Ray watched his niece iron the same sleeve for the third time. The crease still ran crooked, however hard she pressed it, and her mind was clearly somewhere else. She kept checking her phone on the ironing board, screen down, then up again.
"You'll burn a hole in that," he said.
Grace didn't look up. "He said he'd text after the interview."
"He will."
"He hasn't."
Ray let it sit a minute. Then he told her about the layby on the A46, the one past the turn for Colston Bassett, mostly because it seemed like the sort of thing that might get her to put the iron down.
He'd driven for Sallis Haulage nineteen years, mostly nights, mostly the Nottingham to Grimsby run — twenty years, he corrected himself, if you counted the training year, though nobody ever did. Every driver who used that stretch knew the layby: a wide gravel pull-in with a burnt-out litter bin and just enough room for four artics if everyone tucked in tight. And every driver who used it, sooner or later, noticed the same thing on their tacho printout the next morning. Eleven minutes gone. Not a gap where the disc had jammed, not a smear across the trace. Eleven clean minutes with no needle mark at all, sitting right in the middle of whatever time they'd logged there.
"Nobody made much of it for years," Ray said. "Tachos glitch. Everyone's had a duff disc at some point."
But it was always eleven minutes, and it was always that layby, and after a while the older drivers had a rule about it, the kind of thing passed on the way you'd pass on which chippy in Tuxford does the good batter. Don't check your mirrors while you're parked there. Whatever you do in those eleven minutes, don't look.
Ray hadn't believed it either. Not properly. Not until the night his own logbook came back with the gap, and he remembered — clear as anything, clearer than most things from that year — glancing at his wing mirror out of pure habit while he ate a sandwich. Cheese and pickle, on white, he still doesn't know why that detail stuck. He'd seen someone sitting in his passenger seat.
A woman, younger than him, hands folded in her lap like she was waiting for a bus. She hadn't looked at him. She'd said, without turning her head,
"Scammell Mechanical Horse (1936)" by andreboeni is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.