"Road Trip" by SJ

[Every time I go back to this to prepare it to post I end up adding onto it. I think at this point I'm going to develop it into a short story. So at this point it's a zero draft of about half the plot I have in mind. But I don't have anything else to post and am really eager to get feedback on my writing, so I hope none of you mind me posting an unfinished piece.]

Eastern Montana, 20 hours in. For the first time, both boys are asleep at the same time, Mike in his car seat, his head lolling awkwardly to the side, and Ben strapped in the front, a half-eaten raw hotdog in his grip. Since Marcy left Olympia all she wanted was a moment of quiet so she could think, but now that she had it, she couldn’t stand being alone with her thoughts. As she thought them, they raced in a stream out of her head, through the windshield, and out to the horizon…but also back, to start again, the same repetitious pattern that prevented anything from getting resolved. She felt nuts. The land was straight, straight, straight, but her thoughts felt crooked, jumbled, pathologic. It was nearly enough to want to wake up the kids again, just to avoid being alone, thinking.

One moment she was in agony, recalling Big Ben’s (as they called him) announcement that he was leaving her, but, he added, since he was planning on staying in their new home, she was the one who would have to go. Go where? She had never lived outside the hills of upstate NY until that very week that they had moved together to stake out their new life in Washington. Another moment she was laughing about how earlier that day when she was too harried to care, little Ben picked Mike’s nose in front of the gas attendant as she tried to convince the man to let her buy some gas (it was the 14th, but the NY plates on their orange Ambassador Wagon began with a 3). A few more thoughts and the episode with Big Ben inevitably returned.

What seemed like moments later—indeed, the landscape had changed very little, and here was the memory of Ben’s drunken announcement once again—Mike begins to wail. A road sign appears—[Wibaux]—and she realizes she has driven nearly 100 miles since Miles City without paying any attention to the car or the road. Funny how life keeps chugging along with or without you, she thinks, and sighs.

Luckily, there is a gas station on the left. She pulls in and parks next to a cowboy in a pickup. “Howdy” he tells her, looking her up and down as she climbs out and opens the backseat door. “Screw you,” she thinks as she start to unbuckle Mike, now beat red and angrier than ever. His diaper is full and she doesn’t remember where she stashed the box after his last change. She finds it mashed between the boys’ suitcase and her wicker picnic basket, in the back. The diapers are a too small, really, but then she wasn’t thinking very clearly when she dashed into the AM/PM for provisions on the way out of town yesterday.

Once Mike is changed, he is a bit more agreeable. But now Ben is awake and wants to know where Dad is, can they go home now? She realizes when he says “home” he still means NY, and thinks “Well, there’s something positive.” She calms him: “We’re going home, honey, I promise.” She has the idea that hearing grandma’s voice will cheer him up, and digs her hands into her jeans pocket for change. Two dimes—should do it.

But no one answers. She puts Ben back in the car and tells him to watch his brother, strapped in again, while she goes inside to use the bathroom. It’s disgusting, with wet paper strewn across the floor, rings in the toilet and sink, and smudges (of what?) across the mirror. She doesn’t recognize herself but has no time to care. This is the first moment she has been alone in what have been the worst days of her life. She puts her hand on the door handle but counts to ten before opening the door.

The attendant is joking and making faces through the open windows at the kids. “Where ya headed?” he asks as he looks up.

Not far enough, she thinks, when his gaze rests on her chest. “East,” she says, and ducks into the driver’s seat.

“No motels ‘til Driscoll.”

She remembers Driscoll from the map—it’s in whichever Dakota she was heading for. She looks up and squints at him before ducking into the seat. She slams the car door and pulls back onto the highway, not meaning to kick up so much gravel as she does so.

It is getting dark but she has no interest in the nearest motel—no money for it. They’ll sleep in the car, like they did last night. As Ben sits, chin on hand on door where the window is all the way down, she pulls crumpled dollars and change out of her pocket and spreads it on the seat between them. At the tinkle of the coins, he turns his head to see what she is doing. “Help me keep them from falling into the crack,” she says and starts counting.

They have $24.76, plus the two blank checks Big Ben gave her before they left. The checks have his name on them and were issued by the bank back in NY. For the first time she wishes she had listened to her parents and taken his last name when they were married. She doesn’t know how she will avoid having to beg someone to cash a check before too long, because $24.76 can’t possibly get her and two kids from Montana (North Dakota, a sign now tells her) to upstate New York. She has the money, the car, diapers, soda pop, hotdogs, chips, and 10 jars of carrots, sweet peas, and chicken for Mike. And a few suitcases of clothes and knickknacks from home. The car was her life raft, the provisions her emergency gear. Big Ben had said “That should do it,” as he slapped the roof of the car when she pulled away.

She doesn’t realize she is veering to the right until a pop that’s almost a bang brings her to and she is suddenly tugging at the steering wheel in order to avoid going off the shoulder into the scrub. Everything lurches—the bags, the miscellaneous food, and even the kids—when she slams on the breaks. The money slides off the seat to the floor.

They stop, still on the shoulder and everything is perfectly quiet for one second before both the boys wail in unison.

“It’s okay” she shouts at them, but sighs and says it again, under her breath, to herself. She undoes her seatbelt, then Ben’s, pulls him across the seat in from of the steering wheel toward her and out her door with her, opens Mike’s door and fiddles with the straps for too long before she can get him out. Straps aside now, she pulls him to her chest, sits on the ground, and pulls Ben down with them in a 3-way bear hug. The open door shields them from the dusty headwind and the last of the suns rays coming from the west bask them in light made even more orange by the metallic paint of the car.

She is thinking what to do when the sound of a pick-up pulling onto the rough shoulder behind them gets her attention. The cowboy from the gas station jumps out and approaches and she realizes her tears have made the boys’ hair damp. She releases her grip on them and when they look up at her she smiles at their hair sticking to their foreheads like when they have the fever. But they are fine. She stands up and swallows her pride.

“Not gonna make it to Driscoll on that tire,” he says. She gives him a smile now and says she knows.