Lunchtime came eventually, and despite my reservations – Joel would probably prefer to use that old favourite “nagging” – we went to McDonald’s, which I know is meant to be a staple of a truck driver’s diet, and a road trip tradition. However, when you work as hard as I do at maintaining a slim figure, it’s very easy to see fast food places like McDonald’s as the bad guys. All those fatty, salty foods and the sugary soft drinks they churn out by the bucketload? No thank you. But, it’s his body and he was the one driving and paying for it, so I decided to just keep my anti-fast-food rant to myself for the time being. And I’ll confess, that afternoon the idea of a cheeseburger was just too good to pass up for some reason.
Joel was shocked that I was even considering a burger. I’d later come to regret saying this, but without even thinking about who I was talking to, I informed him, “It’s fun to be naughty every once in a while and just not worry about the consequences, you know?”
Joel said he couldn’t argue with that and smiled as he watched me eat my burger.
The rest of the trip that day was pretty uneventful; Joel remarked that he was pleasantly surprised he wasn’t having to push too hard to get to our motel before it got too dark. We arrived a little after 7:30 that night, and we had our own meals for dinner – luckily for me, we were staying a couple of blocks from a Subway so I enjoyed a salad (the bread is too fattening) and Joel, naturally, had another Big Mac.
Even though I’d packed my yoga mat, I felt way too exhausted to actually do any exercise that night. I don’t know why, but travelling does it to me every time. Besides, there wasn’t much room in the room for me to do my poses in a way that I wouldn’t be in Joel’s way…which is another way of saying I didn’t much feel like him ogling me while I stretched and posed in my exercise clothes. Instead, we sat and watched whatever was on TV that wasn’t dreadful reality television until we felt it was time for bed. I grabbed some spare sheets and a blanket from the tiny motel cupboard and used my yoga mat as a makeshift mattress for the night.
You know how I just said that I always feel exhausted after travelling? Well, guess who couldn’t sleep a wink that night? Okay, maybe I got an hour or two, but that’s never enough, is it? I felt so damn sleepy when Joel turned out the lights, and my self-made floor-bed was actually pretty comfortable. However, something was keeping me awake. Either it was the strange new surroundings, or Joel’s snoring, or a combination of the two, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the day and the days that lay ahead. So as I lay there, staring at the ceiling and listening to my son snore from his almost-comfy motel bed, a terrifying and completely new thought entered my head: What if Mark doesn’t love me anymore?
As soon as that terrible thought occurred to me, I couldn’t get it to leave. Holy shit, what if he’s having an affair? What if he’s gay? What if he’s actually in Melbourne to get a really good divorce lawyer? Why wouldn’t he love me anymore? Was it because I don’t have a job? But he told me he didn’t want me to get one since he was on such good money and didn’t want us to get bumped up into the next tax bracket. Oh God, what if he thinks I’m ugly? After all this work I do to keep myself fit and youthful for him, and now he probably thinks I’m just some desperate, dried up middle-aged housewife struggling in vain to hold on to her rapidly-fading youth. I mean, sure, I’ve been dying my hair jet black ever since I got my first grey hairs at 30, but I do my yoga and eat healthy so we have a better chance at a long future together, damn it. I don’t want to be fat and dying of a heart attack or a stroke before I reach 70, like both my parents did.
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