There was nowhere to stop back then—
forty-five minutes of scrub brush
and the empty road ahead—
no gas stations, no rest stops,
not even a phone booth to call for help.
One night we drove past
a young woman without a coat
walking by the side of the road
and my parents stopped
to ask if her car had broken down
because that’s what people did then,
but she was barefoot and wouldn’t
(or couldn’t) respond, and so they asked me
to try to convince her to get into the car
with us. It was dark, and cold,
and on the radio Crystal Gayle was singing—
she was on all the country stations then,
a pretty woman with dark hair that fell in a curtain
almost down to her feet. I’d read once
that she had to use an entire bottle of shampoo
every time she washed it, though who knew
if that was true or not. And sometimes
I’m not sure whether these are good memories
or bad—leaning out the car window
trying to coax a stranger to stop walking
and crawl into the back seat with me
though she might have had a knife in her belt
but in the dark she seemed as fragile as a deer
and in this life sometimes you have to choose,
and so they stopped the car and I called her over.