Faith
Is someone still a hitchhiker if you give them a ride every once in a while? I mean, she’s got to live somewhere around here. I never asked her. As a rule, I usually don’t pick up hitchhikers, but I had been with others who had given her a ride and she doesn’t go far and she doesn’t say much. Surely, I could bend my rule today.
True to the rendezvous in other people’s cars, she got in, said, “not going far” and didn’t say another word until the state line. A rainbow appeared over the Watauga gorge at Tennessee-the-Hard-Way (16-foot waterfall marking the state line between NC and TN). Lately, they’d been playing peekaboo given the finicky weather, clouds blowing them away before I could snap a photo. I pulled over directly.
When I got back in and started down the road, the woman said, “Those are my favorite rainbows because you are only one of a few to see them before they disappear. Toward the end, when they start to fade, someone else might look and never see it, but YOU know it’s there.”
When I let her out a mile later, I got up the nerve to ask her name as she disembarked.
“Faith.”