The Third Gas Station

We stopped three times before noon and each time he paid in cash and each time he watched the road behind us while he did it. By the third station I had stopped pretending not to notice. I asked him, point blank, which hospital. He told me a name. I typed it into my phone while he was in the restroom and there was no hospital by that name anywhere in the state, and there was no specialist, and when I really thought about it there had been no medical paperwork, no pill bottles, no appointment card. Just a word on a phone call and twenty years of me wanting him to need me. When he came back to the car I handed him a coffee and smiled and said the drive was going well, and I started, very quietly, to be afraid of my own father for the first time since I was nine years old.