Chapter 5: Nebraska at Noon

The car broke down in Nebraska, which was either the universe being funny or the universe being cruel, and Jess was not in the mood to decide which. She sat on the hood in the punishing midday heat while Danny called the roadside service, pacing the gravel shoulder with the focused energy of someone whose phone call gave them an excuse not to talk to the person sitting on the car. They'd been doing that for two days. Finding tasks. Taking turns driving in near silence, offering each other gas station coffee with the careful courtesy of strangers on a long flight. It hadn't always been like this. Five years ago — before — they had been the kind of friends who finished each other's sentences and called at 2 a.m. for no reason and had a shared language of references that required no explanation. She had been his person. He had been hers. And then one night, after a party neither of them had particularly wanted to attend, something had shifted in the way those shifts happen: without announcement, without apparent cause, with the precision of a bone moved slightly out of its socket. Not broken. Just wrong. She had pulled away. She could admit that now, four states and forty hours into a car trip she hadn't expected to share with him. She had pulled away first, and he had let her, and then both of them had spent five years being correct about not reaching out. "Service truck in ninety minutes," he said, climbing up to sit on the hood beside her. "Great." A long silence. The highway stretched in both directions, flat, certain of its direction. "Jess." "Don't." "I wasn't going to say anything heavy." She looked at him. His expression was careful in the way it got when he was trying to be considerate of her at some cost to himself. "Okay," she said. "What were you going to say?" "There's a diner about a mile back. I saw it when we pulled over." He squinted into the heat. "I'm going to lose my mind if I sit here for ninety minutes." She slid off the hood. "Fine," she said. "But I'm getting pie." "Obviously you're getting pie." They walked in the heat without talking, but it was a different kind of silence than the car silence. The car silence had been careful. This one just was.