By Emily Rinkema

At night, Willa goes to the truck stop to deal secrets. She arrives just after midnight and sets up at the picnic table near the bathrooms, available secrets on sticky notes spread out in front of her. Some are only a few days old and others have been held much longer. There’s no wind tonight, so she organizes them by topic on the wooden table and waits for customers. 

The first arrives right away, as if he’s been waiting for her, and she thinks she recognizes him. That’s not surprising. It feels good, unloading secrets to a stranger, and her customers return over and over. Willa pats the bench next to her and the man starts talking before he is even seated, a quiet, rushed story that’s more of an apology than a secret, but she takes it in, nods, doesn’t make eye contact. When he’s done, he lights a cigarette and waits as she writes his secret down, her tiny handwriting capturing the man’s words. 

“What are you looking for tonight?” she asks him. 

“Something about marriage,” he says. “Something really sad.” He stands up, takes his hat off, puts it back on. He rubs the toe of his boot back and forth in the gravel.

Willa glances over the table and selects one, something simple that’s been here for a few months, waiting for just the right user. It’s sad, but kind. She remembers the night she heard it, how it made her eyes water, how she wanted to tell the confessor to just talk to his wife, that it wasn’t so complicated. The man puts the secret in his pocket and nods. Like the others, he’ll wait until he’s alone to read it.

Her next dozen customers are easy, mostly repeat users who know the game, who have carefully crafted and edited their own secrets in their heads, likely chewing on them over thousands of miles of highway until they come out almost ready to be transcribed. These are easy for Willa, don’t take much thought or energy or empathy, and she feels almost guilty writing the words that come from their mouths. They share secrets about childhood, about mistakes, about mothers, about alcohol, about wives, about sex. In return, they ask for what they came for, no hesitation as they request other people’s secrets about sex, mothers, alcohol, wives, children. It’s not a fair trade and they know it. They arrive heavier than they leave.

She’s exhausted by the time the last one pockets his sticky note, and starts to pack up, but she hears a shuffling of feet behind her, a quiet, “Sorry.” 

“It’s okay,” she says. “I can take one more.” And she turns to the voice as she pats the bench, and it’s him, the one she’s been waiting for. The reason for all of this.

He doesn’t look at her as he talks, and she knows she’s a stranger to him, a woman about his mother’s age who could be anyone. She listens to him, takes in his warm voice, gravelly like hers. She wants to reach out and put her hand on his arm, to feel his skin again. 

He’s been a half dozen times over the last few years. The first time, she could barely breathe. She recognized him immediately: his eyes, the shape of his chin, a scar on his cheek from the accident. He told her he’d heard about her at a truck stop outside Cincinnati, that he had secrets he needed to unload. She couldn’t speak, so she just nodded and listened and wrote down his words. When he finished, after she’d given him a secret in trade—something silly about a restaurant and a dog—she’d put his secrets in her pocket. She kept them all in a box with a few photos and a Matchbox car.

Tonight, he sits next to her and talks about his wife, his baby, his dog, his childhood friend Tom, about how he’s learning to cook, how he’s planning to run a marathon, how he’s taking classes at the community college to get a different job, one that has him home more. He lowers his voice and says that the secret is what he’s going to miss: the long nights alone, the time in his head, driving his truck in the rain. 

Willa writes it all down, and it takes a dozen sticky notes, but she keeps going, not wanting to miss a detail. She writes slowly, and he stays seated until she’s finished, until she’s written the last bit about the rain, and then he stands up, and she knows he’s going to leave, he’s going to get in his truck and drive away and maybe she’ll never see him again. But she can’t make herself say anything other than, “What are you looking for tonight?”

“It’s okay,” he says, and brings his hand up. She thinks he might reach over and touch her, put his hand on her face, and she wonders if maybe he does recognize her. But no, he’s just taking off his hat. 

“I don’t need anything,” he says, and then, seeing her flinch, he says, “You choose.” 

Willa searches the table for the note she wants, but they all look the same now; they all look blurry. She reaches for one, and then another, and another, but none of them are right, and when she turns around to tell him, to just say what she wants to say out loud, to say the thing she’s been rehearsing for decades, he’s gone.