Frank Hits the Road

Somewhere in the Midwest, early 2022. Frank claimed the passenger seat on day one and never gave it back.

Hey, you. It’s me. Frank. Dad and I have been putting some miles down this summer — real miles, the kind where the cooler is in the back seat, the cup holder is mine, and the road keeps unrolling like a long gray ribbon out ahead of us. After the couple of years we’d all just had — the staying inside, the keeping apart, the careful little world we’d been living in — the highway felt almost too generous. Wide. Bright. Open. Dad would crank the wheel out of the driveway, I’d take my seat up front, and the two of us would aim at whatever city the next handful of hours had on offer. He drives. I watch. It’s a good arrangement.

What nobody tells you, when you’re a thirty-inch stuffed zebra new to all this, is what happens at the gas station. You pull up to the pump. Dad swipes the card. And somewhere in the next sixty seconds, the driver one lane over glances toward your window, then glances again, then really looks. There’s a half-second where their face doesn’t know what to do. Then it picks. It goes with the smile. Every single time. The smile. Sometimes a wave. Sometimes a window comes down. Sometimes a phone comes up, and I do my best to give it a good angle. A trucker once gave me a thumbs-up so sincere I felt my stripes straighten. A whole minivan of folks once laughed so hard the kids in the back wanted to know what was wrong with their grandma.

Here’s the thing I figured out, somewhere between exits, watching all those faces light up through the passenger glass: people had been carrying something heavy for a long while, and they didn’t always know it. They’d be in their own head, in their own hurry, gas pump ticking, mind a hundred miles ahead. And then a zebra would look back at them. And whatever they were carrying got, just for a second, a little lighter. I’m not a toy anymore — not out here, anyway. Out here I’m a delivery vehicle. The cargo is small. It fits between two people in the half-second it takes to recognize each other through a windshield. It still ships, though. Free of charge. I think a lot of folks really, really needed it. I think some of them still do.

So that’s what we’re doing out here, Dad and me. Putting smiles in the mail. We’ve got more stops on the route than I can count, and a few of them are stories worth telling proper — the kind I’ll need a whole post to do right. Stick around. The road’s been good to us so far, and it’s only just warming up.

— Frank