I hang up before the state trooper can give me any more bad news. They can’t, or won’t, help track down Artie. I’ve called Artie’s cell eighteen times, but he won’t answer. If he did, I wouldn’t ask him to do anything but leave Mack where I can pick him up, maybe at another TA, or a vet not far off the road. But Artie sees my number and ignores me. I don’t exist for him anymore.

I need a ride. I need to catch up with Artie. Feeling like a tramp, I start talking to the truckers arrayed around the counter like piglets on a sow. “No can do.” “Against the rules of my company.” “Back off; I’m a family man.”

Soon enough, I attract the attention of the center’s manager, who gives me the look. I hold my hands up in the universal sign of “no harm” and move away from the truckers.

Families are tucking into the all-you-can-eat brunch. I sit alone at a table a mere three feet from a likely-looking group: mom and dad, two chunky preschoolers, and a grandma. “Nice day. Where you headed?” Nice, ordinary midwestern friendliness, nothing scary here.

“We’re headed down to Disney.”

That’s east enough for me. Maybe they can get me as far as New York before they head south down 95.

“What’ll you have?” The waitress is looming over me. The seventeen-inch-tall multipage plastic menu is still flat on the table.

Hungry I’m not, but I need to look like a customer. I order two eggs and bacon, white toast, coffee. I think that I’m going to hurl. I smile at the family beside me. “I’m heading east, too. Any chance you’ve got room for a passenger? I’ll pay your gas.”

The father twitches his mustache-covered lip like an old-time movie Lothario. His wife’s eyes open in that wifely “Don’t you dare” look I’ve seen on the wives who sometimes come looking for their husbands in my bar. He holds his hands palm up. “I don’t think so. We’re pretty full.” Grandma, intent on her biscuits, suddenly gets what’s going on. From her corner of the table, she sets an eye on me, and I nod and go back to playing with the sugar packets in their little white box on my table.

Before my food can arrive, I drop a dollar on the table and leave the building.

* * *

“You need some help?” It’s the one-legged Harley rider. He leans on a single crutch, resting on a leg that ends in a traditional motorcycle boot, the leather beneath his left knee vacant, moving slightly in the Ohio air.

“I guess I do.”

“Your boyfriend dump you?”

“No. My ride east abandoned me. But, worse”—I swallow to gain control of my voice—“he’s got my dog. He took off with my dog.”

“Bastard.”

“I need to catch up with him.” I hate that my voice cracks.

“Where’s he headed?”

With those few words, I feel a flicker of hope, as tiny as the flame on a Bic, but a flicker nonetheless. “Boston.”