Free Lit Riffs by Matthew Miele

feels sudden to her, large.
    You born in Texas?
    Yeah.
    When did your people leave South Carolina?
    We’re in Georgia, he says. He looks over at her then and seems to be adding something up, something that she can’t see. My daddy wrote songs, he says finally. He wrote these songs and he got known for them and that would have never happened if he’d a stayed here.
    His words are fierce, his voice low. She isn’t sure what he expects of her. The windshield wipers slap back and forth. You out here visiting some folks?
    He cracks the window and lights a cigarette, flicking it with his thumb. My daddy left here when he was seventeen. Hitched his way to Nashville. Knew he’d never go back. His real name was Jackson, too. He never did come back here after that, but he talked about it. He told my mom and he told me. Didn’t tell me directly, I guess, but I know he meant to.
    There are things hiding in the darkness all around them. Probably was hard for him, leaving everyone behind like that, Meg says.
    He was a good person. Jackson hits the steering wheel with an open palm. He tried all along to be a good person. My daddy died, Meg says, startling herself enough to sit up straighter.
    He didn’t mean for what happened to happen, Jackson continues as though she hadn’t spoken. He was a good man, everybody says so.
    I’m sure he was.
    You have to make choices, Jackson says. You have to look at your life and what it holds and then you have to ask yourself what’s missing. That’s what he always said, and he was right. So sometimes you have to give up what matters most in the world to you because it gets in the way of something else.
    He is focused on the road, not looking at Meg, but she feels as though the things he says are being delivered in a random order for her to reassemble, everything a clue to something she can’t know.
    They hit a pothole. Jackson passes a white van. There is no one ahead of them.
    Did you know him? Your father?
    Of course I did, Jackson says, turning to her with a sharp look. Of course I did.
    They are quiet for a while and then Jackson pulls the truck into an all-night gas station and Meg stays in the car while he fills up.
    In Meg’s house, the absence is everything. One car turning the wrong way on a one-way street and the world stopped moving forward. Sometimes Meg lets herself think about the other family, the mother and daughter belonging to the drunk man driving the other car. She wonders what they have become, whether that night ruined them, too. The newspaper said the other driver was survived , just as her father was survived , but it was the wrong word, she knows. They don’t survive him, exactly. It is more fragile than that, more precarious. She and her brothers were crushed into tiptoeing shadows, moving soundlessly through the house so as not to disturb their mother, who rarely left her room before and now refuses to leave it at all. Meg doesn’t think of that as surviving him. They survive despite him.
    The rain has let up, but the darkness is inky, the center of night. Meg grinds the heels of her hands into her eye sockets until she sees bright spots of white, and opens them to find Jackson staring at her through the window. She rolls it down.
    You want a Coke? he says. I was asking if you wanted something to drink.
    I’m OK, she says.
    Well if you want to use the facilities, this would be a good time. We still got a ways to go.
    Meg nods. He opens the door and she climbs out of the truck. Her legs nearly buckle from hours of driving. In the sharp fluorescence of the ladies’ room she splashes water on her face and tries to neaten her hair. In the mirror, her eyes are wide, wider than she remembered, and she has the strange sensation of staring at an older vision of herself, as though the evening has aged her. I’ve been up all night, she mouths, but it feels different from that. It feels as though she’s been looking at a teenage version of herself for years and her