🎧 Chapter One | The Wheels Fall Off
What you need to know:
This marks the day everything changes.
Our protagonist awakens to the reality of a troubled marriage.
Chapter One
The Wheels Fall Off
This is the Columbia Gorge at sixty miles an hour. In the distance, the immovable Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helen’s. Nearer, flashing by, the changing landscape of grasslands that transition into and out of rainforest until at last, we travel along the top edge of stone cliffs that front the churning Columbia River below.
I sit up front with Rick who drives our boxy SUV. With his thinning ginger-colored hair and a trim burnished-orange beard, Rick is a mix of Ron Howard in Happy Days and Abe Lincoln. He taps on the steering wheel in time to a song by KT Tunstall that plays on the stereo. Find Yourself Another Place to Fall.
Well, I don't see no holes in the road, KT Tunstall bellows and at that moment, a hard thunk shakes the SUV.
Later, I’d listen to that song again. The full line went: Well, I don't see no holes in the road, but you. Find another place to fall. It contains our whole story, I thought, but I’m getting ahead of myself…
In that moment of a hard hit against the front tire, I turned off the stereo. “What is that?” I asked. “A flat?”
“I don’t know,” Rick says, easing off the gas.
The thunk shivers along his side now.
Out my side window, a flimsy guard rail and a sheer drop. “Don’t stop here. There’s no shoulder.”
“Maybe there’s more room around the bend?” Rick asks, peers down the narrow, curving road.
“Mom?” Spencer asks, straining forward against his seat belt. Shaggy dark hair, a soft, rounded face, braces and thick-framed glasses. “What’s happening?” In his hand, a blue palm sized gaming device that makes a sad “game over” sound.
Jo, who has a pink game in her hand, looks my way, too. A furrow worked into her usually smooth forehead. She’s a thin, long-limbed girl with a pale, almost wan complexion reminiscent of the Victorian era. Blond curls. Pert nose.
“It’s okay. We’re okay,” I say, a habitual phrase appropriated long ago. I also liked to say, “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
The thunk shudders to the back of the rig and I face forward again. “There,” I say and point to a turnout under a cluster of pines.
“I see,” Rick says and rolls off the road and onto the soft dirt. Flicking off the ignition, he sets the brake and unclips his belt. Leaving his door open, mountain air blows in, crisp and cold.
I want to say this was the last week of January, 2011. Or February? I’m not sure. Memory doesn’t hold specific dates as much as seasons and this was winter. I remember that.
Rick strides around the front of the SUV, that habitual forward bend of his shoulders as if about to go into a crouch. It was something my long-dead father had done as well, a particular quality of tall men as if in apology for their extraordinary height.
“Stay here,” I say to the kids, unbuckle my belt and shove open the passenger door.
Meeting Rick, all four tires splay this way and that. My brain goes blank for a long moment—the moment of opportunity Buddhist’s call it—but soon enough I fill the gap with a passing conversation earlier in the week as I hurried out the door to teach a class. Rick, brandishing a crowbar and the owner’s manual, announced his plan to rotate the tires on the SUV. A display of manly prowess, I thought at the time, and wholly out of character. Rick was a doctor. A scholar. A teacher.
“Just take it to the dealer,” I said at the time. “They’ll do it.”
“Nope! I’ve got this,” he said.
Cars and trucks and motorcycles race past the turnout. The rush of speed. The clatter of gravel. And I come back to myself, look hard at Rick who stands at my side working at his chin with his hand.
“Wow. Weird,” he says.
I circle the SUV—orange and black and the latest in stylish transportation. Rick follows.
The wheels hang on the posts, most of the lug nuts gone.
“What happened when you rotated the tires?” I ask.
“Oh,” he says, shoves his hands into the pockets of his loose fitting khaki’s and then shrugs one shoulder in his easy-going way. “I didn’t get around to it. I mean, I started…”
“You started?”
Behind wire-framed glasses, he blinks in confusion.
“Rick? Did you loosen the lug nuts and forget to tighten them down again?”
He blinks on the question and slowly, slowly, realization dawns. “I thought I did…” he says. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Rick,” I say, hands open as if they contain all I cannot say.
His eyes fill with tears.
My mind swirls with confusion and then lands on the fact of the kids, my kids from a previous marriage and how—just like that—they might have died and remain in serious danger now and that my partner, my husband, can only weep.
Tears trail down his cheeks and I study the ground between us. Embedded in the packed earth, broken shards of glass and tiny stones.
“I’m going to call Steve,” I say. The grease monkey. The mechanic. The fixer of things others toss out.
“Oh…” Rick says, ticking away tears with his fingertips. “Yeah. Okay.”
I circle the SUV and tug open the side door.
Josephine, back to playing her baking game, lowers the device and looks at me with her gray-blue eyes. She is eight. Spencer, who has tossed his game aside, kneels on the seat as if ready to get out given permission. He is thirteen and has dark eyes like me.
“We’ve got a situation here,” I say to both of them. “I’m going to call Dad. Okay?”
“Can I get out?” Spencer asks.
“Yeah, but be careful.”
“I will,” Spencer says, yanks a jacket from one of the bags, pulls it on and clambers past Jo and out.
“Are we still going to the hot springs?” Josephine asks, watching me dig into my purse at her feet, her little girl voice high and bright. She wears pink velour sweatpants and a yellow and pink fleece poncho with purple baubles around the edges.
Pulling up the phone, I tuck a wayward curl behind her delicate ear.
“I’m not sure, sweets,” I say. “Maybe grab a snack while I figure this out?”
Jo digs into the swim bag and lifts out a Ziplock of fish crackers, nuts, and chocolate chips.
I flip open my phone, hit the dial button, and sit in the wide foot well. Hand to my head, eyes closed against what will be a certain fury.
“Yel-low,” Steve says on the line, voice deep and confident. We’ve been divorced for almost five years and are friendly-ish. “For the sake of the kids,” we tell ourselves.
“Hey,” I say, describe the situation in hushed tones.
“What the hell? What was he thinking?” Steve says, voice booming. Judgmental. Cynical. Right.
“The why can come later,” I say. “What do I do?”
Steve harrumphs on the line, goes on and on about the stunning stupidity of some people and how we could have been killed. Yes, I know, I think. On my watch. My kids, our kids, could have died.
Jo taps at my shoulder and then points toward the treetops that sway in the wind. A couple wide-winged birds circle as if on the hunt.
Wow, I mouth to her and now I’m the one about to cry. I love her so much, love how she loves every kind of bird: Crows. Finches. Doves. Sparrows. Swallows. My girl. My beloved girl. And Spencer, too. My first born. My heart. Behind the SUV, I can hear him questioning Rick about the lug nuts and why they fell off. He’s a kid with so many questions, a hunger to learn.
“It’s kind of a mystery,” Rick is saying to him. “Things like that happen with cars all the time. Lots of moving parts.”
“Really? That’s strange,” Spencer says.
“Well, hell,” Steve says. “How many lug nuts are left?”
I tick away the tears, clear my throat. “Hold on,” I say and call out to Spencer who hurries over. I ask him to make the count and soon the number comes back: Eleven out of twenty.
“Technically, you can make it a few miles with two per wheel,” Steve says, all business now. He’s probably in his garage working on an old motorcycle, or maybe in his yard winterizing his hoses, or he could be in the house drinking a cup of coffee and planning his week of travel to Las Vegas and L.A. for his job as a free-lance auctioneer. “Get three on the front tires and one on the back—driver’s side— and that leaves two for the last tire. Space ‘em out evenly and get ‘em on tight. Got a crowbar and jack?”
Rick and Spencer now stand before me, side by side. Rick, seeing the hawks, too, shades his eyes and tracks their course.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Spence. Can you made sure the jack and crowbar are in the back.”
Rick lowers his hand and looks at me, a sorrowful expression in his clear blue eyes. “I’m sure they’re still there,” he says, voice quiet.
Spencer is back with a double thumbs up. “They’re by the spare, Mom. Want me to get them out?”
“We’ve got both,” I say to Steve and nod to Spencer who hurries to the back of the SUV again. The clatter of the jack on gravel. The rattle of the crowbar.
More detailed instructions follow. “Get big rocks to stabilize the wonky tires, try to find some boards along the road, or branches that can help, too.”
Rick wanders toward the tree line, hands in his pockets. He pauses to study…what? I don’t even know. The ground, it seems.
“Once you get everything back together, don’t let him drive over thirty,” Steve says.
“Then what? Back to Portland?” I ask.
“Go to the Honda dealer in Hood River,” Steve says. “It’s closer.”
“Okay. Right. Good.”
“Call when you get there. Let me know you made it.”
“I will,” I say, about to hang up.
“Uh, Jen…” Steve says, that old familiar name only he calls me. Not Jennifer. Always “Jen.”
“Yeah?” I say.
“You okay? The kids good?”
Rick strides my way and cradles something in his palm.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” I say, rubbing hard over my eyes and forehead. “Everything’s fine.”
“You only say fine when you’re pissed, or scared.”
I drop my hand, and Rick is back; shows Jo a bit of bark he’s picked up and points out the universe of moss and lichen sprouting on the top side.
Jo sets aside her bag of snacks, takes this treasure into her own hand and “Oh’s” and “ah’s.”
“You can make a tea from that lichen,” Rick tells her.
“Does it taste good?” she asks.
“Sure, with some honey,” Rick says.
Spencer steps around the ATV, looks at me with his hands open like asking, “What comes next?”
“I gotta go,” I say. “I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Okay.”
Next:
Chapter 2: Hot Water
