We killed a car

No, I killed it, but I am all for the collective if it helps spread the blame

We figured it was part of an air conditioner, and that dark strip is the gas that poured out.

We left for Missouri at 4 a.m. more than a week ago, with a carload that included my adult son, his 11-year-old twins, luggage, bags of snacks, and hopeful hearts. The first day, we drove 15 hours and got a room in Effingham, Ill., then got up the next morning to drive to the St. Louis area, where we climbed the Cahokia Mounds, and then some of us (the non-claustrophobic ones) went up in the Gateway Arch.

After that, it was an easy 4-hour drive diagonally southwest across the state to my family, but when we were just two hours out, in a little hole in the road known as Richland, Mo., I crested a hill and saw two pieces of metal right in front of me. The smaller piece was in the passing lane and the larger piece was in my lane. A car was coming up on my left, and the shoulder too skinny to successfully swerve into and out of, so I prayed for clearance and ran over it.

“It” was part of an air conditioning unit, I believe, and the crash woke everyone up. I pulled over, turned off the car, said, “I smell gas,” and we hustled out and down an embankment to an access road.

Budget rental car roadside assistance is, in a word, horrible. I was put on hold. I was told an Uber was coming. I was told an Uber wasn’t coming, but if I got a motel room, they’d pay for it. I suggested they’d never been to Richland, where there was no motel. There was, however, a truck stop (Missouri!), which we walked to and settled in, after I apologized the the waitress that we’d be parked there a while, but we would order and tip handsomely. She actually offered to drive us to Lebanon, when she got off her shift at 10. At one point, the entire restaurant was sharing their own rental car horror stories, which was kind of cool. My granddaughter loved the life-sized wooden hillbilly, and the truck stop carried 24 different kinds of beef jerky, and we daintily sampled all we could stomach.

After Budget broke my heart, I called my sister-in-law, because, at 90 minutes away, she was the closest relative. My voice was shaking and I couldn’t apologize enough, but she said, “I’m on my way.”

While we waited for her (bless her), we briefly marveled that no spark from the scraping metal had set the car on fire, and we decided that this would be the story the twins will tell when they go back to school, that time Granny killed a rental car. Just before the restaurant closed, my sister-in-law showed up, drove us to her farm, and we collapsed into our beds. That next day, a new rental car was waiting for me an hour away, so we borrowed her car again, picked up the newer (bigger) car, and drove the rest of the way in to my aunt’s house. The sumptuous spaghetti dinner meant for our first night’s meal heated up just fine.

The twins trying out the ‘56 nestled in my sister-in-law’s barn. The car is the same vintage as her husband, my brother. The boy kept saying, “Give me a vacuum and I’ll clean it up right now.”

Needless to say, it was an eventful way to start the vacation, which was fun and exhausting and I heard family stories I hadn’t ever heard before, which surprised me because I thought I’d heard them all. One grandchild thought he’d chipped a tooth at a water park, another cut her chin there, they both had some allergic reaction to something, and we came back brown as a butternut. The twins said that Missouri people are nice. The bugs are not, and the humidity? How can people live like that? (They go into their air conditioned homes in July and come out in late September.)

On our return trip, we again planned to leave at 4 a.m. and I didn’t sleep well (anticipation of a trip always wrecks my sleep). Then, at 2:30 a.m., my phone rang and it was my cousin, who I wish was my sister. She and her family had hurried up to Chicago for a concert, and on the way home, they hit a small engine, maybe something from a weed whacker. At first I thought she was kidding, but I recognized the shaking voice and the profuse apologies that she’d called everyone she could think of, but they all had the sense to have their phones turned off at such an obscene hour.

“I’m on my way,” I said, and I went to get them — my cousin, her husband, their twins (runs in the family), and the twins’ friend. And I reassured my cousin that I knew very well how stupid she felt for hitting something in the road, and that I appreciated her call because now I’ve at least partially paid some cosmic debt, “partially” because it was only a 15-minute drive to them, and then a 10-minute drive to their house. I delivered them, we hugged, and by the time I got back to my aunt’s house, it was time to head east. We went another 15 hours, I ran over nothing, and finished the trip in six short hours on July 4. (I kind of thought that dead car on the way out would serve as a talisman for the return trip, and it did. I barely even had to tap my brake until we got to Connecticut.)

So much could have gone wrong — injuries as we rushed over to the side of the road, a spark igniting the car, me choosing to drive my own car (and not a rental). It may sound odd, but after something like this, I always feel immensely lucky. We have a story to tell, and soon we will plan our next big trip. I’m only partially wondering how long the talisman will last.