The Long Way to Benson

The alternator went somewhere past Willcox, on the long flat stretch where the mountains pull back from the road like they’ve decided to let you go. The dash lights dimmed first, then the radio folded into static, and then the whole car just exhaled and coasted, quiet as a held breath, onto the shoulder.

He sat there a while before he got out. There was no reason to hurry. The desert did not care whether he hurried, and lately that was the only company he could stand — the kind that asked nothing and offered nothing back.

The diner was the kind that shouldn’t have still been open. A hand-painted sign, a gravel lot, one truck parked nose-out the way men park when they might need to leave fast.