TYPICAL Mile 0, El Paso
Loaded at the depot at noon. Forty-two thousand pounds of kitchen appliances bound for a distribution center outside Atlanta, almost fifteen hundred miles east. Two and a half days if I run legal, and I'll run legal, because lately I'm trying hard to be a man who does the small things right. The biggest thing I was supposed to do right is a signed decree in a file at the county courthouse.
I'm thirty-seven and divorced since March. Carla kept the house. I got the truck, every other weekend, and a phone that doesn't ring enough.
The radio's on, and it'll stay on the whole way. I don't care about the music. Silence in a cab at three in the morning is the loudest thing I know.
Mile 305, West Texas
Out here it's caliche and pumpjacks and time. The road runs straight for so long that driving stops being something you do and becomes something you're in. You aren't steering anymore. You're aimed.
This is where the thinking starts. I'm not suicidal, and I want that on the record. I have two kids and a load to deliver. But it's the kind of thinking where you replay every conversation you should have had and didn't.
The one that comes back most is Carla in the kitchen, March of last year.
I need you to be here, she said. Not just physically. Here.
I am here.
You're in the room. You're not in the conversation.
I didn't understand her. I was standing right there, same kitchen, same man who'd been showing up for a decade, running a hundred thousand miles a year so she could stay home with the kids and the mortgage got paid. I thought that was what being there meant. She had been telling me, patiently and then less patiently, that it wasn't. The distance between those two definitions turned out to be a divorce.
Mile 450, Abilene
Called Sofia from the truck stop before her bedtime. She asked when I'm coming home. I said Saturday.
A regular Saturday, she asked, or one of yours?
She's nine, and she already knows the difference. The schedule I can live with. What got me is that she has built a calendar in her head to track whether I'll be around, because me being around isn't the default anymore. I'm an event now.
Luis got on for thirty seconds. Hi Daddy. Bye Daddy. He's six. He doesn't have the words yet for whatever he's feeling about all this. I'd like him to get them from me, and a lot earlier than I got mine.
Mile 812, Texarkana
Ate a microwaved burrito at a plastic table next to a guy about my age. We didn't talk. We did the thing drivers do, sitting ten feet apart, both plainly carrying something, neither one about to name it.
I used to tell people trucking wasn't lonely, just solitary, and the difference was that I'd chosen it. I liked the road. I liked the plain math: drive, deliver, get paid, go home. Somewhere east of Dallas I stopped being sure I was choosing anything. Maybe that's where solitary turns into lonely, the day you notice nobody is waiting at the other end of the drive.
Home now is a one-bedroom in a complex off I-10, with a mattress on the floor and two kid beds I set up for weekends. The math is the same. One of the variables changed.
Mile 905, Arkansas
Rain from the state line to Little Rock. The wipers kept time like a metronome, and I started counting.
Eleven years of marriage. I put about 1.1 million miles on trucks in that time and was gone somewhere around 280 nights a year. I worked it out on a napkin at a fuel stop: roughly three thousand nights away from my own house, which comes to eight and a half years of absence inside an eleven-year marriage.
I wish I hadn't done the math.
I don't think Carla left because I was a bad man. I think she left because for most of eleven years I was gone, and she was raising two kids five nights out of seven with a husband on speakerphone. I was in this cab, earning the money for a life I was almost never home to live. I always thought of the money as what I owed her. It turns out that was only the part of the bill I knew how to pay.
I'd heard the phrase provider trap before. I just didn't know I was standing in one until it closed.
Mile 1,090, Memphis
I've driven through Memphis forty times and never stopped. This time I parked at the welcome center and walked until I could see the Mississippi, and watched it move for twenty minutes. That river was here long before my divorce, and it'll be here long after my regret wears out.
That helped for about ten minutes. Then I got back in the cab and the quiet filled up again.
Mile 1,476, outside Atlanta
Unloaded and signed for. Now I deadhead home, the same distance empty.
Empty trucks run faster, and you feel every bump, because nothing is holding you down. I think that's a metaphor for something. I'm too tired to finish it.
Mile 2,200, westbound, empty
People warn you about what this job does to a man, mostly the back and the sleep. Nobody warns you that three thousand miles of road gives you time to have every conversation you never had, out loud, with a person who isn't there, and that you'll get better at the imaginary ones than you ever were at the real ones.
I've told Carla I love her nine hundred times in this cab since March. Perfect delivery every time.
I told her maybe three times in eleven years of marriage. Badly, and usually while she was already walking out of the room.
So I always had the words. I just never used them when she was close enough to hear.
Mile 2,950, El Paso
On the empty run back I decided a few things.
In our marriage, Carla always went first. She said the hard thing in the kitchen. She said it again in the counselor's office we went to twice. I answered with logistics. So this time I'm going first. I've drafted a text, and I'm sending it Saturday after the kids are asleep at my place. I'm not angling for anything, and she doesn't owe me an answer. It says: You were right about the kitchen. I'm sorry you had to say it so many times.
For Sofia and Luis, a rule for the phone: no call ends on an ETA. Every time, I tell them one real thing, something I saw out the windshield or something that made me think of them.
If you're the one at home getting an ETA every night, you don't owe him a fifth or sixth try. But if you have one left in you, ask him something he can't answer with a mile marker: What did you see out there today?
And to the men still on the road and still married: call her from the next fuel stop and open with something that isn't logistics. Try this: Something out here made me think of you today. Can I tell you about it? Then tell her, and save I'm in Abilene, home Thursday for the end of the call.
If you or someone you know is struggling right now, call or text 988 in the U.S., or see our crisis resources.