All stories › Family Drama › Halfway on Route 9 › Episode 1
The Cup Holder
Episode 1 of 3 of Halfway on Route 9 by Amy Fenwick · free to read
Sunday, 5:12 p.m.
The dash clock said 5:12 and I left the engine running. The Route 9 station had four pumps, a coffee sign, and the lot where we did this every Sunday. Two years of Sundays, nose to nose, back doors lined up.
Sam’s car came off the highway at 5:14. He pulled in the way he always did, so Milo could walk between the two open doors without crossing anything.
Milo was in the back with his headphones on. He raised one hand at me through the glass and went back to his screen. Seven years old, and he had the handoff down better than either of us.
Sam got out and opened his back door. He unbuckled the booster seat, the gray one with the red armrest, and lifted it out with the belt guide still swinging.
“Fourteen after,” I said.
“I know what time it is,” he said.
“That is three Sundays in a row now.”
“There’s construction past Corbin,” he said. “One lane. They’re doing the bridge.”
Past Corbin. He lived in Corbin.
He carried the seat around to my side and set it on my back seat. He fed the belt through the red guide the way the manual said. He tugged it twice, the way the manual did not say.
“The plan says five,” I said.
“The plan says five,” he said. “I’m doing my best with five.”
“Your best used to be four fifty.”
“My best used to be a lot of things.”
Milo walked between the doors with his backpack and climbed into the seat. He buckled himself. Sam leaned in and kissed the top of his head.
“Five on the nose next week,” Sam said, to him or to me.
“You haven’t said that since August.”
“Then I’m saying it now.”
Sunday, 6:20 p.m.
My mother had the calendar off the fridge before I set my keys down. She came over on the Sundays I got him back, with the red pen she kept on a cord around her neck.
“Late again?” she said.
“Fourteen minutes,” I said.
She wrote it in the box under the two other numbers. 5:09. 5:12. 5:14. Her handwriting made them look like a case.
“That’s a pattern,” she said. “You tell the mediator that’s a pattern.”
“It’s fourteen minutes, Mom.”
“It’s late three times,” she said.
Milo came in for the blue cup and left with it. The headphones were around his neck now, which meant he could hear us, so we stopped.
She put the calendar back under the pizza magnet. She stood there and read the three numbers again, as if a fourth might show up.
“He said there’s construction past Corbin,” I said.
“Then he leaves earlier,” she said. “That’s what the rest of us do.”
“I know that, Mom.”
“He was never late when you were married.”
“He was late for everything when we were married,” I said. “He just lived here.”
She let that go. She tucked the red pen back inside her collar, and I put the water on and set out two plates and the blue cup.
Sunday, 8:40 p.m.
Milo was asleep by eight thirty, which was the one thing about Sundays that never changed. I went out to the car for his reading folder.
The dome light came on over the booster seat. The red armrest had CAPTAIN written on it in marker, from when he was five and promoted it.
There was something in the seat’s cup holder. A receipt, folded twice, the way a kid folds a thing he has been told to hold onto.
I opened it under the light. Route 9 Fuel and Go, Ashford. Today, 4:06 p.m. Eleven gallons, thirty-eight dollars and change.
Ashford was twenty miles past Corbin on the same road. My sister had her baby shower at the hall there. It took me fifty-five minutes from the station, on a Saturday, with no bridge work.
I did the math on the steering wheel with my finger. Gas at 4:06. In the lot at 5:14. Sixty-eight minutes, with one lane past Corbin.
Nobody drives twenty miles past their own apartment for gas on a Sunday and then drives back. He was coming from Ashford. He had been coming from Ashford since the numbers on the calendar started.
In June he had said the lease was sorted. He had not said where.
Sam did not live in Corbin anymore.