Page 42 of Born to be Wilder

“Permission granted!” I answered, still excited I got to be the one calling the shots on this leg of the journey.

I looked through the windshield from the passenger seat at the sunset. The snow was gone now, and just like the weather, every hour we’d covered since we’d left the Ark warmed my heart too.

Something had shifted.

I couldn’t name it exactly, but somewhere between the gift shop and the camel ride, the knot that had been living in my chest since Alice had said the word cancer had loosened just slightly, just enough to breathe around. That weight on my shoulders lessened, like taking off a heavy winter coat soaked from a storm.

I still had my worries, of course. I suspected I always would. I was built that way, the same as Marge was built to drive too fast, Sylvie was built to plan and organize, and Alice was built to be the most beautiful woman in any room she walked into. Worry was the factory setting God had put into me.

But something Marge had said kept coming back to me as Bertha rolled through the darkening Mississippi countryside.

You’re our loophole, Doris. You always have been.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe I didn’t have to convert them or save them or drag them to Noah’s Ark and hope for a lightning bolt of divine intervention. Maybe I just had to be me—praying hard enough for four, believing enough for four, living well enough for four—and trust that God, who had managed to fit around fourteen hundred animal kinds onto one wooden boat, could manage to sort out the particulars of three stubborn nonbelievers who happened to be loved fiercely by one very determined Christian currently wearing a Viking helmet.

“Alright.” Marge rolled her neck with a crack. “We need food and I need a drink, and then I need a flat surface to lie on before my back stages a full rebellion.” She nodded toward the windshield where the lights of a small town were beginning to glow on the horizon. “Looks like a restaurant up ahead. Big one. Parking lot looks plenty big for Bertha. What do you say, Captain? Make that our next stop?”

I saw the sprawling roadhouse-type establishment with a lit-up parking lot. “I approve,” I said, and my belly grumbled loudly at the same time.

“She approves. And I think so does her belly,” Marge confirmed, calling back to Alice and Sylvie sitting together in the booth. “Sound good to you, ladies?”

“Whatever the captain says is fine by me!” Sylvie called back.

“Works for me, too,” Alice answered.

“Hold on!” Marge tipped the wheel, and Bertha careened off the highway and up the exit ramp.

“If we could get there alive, that would be preferable!” Alice called up.

Marge just laughed, navigating the RV up the ramp, and I smiled, because it was the first time someone had made a comment about life or death, even joking, that I didn’t suddenly feel the need to explode in sobs.

I’m trusting You, I told Him silently, watching the lights from the town grow brighter as we approached it. I’m going to stop trying to do Your job and let You do it. But I’m still going to pray. Loudly. Every day. Just so we’re clear.

After we parked, we stretched, our legs wobbly as we walked across the parking lot to the giant building with The Rusty Spur in a blinking neon sign above it. Inside was warm and loud and smelled like fried food and cold beer. We found a booth and ordered, then clinked our glasses in a Wilder Widows cheer when our drinks arrived.

“I have to say,” I told them once the waiter delivered our food, “I’m sorry my time as captain wasn’t more exciting. We only had a little time with the animals after the Ark yesterday, and today you didn’t seem very excited about the Apron Museum.”

We’d spent four hours of my second day as captain at the Apron Museum in Mississippi. To me, it was heaven. As a baker, I’d spent half my life tied into a floral print, and seeing those vintage pieces—the sweetheart necklines from the forties, the sturdy denim from the war—it felt like a tribute to the women who had held the world together.

But as I’d read the history of the “clothespin pocket” aloud, I’d caught Alice checking her reflection in a glass case with a look of pure despair. Marge had actually fallen asleep on a small wooden bench between a display of 1950s hostess aprons and a collection of handmade potholders.

For all my bravado about being a new Doris who started to live a little more, I was failing. I was being the “safe Doris.” I was taking my best friends on a tour of my own comfort zone while Alice was facing a battle that had no safety net at all.

“Hey, at least it wasn’t the Marionette Museum.” Marge shuddered. “Not much scares me in life, but I’ll never be more grateful we were too far south to do that wish of yours. A museum full of creepy dolls staring at me?” She shuddered again. “I’ll take bullets in ’Nam any day.”

I frowned. I had really wanted to see it.

“Well, I’m sorry if this wasn’t the excitement you all had wanted. I guess I just picked the things I felt comfortable with. I’m sorry.”

“Are you kidding?” Sylvie shook her head. “I rode a camel, Doris. I have been wanting to ride a camel since I was a little girl. I’m calling it a win.”

“And the Ark itself was genuinely incredible,” Alice said, and the sincerity in her voice was so unguarded it made my heart seize up in the best possible way. “I mean it. I walked in fully prepared to be politely tolerant, and I walked out actually impressed.” She lifted her glass toward me. “Great wish, Captain.”

“Really?” I pressed my hands together.

“Really,” Marge confirmed. “Ten out of ten. Would visit giant biblical boat again.” She pointed her fork at me. “And the dinosaurs. Always lead with the dinosaurs, Doris.”

I laughed, looking around at my three widows, the neon light on their faces, and something settled in me even further. Here they were. Right here. Alive and warm and real.