Elvis and Me

The bride never arrived.

Not late. Not stuck in traffic. No second thoughts followed by apologies. She simply didn’t come.

After ten minutes, the organist stopped playing. The groom stood at the altar, his boutonnière listing to one side, his hands locked behind his back like he was waiting for a verdict. His cousin in the third row checked his phone. Once. Then again.

After fifteen minutes, the pews developed a sound. Fabric shifting, throats clearing. Someone’s child asked a question that got shushed very quickly. The best man touched his shoulder. He didn’t turn. Couldn’t. If he turned, he’d have to see his parent’s faces, and that would make it real.

After twenty minutes, the minister touched his elbow and said quietly, “I think we should—”

He walked down the aisle alone, each step landing harder than necessary, his shoes announcing his exit on the marble floor. Someone started to stand. He held up one hand without looking.

Outside, the bells rang anyway. He didn’t look back. He walked straight to the car. Streamers hung limp in the heat. He ripped them off in fistfuls and threw them in the street. Missed one. Left it. He turned the key. The radio clicked on mid-song: Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel."

“You have got to be kidding,” he said.

His hand hovered over the dial, but he couldn’t make himself turn it off.

“Oh no you don’t,” he said, pulling onto the highway. His knuckles went white on the wheel. “We are not doing irony today.”

Elvis didn’t argue. He just kept singing the way he always had—certain, smooth, unbothered by abandonment.

The groom drove fast at first, like speed could reorganize reality. The speedometer climbed. Seventy. Eighty. The tux jacket suffocated him. He loosened his tie with one hand, yanked it off entirely, and whipped it into the backseat where it landed across the card that said JUST MARRIED in silver glitter.

Elvis's "I'm All Shook Up" started to play.

“Yeah,” he said. His laugh came out sharp. “That about covers it.”

The highway stretched flat and indifferent. Cornfields blurred past. He took an exit for a town that looked surprised anyone noticed it. One diner. One blinking light. A hand-painted sign that said PIE .

Inside, the air conditioner wheezed. The vinyl booth stuck to the back of his legs through his pants. The waitress whose name tag said Doreen in faded letters poured coffee without asking. Behind the counter, a radio played low. He wrapped both hands around the mug. It burned. He didn’t let go.

“Where you headed?” she asked.

Her eyes flicked to his cufflinks. Custom. Expensive. Wrong for a Tuesday in nowhere, Kansas. He considered lying, inventing a business trip, a funeral, anything with a destination. But the radio beat him to it, playing "I'm Movin' On."

The groom snorted. Coffee went up his nose. He grabbed a napkin from the dispenser, pressed it to his face. His eyes watered. Doreen refilled his cup without comment. Set the pot back on the warmer. Pulled out her order pad even though he hadn’t ordered anything.

“That your wedding getup?” she asked, clicking her pen.

“Was supposed to be.”

“Ah.” She set the pot down, leaned against the counter. Her weight settled on one hip. “She leave you or you leave her?”

“Does it matter?”

She tapped her pen against the pad. Looked at him for a long moment. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. You’re here either way.”

The radio kept playing—this time, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"

He stabbed his pie—she’d brought it without asking, apple, the crust flaking onto the plate. Too sweet. The filling slid across his tongue like syrup.

“You mind changing the station?”

Doreen looked at the radio, back at him. “Only station that comes in clear out here.”

“Of course it is.”

“You don’t like Elvis?”

“I’m having a very long conversation with Elvis today,” he said. “Started in the car. Apparently it’s following me inside now.”

“Ah,” she said again, like that explained everything. She wiped down the counter even though it was already clean. Her cloth moved in small circles, the same spot over and over. “Had a regular used to talk to Patsy Cline. Sat right where you’re sitting. Played her on the jukebox every damn day for two years.”

He stood and paid in cash, leaving too much.

Outside town stood a giant fiberglass cowboy holding a tire, leaning slightly. One eye had been painted over badly, giving him a permanent wink.

“Easy,” he told the dashboard radio, which was playing "Hound Dog." The cowboy receded in the rearview. “I didn’t leave anyone.”

But his jaw clenched saying it. The truth sat in his chest like a stone: she’d left first. Hours before the ceremony, maybe. Days. He’d just been the last to know.

Elvis's "Don't Be Cruel" started to play.

“I wish you would've told her,” he muttered.

He drove until even the billboards gave up. The landscape flattened into something prehistoric. Just earth and sky with nothing between them but the occasional fence post. The gas station had one pump, one soda cooler humming off-key.

A woman behind the counter was braiding her hair in the window’s reflection, her fingers moving through the pattern without looking. The braid hung halfway down her back, thick and dark with gray threaded through it.

The cooler door stuck. He yanked it twice before it opened. Grabbed a bottle from the back where it was coldest.

She glanced at him in the reflection, kept braiding. “Register’s up here.”

He brought the Coke to the counter. Set it down.

She secured the end of the braid with an elastic from her wrist. Let it fall over her shoulder. “Three dollars.”

He pulled out his wallet. A receipt fell out, fluttered to the floor. The florist. He’d paid extra for the boutonniere to match her bouquet exactly. She watched him pick it up, stuff it back in his wallet. Her eyes went to his dress shirt, the vest, back to his face.

“Nothing stays put out here,” she said.

He looked at her. She was maybe sixty, maybe thirty. The light made it impossible to tell.

“Wind moves everything,” she continued, pulling the elastic from her braid, shaking her hair loose. “Fences. Signs. People, sometimes.” She started braiding again, her fingers working without looking. “Had a fence post three feet from the building. Woke up one morning, it was ten feet out. Didn’t fall over. Just moved.”

He twisted the cap off the bottle. The carbonation hissed. He took a long drink. The cold hurt his teeth.

“You running or looking?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Fair enough.” She went back to her braid. “Most folks don’t.”

“Not helping,” he told the radio when he got back in the car. It was playing "Suspicious Minds" and reached the lyric about not being able to walk out.

“Watch me,” he said, and pulled back onto the highway.

The road climbed into mountains he hadn’t planned on. The air cooled. Pine trees crowded the asphalt, their shadows slicing across the windshield in rhythm. The altitude made his ears pop. Made everything thinner somehow. Air, excuses, the story he’d been telling himself about how this was supposed to go.

He pulled over where there wasn’t a sign. Just a gravel patch wide enough for two cars and a view that went on forever. Wind, trees, and the valley dropping away so suddenly it made his stomach lift. He got out. Stretched. His dress shirt pulled across his shoulders. He’d been wearing it for six hours. It smelled like nervous sweat and the cologne she’d said she liked.

Had liked. Past tense now.

A railing ran along the edge, waist-high, the metal warm from the sun. He gripped it. Squeezed until his knuckles went white. Below, the valley spread out in layers—green, darker green, shadow, then the silver thread of a river cutting through.

“So what,” he said aloud, drumming his fingers on the hood when he turned back, “you think this is character-building?”

The radio answered him through the open door with "It’s Now or Never."

He laughed despite himself—a real one this time, surprised out of him by the sheer audacity of Elvis’s timing. The sound echoed off the rocks. Came back to him changed. “Are you always this dramatic?”

Elvis didn’t reply. He just crooned on.

The wind picked up. Scattered gravel across the asphalt. Moved through the pines with a sound like water. A pinecone rolled past his foot. Another. He watched them bounce down the slope, disappearing into the trees.

The descent took an hour. The air thickened as he dropped. His ears popped again, equalizing. The trees thinned, then disappeared entirely. Scrub brush took over, then grass, then sand.

By the time he hit sea level, the sun was setting, turning everything gold and temporary. The ocean appeared without warning. It was just suddenly there at the end of the road, all that water with nowhere else to go. He parked. Sat for a moment. Through the windshield, the horizon line cut the world in half—sky above, water below, nothing in between but light. He rolled up his pants. His socks were still on, the expensive ones his brother had given him for the wedding. Charcoal gray. Silk blend. He pulled them off, left them balled up in the cupholder. The sand was cold. It shifted under his feet, pulling away with each step. The water was colder. It slapped his ankles and startled a laugh out of him. Short, real, undignified. He walked in deeper. To his knees. The waves pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled. His pants darkened, the satin stripe turning black. He didn’t care. A wave hit harder than the others. Soaked him to mid-thigh. He staggered, caught himself, laughed again. He hadn’t cracked. He hadn’t vanished. He was still here. Still upright. Still capable of movement and standing in the Pacific, still in his wedding pants.

"Can’t Help Falling in Love" started to play.

“Yeah, well.” He turned back toward the car. His footprints filled with water behind him, erasing as fast as he made them. The sand clung to his wet feet in clumps.

He got back into the car. Sand gritted between his toes. He brushed at it, gave up. Tracked it across the floor mats, into the grooves of the pedals.

He turned the key. The engine caught. The road opened again, indifferent and generous, heading north along the coast. The ocean stayed on his left, vast, dark and moving.

“Well, I’m feelin’ so lonely…" the radio played.

“You’ve got that wrong,” he said, pulling away. The ocean disappeared in his mirror. Reappeared. Disappeared.

“I’ve got you for company.”

Elvis kept singing.