I did not answer the voice right away. The radio hissed in my lap, and the wind pushed at the camper as if it wanted to listen too. Brittany sat across from me with her knees pulled up, looking about nine years old. In forty years of driving I had learned that when a stranger calls you on the CB by the name of a dead man, you do not answer the first time. You let the silence say whether you are somebody worth talking to. After a full minute, I pressed the button on the microphone.
“This is the wife of Big Skillet,” I said. “Who is asking?” There was a long crackle. Then the old voice came back, slower and softer, with a rasp like a gate in the cold. “Honey, this is Opal, out of Fort Benton. I have been calling for Curtis on this channel for thirty one years. I did not know he had passed until a young woman phoned my daughter yesterday asking about a room in Arkansas. Is that girl with you?” Brittany put her hand over her mouth.
We drove to Fort Benton the next morning, forty miles of wheat fields and open sky. The house was small and white, with an antenna on the roof taller than the barn behind it. Opal waited on the porch with a walker and a quilt over her knees. She was eighty eight years old. She did not look at me first. She looked at Brittany, for a long time, the way you look at a photograph of somebody you used to know, and then she opened her arms.
She told us the story over coffee and pound cake. In January of 1994, a blizzard closed Highway 87, and her husband Everett was driving home on the ice when a loaded truck jackknifed in front of him. Curtis was the driver of that truck. He pulled Everett out of the wreck and held him in the snow for forty minutes until help came. Everett did not make it. The highway patrol said it was nobody fault but the weather, and Opal said so too. She said it again every night, over the radio, for thirty one years.
Guilt is a debt that nobody else ever asked him to pay, and he paid it every month anyway.
Curtis never believed her. He sent Opal money on the first of every month, fifty dollars at first and more later, and he never once put a return address on the envelope. In 2005 he bought a prepaid room at Magnolia Terrace, paid in full, with Opal as the beneficiary, in case the Montana winters ever got too hard for her. She never used it. She never even told him she had received the papers. She only said, each night on channel nineteen, “Big Skillet, you got your ears on?” and he always answered.
Brittany had found the folded paper inside the battery door of the radio when she cleaned it. She handed it to me now with a face wet from crying. It was in Curtis blocky handwriting, on the back of a fuel receipt. It said that he should have told me, and that he had not known how to say it without breaking something, and that if I was reading it then I was surely sitting somewhere warm with a good cup of coffee, being right about everything. I laughed so hard I had to put my cup down.
Brittany confessed the rest right there on the porch. She had seen the second signature and decided her father had a secret family. She had been so frightened of losing me that she tried to move me into Magnolia Terrace before I could leave on some adventure and not come back. “I thought if you were in Room 114, I would always know where you were,” she said. I took her face in both my hands. I told her I was seventy years old and in perfect health, and I intended to be insufferable for another twenty.
Opal took my hand and said she had no use for a room in Arkansas, and neither did I. So we sat at her kitchen table and wrote a letter to Magnolia Terrace. The prepaid room would be held for a retired driver who had nowhere else to go, chosen by Opal and me together, and named for Everett. The director called back in two days and said the board was honored. Brittany carried the letter to the mailbox herself, walking slowly, as if she did not want the walk to end.
On Saturday I took Opal for a drive in the camper, her first long ride in six years. We went up to the river breaks and ate sandwiches on the tailgate, and she told me about the nights she and Curtis used to talk across the miles, about weather and hay prices and the grandchildren of people they would never meet. Then she took the microphone and said, in a voice that made me sit straight, “This is Opal, and I have got Big Skillet wife with me.” The channel went quiet, and then a dozen truckers answered at once.
I did go to Alaska in the end. Brittany came along as far as the border, and then she kept going, sitting in the passenger seat with the CB in her lap and her boots up on the dash. We stopped in Fort Benton on the way back to see Opal. The antenna is still on her roof. Some nights, when the weather is clear, I park out in the dark and turn the knob to nineteen, and a voice in the static asks if I have got my ears on. I always say yes.