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There was so much uncertainty about what was about to happen in my life. From how I was going to live day to day, big picture stuff, to if this car was going to make it another five miles kind of smaller picture stuff.
“Come on, you can do it,” I moaned hopelessly at the dashboard of the car.
All the lights were on inside the dash. I didn’t know much about cars, but I was positive that all of them being on was bad.
The car hiccupped, and a grinding sound roared out, and then a loud pop from under the hood shook the entire car. Tears stung the corners of my eyes as I shook my head, pushing against the steering wheel in desperation to give the car some more momentum. Like if I got it going faster, it would just fix itself.
An angry whooping, coughing sound followed and then silence. I was going down a hill, but I knew that the second gravity had no more pull was where the car was going to stop. I clutched the wheel and watched as I came up to a sign for a berry farm five miles away, and slowly the car stopped just beyond it. At least I had a mile marker.
I sat there, the car stopped and smoke starting to stream out from under the hood, staring into the middle distance for a moment. I snapped back to reality when the first big, wet drop of rain hit the very center of my windshield.
“No. No, no, no,” I said. “Not rain. Not rain.”
Another plop.
“Son of a bitch.”
I got out of the car, slamming the door behind me and marching over to the hood. Opening it up gave me a wall of smoke at first, and the hot, greasy blast made me take a step back and cough for a second. The rain was coming down in slow, heavy drops, and one went right down the back of my shirt. I wiggled and realized I must look like an idiot.
Not that there was anyone else on the road. I was in Nowhere, Texas. Not literally, but I may as well have been. Murdock bordered absolutely nothing, and from my memory it was thirty minutes to an hour to get anywhere civilized. I didn’t even know how far out I was from Murdoch, since my phone had decided the GPS app didn’t want to work anymore and I was going off memory. The last ten miles had been panic combined with sadness, and I hadn’t paid attention to any of the road signs. I could be anywhere between an hour and ten minutes from Murdock at the moment.
Might as well be a million.
As the smoke cleared, I stared at the engine blankly. I had absolutely no idea what to do with any of it. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew how to add oil and jump a battery. But that was the extent of my mechanical prowess.
Shrugging, I turned to walk back to the driver’s door and stopped in my tracks. A cold, wet blob of rain had hit me directly in the eye. It felt purposeful.
Gritting my teeth, I stalked up to the door and yanked.
My shoulder felt like it was on fire. A familiar panic went up my back, and the thousand times I had told myself never to do this exact thing started running through my mind. I’d left the keys in the ignition. I’d left the keys in the ignition, and out of habit, locked the door when I got out.
I pressed my face against the window and looked in. As expected, I could see the keychain, a little Homer Simpson face staring back at me from the dangling toy attached to it, hung from the ignition.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I yelled to nothing in particular.
The rain pelted me on the top of the head and shoulders, soaking me almost instantly.
For the first time since I’d rolled away from my former home, I felt the tears start streaming down my face. They came in big, ugly globs and as an insult to the injury, I was sure they were ruining my makeup. I could see the umbrella sitting just below the passenger door. It had a yellow duck print on it. I’d always loved that umbrella, and for the life of me, could not ever remember using it. It just stayed in the car on the off chance. Now I needed it and couldn’t get it.
Because this was my life.
Everything, absolutely everything, had gone wrong. I didn’t want to think about what had led me to this moment, forcing those thoughts back. I wasn’t ready to get into that yet. That would require a warm bed and soft pajamas and, preferably, a considerable amount of alcohol. Not standing on the side of a Texas highway in the middle of nowhere as rain poured down on top of me and my broke-ass car.
