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She tossed her blonde locks back and scooted further down into the seat, kicking her feet up on the dashboard.
“We’re gonna be seniors,” she said, an observation she’d made many times on the trip, each utterance delivered with different inflections an emotion. Fear, excitement, anxiety.
“Bridgeport’s been a hell of a ride,” I agreed. “I remember the day I got in.”
“Same. I got the card that said ‘Welcome to Bridgeport University’ and it was like my whole life changed in a split second. And now it’s all gonna be over.”
I turned to look at her. “The important stuff isn’t over. Like our friendship. That’s not a four-year thing, that’s a forever thing.”
Ever avoiding emotional intimacy, she replied, “If you don’t put your eyes back on the road, we’re not gonna make it to four years, or even four more minutes.”
Laughing, I shifted my stare from Jo-Beth to the road.
Only I didn’t shift quite fast enough.
What I now know to be a damn tumbleweed rolled into my view. I, mistaking it for a small defenseless desert animal, veered right. Jo-Beth screamed, I screamed, the car screeched, the dust churned.
And just like that, airbags were filling up the cabin and black smoke was coming from the crevices of the vehicle. Technically speaking, the airbags didn’t really fill anything — they were so deflated from twenty years of being cramped up that they just kind of hissed out like dejected balloons.
But airbag efficacy aside, we’d crashed into a tall, rusted metal pole.
For a moment, we sat there, stunned. We’d crashed the car only one stop from our final destination. What was this frickin’ pole doing in the middle of the desert?
“Are you okay?” I managed to ask my friend, breath coming heavy in my throat.
Jo-Beth shook the dust out of her hair. “Yeah, I’m okay. You okay?”
“Yeah. Shit.”
I shifted forward in my seat until I could tilt my chin up and look through the glass at our iceberg, the thing that had sunk us.
Well, that just figured.
At the top of the pole, in brick red and dull blue, with burnt-out bulbs rimming the edges, sat a sign.
It read, “Welcome to Rough and Ready.”
CHAPTER 2
Carter
A DROP OF oil splashed onto my face.
“Shi… shoot,” I muttered, tongue jamming between my teeth as I took a wrench to the source of the leak.
“What’d you say, Daddy?”
“Nothing, kiddo.” Learning not to swear around your kid takes years of practice and the patience of a saint. “Could ya hand me that flashlight?”
“Mm-hmm!”
The clop of Henry’s cowboy boots echoed through the high-ceilinged repair shop, reverberating off the cement walls. The boots were still a little big on him, but I figured that just left him with room to grow. In the meantime, I made him wear the boots with two pairs of socks so that they were snug as a bug.
“Here,” he said, his chubby fingers passing me the flashlight beneath the car.
I caught hold of his hand and planted a raspberry on his outstretched palm. He giggled and squirmed, and though I couldn’t see his face from my vantage, I could picture it — cheeks red, mouth full of baby teeth stretched into a grin, that asymmetrical dimple emerging like a secreted gem.
Shining the light on the engine, I sighed again. This old beauty — Cici, as Henry and I had dubbed her — refused to run.
We’d found Cici on the side of a highway on our way to Henry’s annual physical. Our little village didn’t have a doctor in residence, so to get complete workups, we had made a morning out of it.
This past month, the day after Henry’s sixth birthday, we were driving back along a road that was known only to the locals, and much to my surprise, I spotted an old race car just abandoned on the side of the road. Didn’t seem like there’d been an accident and the license plates had been removed. The body was in good shape. It was as if the universe had just plopped a gift into my lap.
Well, kind of. Cici needed lots of work. Turned out her motor was shot, she had a punctured hose or two, and the steering was a mess. But I figured that maybe she’d be a good project for me and Henry and I’d made a lot of headway on Cici. Daddy-son bonding, y’know? Besides, it’s not like my regular job as a car repair guy took up much time. We saw about one vehicle every other day, max, leaving me with plenty of time to soup Cici up.
Anyways, Henry had been learning plenty from our venture, the point of which had been to teach him an honest day’s work. Only a month on and he could name parts of an engine and fetch me all the different tools I asked for. I even let him get under the car with me, so long as he held onto my hand and squeezed it if he got nervous.
