“Yeah,” I said.
“The kind that believed in the Rapture and stuff?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t have a—a date, you know, when everyone thought it would happen. Just, like, soon.”
“Are you still a member?”
“No,” I said, and ducked my head over my pancakes. After a minute, Robin went on.
“I am a male-to-female transsexual. When I was little, and people would talk about the earthly paradise, I knew I’d receive a resurrected body and anything wrong with it would be miraculously fixed, but I couldn’t ask, did that mean I’d get a girl’s body? Or that I’d stop wanting a girl’s body? Because both options were actually terrifying to me at that point. One meant that my parents would find out, since of course they’d be in paradise with me, and the other meant I’d somehow be someone else.”
I had looked up when she said “transsexual,” looking her over without really meaning to. I’d met trans women before, back home in Spokane, and I was looking at her because I was wondering if this should have been obvious to me and I was just that tired. There are places where if you meet someone you know they’re queer, but a diner in South Dakota isn’t really one of them.
“Anyway. The sun rose on November 1st, and all the adults pretended that no one had ever said the world was going to end the previous month. And that was my first Armageddon.”
Robin’s and Michael’s food arrived. “I’m definitely going to want some of the bread pudding,” Robin told Patty, “when I’m done with this.”
“We’ve also got a big pineapple upside down cake that’s coming out of the oven right now,” Patty said.
“Oh, excellent, I’ll have that!” Michael said.
“Anyway, you can probably guess why Michael’s family is my family,” Robin said.
“Did they disown you for being trans?” I asked.
“No, they disowned me for leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses and majoring in Theater and then when I came out as gay that would definitely have been the last straw, only they hadn’t spoken to me in years already at that point. Robin is actually my birth name, but I changed my last name after that. My last name is Raianiemi. It was the last name of one of my neighbors. The only lesbian in the town where I grew up.”
I couldn’t really answer that at all. Patty had refilled my coffee again so I put the mug up where it sort of hid my face and drank coffee.
“My second Armageddon was when I almost died from a mysterious infection about a decade ago,” Robin said. “I was in the hospital and they were giving me IV antibiotics but I wasn’t responding and they thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to die.”
“I feel like calling that an Armageddon is kind of cheating,” Michael said. “You thought you were going to die. But in an Armageddon, everyone dies.”
“I really think the biggest difference is the level of hassle,” Robin said. “Each individual thinks they’re going to die. The problem is that when it’s everybody, this means huge numbers of people don’t show up for work, so everyone runs out of gas just as they’re trying to make road trips to see loved ones or visit Yellowstone or whatever.”
“Did they ever figure out what you had?” I asked.
“Enough that they were able to treat me. But I spent a few days thinking about what I’d most regret, if I died that week, and I knew the thing I’d really regret was never living as my real self. Never living as a woman. The thing was, I had a partner—that’s what we called our spouses before we could get legally married, I don’t know if kids these days remember that—and I had no idea how he would react and he was the love of my life. Coming out the first time, as gay, that was scary. Coming out the second time, as trans? Made me realize just how much scarier it could be.”
“But it was okay. Don’t forget to tell her that part,” Michael said, and squeezed Robin’s hand.
“Yeah, it was all okay. Anyway, once you’ve survived Armageddon twice, a third one rolls around and you say to yourself, ‘What would I like to see in case this is it?’ and we knew we could get to Yellowstone so we gave all our nieces and nephews a big hug and hit the road.”
I’d eaten the last of my pancakes and my coffee cup was empty. Patty hadn’t been by in a while.
“We really thought we’d be able to find gas, though,” Michael said. “If we stuck to the back roads…”
“That was my theory, too,” I said. “It worked at first.”
“So where are you headed?” Robin asked.
“Pierre,” I said. “It’s where my parents live.”
“Do they know you’re coming?”
It was an odd question, and I knew I’d betrayed myself, listening to her story. “No,” I said. It came out in a whisper.
“When was the last time you and them talked at all?”
“After I graduated college, they were really mad that I wasn’t going to move back home.”
“That was all it took, huh?” Robin asked.
“Yeah. There’s a lot of other stuff they’d be mad about, but they just don’t even know about it, unless someone’s told them. Which maybe someone has.”
“Listen,” Robin said. “There are a lot of people who will tell you that you have to reconcile with your family, that you only get one, that if you never speak to your parents again this is somehow on you, and I am here to tell you that this is crap. You don’t have to reconcile with your family. You can find a family that accepts you for who you are instead of trying to cram you into the box they think you’re supposed to live in. And if they choose to reject you, that’s on them.”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
Robin pulled some Kleenex out of her purse and handed it to me. I wiped my eyes and looked out the window at the sunny afternoon.
“Just cause they raised you, that doesn’t mean you have to give them the opportunity to slam another door in your face,” she said.
“I didn’t have anyone else to go see,” I said. “My girlf—” I choked off the word, then checked myself. “My girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks ago and none of my friends out there are super close. I moved to Spokane for a job and I kind of hate it and I thought, ‘I should go see my family’ and so I went.”
I had felt so alone, listening to the news in my little apartment. And I’d tried calling home, and they hadn’t picked up. So like everyone else, I’d blown off work and hit the road.
What would I regret? “I would regret not reconciling with my family” seemed like an obvious answer, so I’d decided to try.
“Did you pass through Yellowstone on your way east?” Michael asked.
“No,” I said. “Even if I’d taken I-90 I’d have passed north of it.”
“Want to come see Yellowstone with us?” Robin asked. “It has Old Faithful.”
“And a Supervolcano that could blow up at any time,” Michael said. “So even if the asteroid misses us completely we could still potentially die in a cataclysmic disaster today!”
“You can still say no,” Robin said, “because we’re going to have to go door-knocking to try to find gas. You be the cute kid and we’ll split whatever we can find.”
Robin was being generous, because Michael’s plan was to offer cash—$10/gallon for whatever they’d let him siphon out, and if they balked at that, he’d try upping it to $20. We walked around Belle Fourche, knocking on doors. Mostly no one answered. We did find one person who was also out of gas, which was the only reason she was still in Belle Fourche and not on her way to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to see her granddaughter, and someone who had a full tank but flat-out refused to sell us any. (“Bank notes won’t be worth a damn thing if that asteroid hits. I need a full tank to get out of here, if I have to.”)