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THE FINAL IN A SERIES OF SEVEN STORIES.

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“You don’t know of a ‘Virginia Giddings’, by chance do you?”  Channing certainly didn’t anticipate Vern being a bastion of knowledge, but had to start somewhere.  The look he received when the motel clerk looked up from the TV confirmed his inability to help.  “She used to teach English here in Fort Stockton 20 years ago.  I thought you might know who she was.”

Vern nodded his head back and forth indicating his lack of any information.  Channing quickly assumed that was Vern’s “go-to” response that fit most situations.  “Best place for breakfast?” Channing followed up.

“Grounds for Divorce is the best cafe in town.”  Vern kept his eye on the TV.  “The crowd there is a little shifty, sometimes.  The breakfast tacos are good over at the Dairy Twin.”

The LeBaron still smelled like the cheeseburger combo from the Dairy Twin the night before, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Channing figured he’d see if the breakfast tacos were as good.  He headed back out to the car, but was stopped by Vern’s voice before he made it all the way out.

“If she taught English, it would have had to have been either at Jim Bowie High School, or the Catholic high school, Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern.”  Vern had experienced an epiphany.  “Or maybe Pecos County Junior College.”

“Thanks, man.”  Channing was amazed at the intimate details he could remember with absolute perfect clarity, but not any of the more mundane information from the summer of ’72. Then, he might not have ever even know those details he surmised. The relationship had not been focused on Jenny’s resume or personnel history.

Back at the Dairy Twin for the second day in a row, Channing felt like Trudy was undressing him with her eyes while he ordered at the counter.  Afterwards, he sat in a corner booth enjoying the breakfast tacos with some hot black Folgers.  Vern’s advice had been good both times.  The bacon was crisp, the eggs were fluffy, and whatever the cook did to the potatoes in the tacos made them dance across his taste buds.  He nearly didn’t even notice the Plymouth Voyager minivan when it pulled up.  A guy got out of the driver’s seat and waited for who was apparently his wife as she struggled to get two squirming kids out of the car seats in the back and corral them towards the front door of the Dairy Twin.  The man who appeared to be their father did nothing to help.

It was only as the girl stood up, right in front of the window, that he recognized her as the girl from the motel last night.  The female passenger of the Chrysler 300 that was in the room next door.  She looked right at Channing through the window which almost made him duck to avoid being seen.  Then he realized she was staring at her own reflection.  He wondered what she saw.  Her eyes were hollow and looking for something she couldn’t find.

For a moment, he hoped that it wasn’t actually her, because the man who’d been driving the Plymouth Voyager certainly wasn’t the one who’d been driving the Chrysler 300.  But when the brood all came through the door and the young woman shrieked at her kids to stop what they were doing and behave, he recognized the high pitched voice as the same one who’d admonished her partner to not stop what he was doing a dozen hours earlier.  As he finished and walked by the table where the family sat, the husband reading the morning Stockton Telegram-Dispatch and the wife staring out the window, Channing hoped he could describe exactly the lifeless expression that was on her face for the next time he sat at the portable Royal typewriter.

On a whim he asked Trudy if he could borrow the phone book behind the counter. She handed it to him and he flipped to the ‘G’s, running his finger down the list of last names. Nothing. Watching him, Trudy pictured him running that same finger down the small of her back while she was bent over the prep counter in the kitchen. The fry cook yelling “Order UP!” broke the spell. Channing slid the thin White Pages back her direction.

Trips to Jim Bowie High School and Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern yielded no results, nobody knowing a ‘Virginia Giddings’.  Channing felt as though the credit he’d given Vern might have been misplaced.  His hopes weren’t high for any better results at Pecos County Community College.

The woman at the Admissions Desk at PCCC was quick to point out much the same information.  “No.  Nobody by that name teaches here.  I’ve been here seven, going on eight years next January.  I’d know her if she taught here.  Not thing gets past me.”  Her tone indicated a sense of self worth that may have been exaggerated.  Channing headed back out towards the LeBaron.  He realized the whole thing had not been meant to be.  It was too late to head back to Amarillo and catch a late flight home.  He figured he might go back to the motel and knock out a few chapters of the story he couldn’t get out of his head.  He could set an alarm and leave early in the morning.

Stopping by the Ben Franklin, Channing ran in and bought a ream of paper.  He started to ask the girl at the check out, “By chance, do you happen to know a  . . . .” and then his voice trailed off.  It was pointless.  Back at the Naughty Pine, the words flowed from his fingertips onto the keyboard until it was nearly dark.  He stood up and stretched and determined it was time for a drink.  Maybe to toast the folly of the whole thing.  Maybe to celebrate the inspiration that the drive to Fort Stockton and the Naughty Pine Motel had all provided. The girl in the room next door and Dairy Twin that morning had provided both erotic and tragic details for a character that needed to be further explored. Typing what he imagined her story to be made several hours fly by. He needed either a cold shoer or a drink . He wasn’t in the mood for a shower.

Vern, ever the fountain of help, guided him to the Lucky Lady.  “Theres no better dive bars in the world than those in the Lone Star State,” Channing had to admit as he walked in.  Hank behind the bar set him up with a tab and a bourbon and was as friendly as Hank could be.

Twenty minutes later the man and wife from the minivan at the Dairy Twin walked in.  They got a table, the first of what would be several rounds, and attempted to tolerate one another for the assembled crowd.  The woman was dressed far more provocatively than she had been for breakfast. Channing tried not to stare. But between what he’d heard from the room next to his last night and the things he’d made up about the woman as he typed, he felt like he knew her.

Twenty minutes later, the owner of the ’79 Chrysler 300 entered with a girl on his arm who was apparently his wife or significant other.  The pair sauntered over to the table where Mr. and Mrs. Minivan sat and the four greeted each other.  Channing got out a pen and started jotting down notes on the back of a cocktail napkin.  Plot development like this was too good to risk forgetting.  As he watched the booth the two couples sat at, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was the only one that caught the glances that flew across the table between the man and woman who were not married.

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So immersed in the unfolding story was Channing that he didn’t even notice her walking into the bar.  She spotted him immediately.  She didn’t think he’d changed that much.  Just an older version of the 19 year-old kid she’d bedded for an entire summer in Amarillo 20 years before.  She took a seat at the bar next to him.  When he glanced over, she took his breath away.

“Oh my god!” he said.

“Right?” she replied.

“How’d you find me?” he asked.

“If you’ll recall, I believe it was you who found me.  I live here.”  Jenny still had the same biting tone to her voice, like she was giving a lecture.  That was, when she wasn’t naked and performing unspeakable acts on him.

“You know what I mean!” Channing was perplexed.

“A colleague was in the office when you came into college Admissions Office asking for me.”  Jenny took a sip of the drink Hank had set down in front of her.  “I haven’t been Virginia Giddings for 19 years.  People know me as Jenny Davis.  The woman you spoke to didn’t know that, of course.  As much as she thinks she knows everything.”  She took another sip.  “Anyway, a colleague in the office at the time heard your question.  Someone who’s known me forever.  She found me and said someone was looking for me and used my former name.  When she described you, I had a pretty good idea who it was.”

“How’d you know I’d be here?  Now?” Channing asked.

“Partly luck.  I didn’t know how long you’d be in town.  But I knew if you were going to be in Fort Stockton for the night, you’d wind up here.  Everybody does.  It’s Fort Stockton, for god’s sake.”  She was still as gorgeous as she ever had been.  There were lines in her face and she had a thick mane of silver hair gathered in the back.  But she was still sexy as hell.  The thin neck.  The piercing eyes.  The easy laugh that made him smile and the deep voice that commanded respect, all within one sentence.

“What if I’d left town?  Given up and gone home?” Channing asked.

“Then it wasn’t meant to be.  In the end, we’re both romantics, doomed to fate and accept whatever happens.  We can’t help it.”  Channing remembered why he couldn’t wait to get to the motel room every Friday afternoon back in 1972.

“Your last name is Davis now?” Channing asked.

“I divorced my former husband right after Amarillo.”  Jenny looked into the glass in her hand, as though looking for the right words.  Then, right into Channing’s eyes.  “I probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for you.  You showed me I deserved more.  Showed me I shouldn’t have settled for comfort.  Showed me I needed passion.  It was amicable, the divorce.  I didn’t even have to tell him what happened in Amarillo, although I think he might have suspected.  I remarried a few years later.  He’s a wonderful man.  We’re the same age; we have plenty in common.  Not too young.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up.  He teaches at the college, too, but History.  You’d like him.”

“I’d hate him.”  Channing was admitting jealousy he had no right to feel.  It made Jenny laugh.

“What happened to the Imperial?” Channing asked.

“I gave it back when I left.  He actually thought I might want to keep it,” she laughed.  “I bought a Mustang.  Like the one he traded in that had been my first car.  Part of getting myself back, I think.  He didn’t understand it.  Of course, that only explains why we shouldn’t have ever been together to begin with.”

Jenny had searched out a Lime Gold with Ivy Gold upholstery and a 289ci V8, along with a three-speed automatic transmission, power steering, air conditioning, and tinted glass.  It’s the only car she’d driven since then.  She added C-stripes and a vinyl roof, but never added the radio that had been deleted when the original owner ordered the car new.  The car suited her when she bought it in 1972.  It was iconic in the way it reflected her personality all these years later.

“I read the book,” Jenny replied.  “I’d have known you wrote it even if I didn’t recognize the name on the cover.  I recognized the scenes you wrote about in such detail.  It was like reliving them, almost.”

Channing went from being jealous to being embarrassed.  He’d never really even thought about what she might think if she read it.  He’d never even thought about her reading it.

“The book was better than the movie they made it into,”  Jenny stated matter of factly.  “I couldn’t go see it with my husband.  Not even a friend.  I had to drive to Marfa and see it by myself alone in the theater.  It was almost too much.”

TRUE REST had sold reasonably well, especially for a little known regional Texas author’s first attempt at fiction.  Only two people knew that it was, in fact, autobiographical and not fiction.  They were both sitting at the bar, having a drink, seeing each other for the first time in two decades.

“So you saw the dedication at the beginning of the book?” he asked.

“I did.  It’s still on the bookshelf in my bedroom.”

“To the English teacher who showed me I had talent.”  Read the dedication.  “And the one that followed who showed me so much more.”

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