hang up.

“It’s a hard day,” Lucy offers.

He swallows, stiffens, and it’s like Lucy watches something seal, a fingertip smoothed across a freezer bag. He nods to the microwave clock. “It’s late,” he says. “Everything okay?” Without waiting for an answer, he turns back to the cutlery drawer and begins to rummage.

Lucy brushes her hair from her face, picturing the kitchen bag in the neighbor’s trash. She studies Jim’s back, how it jerks as he stacks forks, knives, tablespoons on the counter, each pair clanging like a bell. He doesn’t look up.

“Yeah, sorry—last-minute busload,” she says. “Took forever to close out.”

“Call next time?”

“I will.”

Lucy hang ups her jacket, pulls the stack of tips from her purse, and opens the top cabinet door. The cat comes running immediately. She nips Lucy’s ankle; Lucy nudges her away with her foot. Lucy pulls down the coffee can from the top shelf of the cabinet, folds the cash inside, replaces it, then grabs the box of cat food from the shelf below. The cat yowls, butts against her. The cat was a stray Lucy found by the back fence of the truck stop, the winter that Coop died. Stupid to think it would help. They named her when they got her—Blade (Jim's call)—but for the most part, they call her “cat,” and usually as a reprimand. She's mostly black, with a brown-orange ridge down her spine. She is a mean, bony, biting thing, impossible to cuddle, a harvester of insects and vermin. Last spring she got a bunny between her teeth and brought it to the back door. Lucy had never heard a rabbit scream before.

Lucy crouches to shake food into the cat’s bowl, and the animal pushes against her so hard that she teeters. “Whoa!” she says, and Jim looks over. “What happened to your pants?”

Lucy stands, brushing her damp knees. “Oh, just—tripped on the grass. I’m fine.”

“You wanna change before dinner?” he says, thumbing toward the bedroom. “I can heat things up here. Want a beer?”

Lucy tries to remember a time she’s wanted a beer more. “Please,” she says.

In the bedroom, she peels off her uniform, the smell of grease heavy on her clothes. This happens on chilly, cloud-dark days—sunlessness makes people crave deep-fried food. She scrubs her arms and neck with a washcloth, pulls on sweats and a tee stretched shapeless, and slips on a pair of Jim's athletic socks.

Lucy and Jim have a theory this rental used to be a portable office—maybe school administration, or a construction project—and nowhere is the unit's former life more evident than in this bedroom. Take, for instance, the office carpeting—short rough loops of mottled gray, shiny with plastic fiber—which bears the parallel indentations of file cabinets, or a keyhole desk. There’s two sets of phone jacks in a nine-by-eleven room, and a tacked-on closet, built into a corner with accordion doors, forming not-quite-right angles with the walls.

“Well, it'll certainly take some love,” Lucy’s sister Helen said unhelpfully when she first saw the place, after they’d unpacked. Helen is given to passive-aggressive Pollyanna-ing like this, at times when the most supportive thing would be to say, “It's only temporary,” and present them with liquor. (Coop used his truck to help them move, and brought them a bottle of Jameson.) And who wants to invest love in something that won’t return it?

The rental, poor thing, was not designed to be loved, was probably not even designed to be a home. It is hallway-less: an open kitchenette (a patch of linoleum bordered by metal runners screwed into the office carpet) and a narrow living room run down the right of the unit, with doorways off the interior wall for the bathroom, office, and bedroom on the left.

In the living room, Jim has brought their plates and two cans of Coors to the coffee table, and turned to a rerun of Wheel of Fortune. The set is decked in tinsel and poinsettia, and Vanna is in emerald sequins. They haven’t seen this one.

“How was work?” Lucy asks after a bite of potatoes.

“Fine,” Jim says. “Attendance; worksheets; cafeteria duty.” He forks a mound of spinach to his mouth. “You?” he says.

“Quiet,” she says, then, remembering her late arrival, adds, “other than that last busload.”

They chew. Jim solves for INSTANT MESSAGING and TV HOST TY PENNINGTON. Lucy gets TRIPLE-DECKER TURKEY CLUB SANDWICH and JUDAS ISCARIOT.

Jim coughs, raises his fork. “Good meatloaf.”

“Carl’s special,” she says, and before she can talk herself out of it, adds, “Coop used to order it all the time.”

Jim nods without taking his eyes from the television, and Lucy can’t tell if it’s to her, or to Tressie’s decision to buy an “U.” She watches for his gaze to lower, or for him to chew his cheek. Any sign Coop is on his mind.

Vanna turns a panel. “With macaroni and the veggie medley, and ambrosia if we had it,” Lucy continues. “If not, rice pudding.”

“A Q?” Tressie says, and a buzzer sounds.

“No Q,” Pat Sajak apologizes. “Chelsea, it’s your spin.”

Lucy studies the letters and the blanks on the screen. For the fifteen months since Coop died, she’s alternated between giving Jim space and gently trying to get him to open up. She knows there is no calendar for grief; she knows he’s mourning in his own way. What she doesn’t understand is why he’ll stay on the phone for an hour with his mother while she talks and talks about Coop, but shut down the moment Lucy tries.

“A P,” Chelsea says.

“Three Ps,” says Pat.

“Jim—" Lucy says.

“I want—” he starts, at the same time.

Lucy waits, but he doesn’t say more. “Go ahead,” she says, as gently as she can.

“I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND PUPPET,” he announces, and Chelsea echoes a heartbeat later. Tressie shakes her head; trumpets blare. Chelsea is headed to the final round.

Lucy isn’t sure why she tried. Coop’s name has been dead in their house almost as long as he has.

Jim finishes his beer in a long gulp, stands, stretches. “You need anything else?” he says. “I’m gonna go look something up for tomorrow.” He collects his plate and silverware from the table.

“I’m good,” Lucy replies. Jim rinses his plate and dries his hands, then disappears behind the office door.

They keep the computer in that little room on the right, the one probably imagined to pass as a second bedroom but which houses for them—besides the old beige desktop—a card table, a printer, Jim's old church league trophies, copy boxes of old lesson plans, and back issues of Science. For the past month or so, Jim’s spent all his free time shut away in there. He’s withdrawn into the screen.

Lucy finishes her meal alone. Chelsea gets two letters in the finals, accepts consolation for the car she doesn’t win. Lucy turns off the television, washes the dishes, stacks them in the rack. When she’s done, she presses her ear against the office door. Jim is breathing raggedly.

Lucy steps back, clears her throat, and raps twice with her knuckle.

“Just a sec,” he calls, his voice strained. It’s at least a full minute before he opens the door. He looks bleary, and red-faced, and spent.

Lucy has heard about things like this on the talk shows bleating in the background at Marge’s. Wives tell their stories through strained, high-pitched voices; husbands look at their hands in their laps.

“I’m heading in,” Lucy says. “Should I say goodnight? Do you think you’re coming in soon?”

“Uh —yeah. I’ll be in in a bit,” he says.

But he won’t be, Lucy knows.

After she washes up, she presses the bedroom door closed. They often divvy up the house like this now, angle for one of the three rooms alone, a shell game of solitude. Lucy crawls beneath the comforter, its pills rough against her cheek. They still use the linens they received for their wedding, a hunter green bed-in-a-bag with a reversible comforter—one side: green plaid; the other side: a different green plaid.

On her dresser is a photo, in a silver frame from Helen—another wedding gift. Jim and Coop are in matching gray suits, their fresh haircuts too short. To the left, Coop holds champagne flute aloft. Lucy and Jim are center frame, sparkling at each other.

Lucy imagines going back to the office, throwing the door wide. And then what, exactly? How could that help anything? Everyone grieves differently, seeks comfort in different ways, don’t they? Everyone has their fascinations and deserves some privacy to indulge them. She doesn’t like those tell-all wives on the talk shows, dragging shame out of their husbands, and themselves. Their bright twinsets and a string of pearls.