"Grandma Ruth's UP Truck Stop" by Viggy Hampton

Grandma Ruth sets Rachel up on a creepy date.

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Grandma Ruth’s UP Truck Stop by Viggy Hampton

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Rachel’s last semester at the University of Michigan would have been easy if not for the news that reached her six weeks before her final exams.

It wasn’t a phone call—the phone lines were still down from the most recent blizzard to hit Paradise, she guessed. Instead, a rumpled-looking envelope appeared in her mailbox, the ink of her address slightly smeared. She didn’t recognize the return address at first, but anybody mailing her a letter from Paradise must be someone she knew. Paradise was a small town.

Overwhelming curiosity forced her to open the envelope before she could even reach her front porch; in her haste, the sharp edge of the paper sliced into her fingertip, staining the letter with droplets of blood.

“Shit,” she said, sticking her finger in her mouth and sucking. She managed to pull the letter from the envelope with her uninjured hand and flipped it open with a flick of her wrist.

Dear Rachel,

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but your Uncle Stuart has passed. I know it’s been a while since you’ve been home, and this will probably be painful for you. Stu’s service will be on Friday at 10am at Our Lady of Victory. I really hope we’ll see you there.

Please let me know if you need anything, hon. You know we’re all here for you.

Much love,

Ruth

Finishing with the letter, Rachel became acutely aware of the rancid copper taste in her mouth left by the blood. She pulled her finger from her lips and wiped it on her jeans, leaving a small streak of scarlet.

Uncle Stu is dead.

The realization sent electrical jolts into her eyeballs, which began vibrating in her sockets as the tears rolled out. She hadn’t seen Uncle Stu since her parents’ funeral four years before. Her mother’s brother had been an enormous source of comfort as she grappled with the most severe tragedy of her short life. Stu had acted as gatekeeper in the living room, accepting gifts of casseroles and condolences from neighbors as Rachel worked through her grief in her second-floor bedroom, twisting her sheets into knots and screaming into her pillow. He’d forced her to eat even when nothing sounded good, insisting that she needed to keep her strength up, and some calories would make her feel just a tiny bit better. When words weren’t enough, he sat with her on the couch in silence, offering solace with his presence without the complication of language.

How had Rachel thanked him? She’d driven off into the new dawn of college in Ann Arbor, making empty promises to call and write, to keep him apprised of her life. At the time, she’d felt too grief-stricken to keep her connections to Paradise strong. Looking back, she realized with a shameful ache that just as he was hers, she was the only family Stu had left. She’d been too selfish to realize that Stu was hurting, too, mourning the death of his only sister right alongside her.

Now Stu was dead, and Rachel hadn’t spoken to him in years. He’d tried to call on a few occasions—birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving—but as soon as Rachel saw the 906 area code, she muted her phone and let everything go to voicemails she never listened to. That could be the other reason behind the letter Ruth had sent; word had gotten around that Rachel Regal never answered her phone.

I’ve been such an insensitive shit, she thought, dropping to sit on the splintery wood of her front porch steps. She cradled her head in her hands, and the small tears of blood still leaking from her sliced fingertip left red smudges on her cheeks, like the world’s most lurid blush.

The day of her parents’ accident, Stu was supposed to be on the boat with them. Mary and Carl had invited him along to cruise around Lake Superior before heading over to Tahquamenon Falls for a hike and a picnic lunch. It was early May and unseasonably warm; everybody was out and about, hiking the state parks, playing on the beach, biking through town. Rachel had to study for her upcoming exams, the last ones she had to take before graduation, before setting off for the full scholarship awaiting her at U of M. Getting in had been a breeze. She had three major things going for her: she was from a poor, rural county; she was in-state; she was a woman interested in mechanical engineering. On top of all that, of course, she was the smartest one in her grade, which wasn’t too hard in a graduating class of twenty-three students, but her parents always told her that didn’t matter. Smart was smart, and Rachel was one of the good ones. She would make something of herself.

Rachel knew it, too, which was the main reason she had decided to forgo what promised to be an incredible day out on the water to study in her cramped bedroom. She needed to get through one more academic push; she needed to finish things the right way. For her, the right way meant acing her last classes and graduating valedictorian.

In the years that followed, she wondered over and over and over again how things would have turned out if she’d gone with her parents. Maybe they would have seen the rocks in the water, or maybe they wouldn’t have been in that area of Lake Superior at all. Maybe they’d still be alive.

Stu hadn’t been with them that day because he’d come down with a case of late-winter flu. Mary had offered to stay with him, but he’d shooed her away, insisting that she spend such a beautiful day outside with her husband. Life was too short to say no to those experiences.

The irony, of course, was not lost on Rachel.

She’d learned of the accident later that evening, right as she was starting to get worried that her parents would miss dinner. When the telephone rang, she expected to hear her mother’s warm voice, letting her know they were on their way, so go ahead and preheat the oven for the baked potatoes. Instead, she heard Officer McDaniel’s growl, husky with a grief she didn’t understand at first.

“Rachel,” he said, “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this, honey, but…there’s been an accident.”

Rachel didn’t remember much after that; her mind skipped like a broken movie reel. She could only recall snippets: the sound of her own grief-stricken wails as the coffins were lowered into the ground, the snotty smell of her pillow as she sobbed, the sandy taste of the macaroni and cheese casserole Uncle Stu begged her to eat.

Her complete memories came back online once she reached U of M’s leafy campus, as though she’d broken through an invisible, geographic barrier of grief. Without any reminders of her parents—minus the initially frequent questions about her family from fellow students—she felt a psychic scab form over her grief, closing the wound that her parents’ deaths had cut.

Now, sitting on her porch step, everything came hurtling back with unexpected force. On top of all that stale misery, here was something fresh to add to the pile: the death of her last remaining family member, the only other person who shared her blood. The only other person who held vivid, visceral memories of Mary and Carl Regal.

“Fuck,” she whispered, snot and tears pooling in her palms, which were chafed raw by the Michigan cold.

Recalling Ruth’s phrase—I really hope we’ll see you there—Rachel felt ashamed that any person could think she wouldn’t come pay her respects for her own flesh and blood. Of course she would go.

With a herculean force of will, she stood up and walked inside to pack as the sun set over the Ann Arbor skyline. If she left before midnight, she could be in Paradise by 6am Thursday morning.

The atmosphere seemed to grow heavier the closer Rachel got to Paradise. The air tasted different, too, like sweet cherries that had just started to turn—a burst of sweetness followed by a lingering, rancid sourness that puckered lips and upset stomachs.

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, and a few more hours of driving still lay ahead, when Rachel realized with a start that she didn’t know how Uncle Stu had died. Wasn’t that something people normally included in letters like that? Something as simple as ‘The cancer finally got him’ or ‘There’s no way he would have seen the other driver coming’ or ‘The fall killed him instantly.’ What if he’d been sick for a long time, but Rachel never knew because she couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone?

A sob bubbled up in her throat, and she fought against it as hard as she could; if she let herself drift over that edge into the greedy undertow of grief below, she’d never be able to claw her way back out. Once uncorked, that bottle couldn’t be re-stoppered.

Rachel hoped Uncle Stu hadn’t suffered, that whatever it was that had killed him had done so as swiftly and painlessly as possible. That’s what she would want, if it had been her.

What if Uncle Stu had ended his own life? Ruth’s letter had been so ambiguous that all possibilities were still on the table. Had he been found hanging in his garage, swaying gently back and forth? Had he slit his wrists before sliding into a warm tub and drifting away forever? Had he stuffed heavy lakeshore rocks in his pockets and walked into the icy cold surf, letting the water fill him completely?

Rachel wasn’t sure if she would ever know, and if she would ever want to know. She’d only ever question if there was something she could have done to change things, the response a dangerous perpetual motion machine of self-torture that she remembered all too well from the weeks following her parents’ deaths.

She turned her thoughts instead to the woman who sent the letter. Although she’d signed it Ruth, everybody always called her Grandma Ruth, or just Grandma. As far as Rachel knew, Grandma Ruth didn’t actually have any children, much less grandchildren, but the matronly, maternal vibe she gave off attracted people to her. She owned Grandma Ruth’s UP Truck Stop, self-nicknamed ‘The Best Meal You Can Get in the Upper Peninsula,’ open 24 hours. Rachel fondly remembered the thick buttermilk pancakes she got every Sunday morning with her parents, and how Ruth would surreptitiously sprinkle in a few chocolate chips along with the blueberries her parents insisted on, for the vitamins. Grandma Ruth was pleasantly plump, as Rachel remembered her, harmless and Betty Crocker-like. Always a pie in the oven, always a hamburger on the grill, always a pot of coffee brewing for the weary traveler.

Rachel wondered if there had been a discussion about who would tell her of Stu’s death, if her former fellow townies had all agreed on Ruth, or if Ruth had taken the task on herself because it was clear no one else would do it. Was it an act of love, or of obligation? Could it be both?

A neon sign blinking in the night off to her right caught her attention, pulling her out of her swirl of thoughts. PINCONNING CHEESE shined out into the night, beckoning her. She almost laughed aloud; Pinconning cheese, eponymously named for the town she was now driving through, had been a delicacy in her house. Whenever her father or Uncle Stu had gone downstate for business or pleasure, they’d always been sure to bring her back an entire wheel of sharp Pinconning cheddar, which she sprinkled over scrambled eggs, melted onto tortilla chips, sliced onto sandwiches, and stirred into macaroni. Her mouth watered at the memory, and she realized she’d skipped dinner the night before. She wanted to pull over and buy a block for old times’ sake, but it was barely 3:15 AM, and the Pinconning Cheese Co. & Fudge Shoppe wouldn’t be open, of course.

She knew a place that would be, though. She’d never been to Grandma Ruth’s UP Truck Stop before 8am or after 6pm, but she knew people who had, who practically lived in the cracked red vinyl booths and watched life pass by atop the crusty barstools that had long since ceased their ability to spin. Those people, mostly (maybe all?) men, were the fathers, brothers, businessmen of the town; something clearly called them to Grandma Ruth’s. When she was young, she’d heard a rumor that Grandma Ruth was hypnotizing them with a special potion she stirred into their coffees, or, for some, whiskeys. When she was older, she came to the more depressing conclusion that all the men congregated at Grandma Ruth’s simply because there was literally no other place for miles around that was open at night and had a liquor license.

She was making good time, she could tell by how quickly the road flew by between Pinconning and the old Family Fun Park near Alpena. She’d heard another rumor from an Alpena girl at U of M that a completely unhinged dude had started living in the Family Fun Park and was trying to bring it back to life. Privately, the girl said she thought something much more sinister was going on. “You know, like House of Wax, where all the people who go visit this super creepy town in the middle of nowhere end up disappearing because some guy makes them into wax figures while they’re still alive!” Rachel had laughed at that, but the whole idea made her uneasy. There was something about northern Michigan, the Upper Peninsula included, that always left her feeling a little off-kilter, as though the smallest dip in the road could send her careering into empty space. She wasn’t sure if that was just a feeling that blossomed in the wake of her parents’ deaths, or something more intrinsic.