Sunday, June 20, 1999
Written at: home, Tucson. Three days off. 109 outside and I don't care.

Father's Day. I made Ray an omelet with egg whites and peppers and a little cheese, and he looked at it the way he used to look at the bill for the transmission. Then he ate it. Then he said it was good, which I believe about halfway.

Friday was his three-month checkup with Dr. Natoli. There's a blood test that tells the doctor what your sugar has been doing for about the last three months, not just that morning, so you can't cheat by being good the day before. (Ray asked. He was serious.) His number is better. Not where the doctor wants it, but better. So the doctor added a second pill, a different kind that works a different way, and told us to watch for lows. A low is when your sugar drops too far. Shaky, sweaty, confused. He said keep orange juice and glucose tablets in the cab, and I wrote that down in big letters.

Ray's belt is two notches in from March. Greg drove down from Phoenix and gave him one of those little step counters you clip on your belt. Ray clipped it on and walked around the backyard four times and came in and showed it to everybody like a kid with a report card.

Melissa is starting to show. Mom keeps patting her stomach and saying "Hello in there," and Melissa lets her.

Saturday, May 8, 1999
Written at: truck stop, I-35, Kansas, north of the Oklahoma line.

We came up I-35 through Moore, Oklahoma, on Thursday, three days after the tornado.

I don't know how to write about it so I'll just say what we saw. On one side of the interstate, a neighborhood. On the other side, where a neighborhood had been, boards and insulation and pieces of things spread across the ground like somebody dumped out a drawer. Trees with no bark. A car on its roof in a field. National Guard trucks. A church parking lot full of bottled water and people in work gloves. Every truck on the road slowed down and nobody on the CB said a word for about ten miles. Then somebody said "Lord, look at that," quietly, and somebody else said "Yep."

At the truck stop this morning they had a jar on the counter for the tornado families and drivers were putting twenties in it. Ray put in forty and didn't tell me. I saw.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. I'll call Mom from wherever we are. She'll say "You didn't have to call," and she'll mean you'd better have.

Thursday, April 22, 1999
Written at: truck stop, I-70, Salina, Kansas. Wind.

Every TV in every truck stop since Tuesday has been Littleton, Colorado, the high school. I'm not going to write about it. I can't. I stood at the counter in Limon yesterday with a cup of coffee going cold and watched kids running out of that school with their hands on their heads, and I thought about Greg and Melissa at that age, with their backpacks and their bad haircuts, and I had to go out and sit in the truck.

And then last night, at a pay phone in Hays, Melissa told me she's going to have a baby.

November. Thanksgiving, probably. She waited to tell us until she'd seen the doctor twice, because she's careful, like her dad. I yelled in the phone booth. A driver walking by asked if I was okay and I said "I'm going to be a grandmother!" and he said congratulations ma'am and tipped his hat and kept walking, fast.

Ray was asleep in the sleeper. I woke him up to tell him. He said "Huh," and then he sat up and hit his head on the cabinet and said it again louder. Then he got out of the truck in his socks and walked a whole lap around the parking lot in the dark. For his sugar, he said.

The world is terrible and wonderful in the same week. I don't know what to do with that except write it down.

Sunday, March 28, 1999
Written at: truck stop, I-10, Ehrenberg, Arizona. Laps around the lot: 4.

Eating right in a truck. Let me tell you about eating right in a truck.

A truck stop is built to feed a hungry man fast. Chicken-fried steak with white gravy. Biscuits with white gravy. Eggs, hash browns, toast, and pie. The buffet is all-you-can-eat and the pie case is lit up like a jewelry store. For two years we've eaten like this, at two in the morning, because it's hot and it's there and you're tired.

So now: I bought a cooler that plugs into the truck, and a little cooker that plugs into the lighter and heats up a pot of whatever you put in it, slow. I cook beans with no lard (Ray's grandmother is spinning in her grave), chicken, brown rice, vegetables. Apples. Those little cans of tuna. I keep the cooler full and the pie case is a thing we walk past now with our eyes straight ahead like soldiers.

Ray checks his sugar twice a day with a little meter. You prick your finger and put a drop of blood on a strip and the meter thinks about it and gives you a number. He writes the numbers in a little notebook he keeps next to his logbook. So now we keep two logbooks. One for the government and one for his blood.

And we walk. Every stop, twenty minutes, laps around the lot, between the trucks, in the diesel smell. Drivers sitting in their cabs eating sandwiches watch us go around. Tonight a man rolled his window down and yelled "Hey Saguaro, you training for the Olympics?" Ray yelled back "Yep. Trucking." Then he kept going.

Wednesday, March 10, 1999
Written at: home, Tucson. Two years on the truck, to the day.

Ray has diabetes. Type 2, the kind grown-ups get.

Dr. Natoli did the blood work Monday and called us in today. The sugar in his blood is way too high and has been, he thinks, for a long time. The thirst. The bathroom every two hours. Sleeping all the time. His eyes going blurry so he bought those drugstore reading glasses in January. All of it. I teased him about that water jug for six months. I feel like a fool.

He's starting on a pill called Glucophage, twice a day, and a diet, and exercise, and checking his sugar at home with a meter. The doctor drew pictures for us on the paper on the exam table. He was kind, and he took his time, and he talked to Ray and not to me, which I appreciated even though I was the one writing it all down.

And then the part that matters for us. I asked him straight out. The federal rules say a driver whose diabetes needs insulin to control it can't drive a truck across state lines. Pills are okay. Insulin isn't. No exceptions. So the whole thing, the truck, the house payments, the two of us out there together, comes down to whether pills can do it.

Dr. Natoli said, "Lots of people do very well on pills for a long time. Lots of people don't. Let's find out which one Ray is." Ray said, "I'll be the first one." The doctor said that's the right attitude. Ray said, "It's not an attitude, it's a decision."

We went home and Ray poured out every can of Coke in the refrigerator into the sink, one at a time, and didn't say anything. I sat at the table and watched him do it. Then he came and sat down across from me and said, "Well, Payroll. Now what." And I didn't know.

Friday, February 26, 1999
Written at: the company terminal, Phoenix, in the drivers' lounge. Bad coffee.

Every two years a truck driver has to pass a physical to keep the medical card that says you're fit to drive. Eyes, ears, blood pressure, and you pee in a cup. Ray's was due. I went with him to the clinic this morning because I had nothing better to do and because I'm nosy.

There was sugar in the cup. The doctor at the clinic, a young woman who looked about Melissa's age, asked him a lot of questions. Are you thirsty. Are you tired. Do you get up at night. Ray said yes, yes and yes, and looked at me like I'd told on him. I hadn't. I didn't need to.

She gave him a card good for three months instead of two years and said, "Go see your own doctor next week. Not next month. Next week." Ray asked her if it was serious. She said it could be very manageable. That's not what he asked and we both noticed.

We have a load to Albuquerque and back and then we're taking a week off. I already called Dr. Natoli's office from the pay phone. Ray's out at the truck checking the tires, which he does when he's thinking. He's checked them three times.

Sunday, January 17, 1999
Written at: Nogales, Arizona, waiting to load peppers. The hills of Sonora out the windshield.

Produce season. All winter the vegetables come north out of Mexico through Nogales, and the trucks come from everywhere to get them, and we come too, because we're close and because Joel knows we like it. Today it's green bell peppers going to Dallas.

We're forty-five minutes from home and we'll sleep in the truck tonight because they load at four. That's trucking. You can see your own mountains and you can't get to your own bed.

Ray's in a mood. He's been in a mood since Christmas. His mouth is always dry, he says, and he can't read the bills of lading without holding them out at arm's length, so he bought a pair of drugstore reading glasses in Kingman and he hates them. He looks like a professor. I told him he looks distinguished. He told me to watch the dock.

The warehouse where we're waiting has a radio playing Mexican ballads, the old ones, and the man running the forklift sings along with every single song. Ray hasn't said a word in an hour, but his foot's going.