As AJ washed the dinner dishes from a meal of leftovers and refrigerator scraps, her mind wasn’t too far away, just through the door to where her packed suitcase stood. She mentally riffled through the items she had just gathered, bundled and stuffed into the luggage. “Hat? Sunblock? Do I have enough socks? What if it rains? It's not supposed to rain. I forgot pajamas.”
AJ, B and their boys, One and Two, were almost ready to almost start their vacation.
When her soggy task was done, AJ hurriedly pulled on a long skirt and tee-shirt and joined her family as they roamed the house looking for potential cat hazards. After giving furry goodbyes to their feline queens, they got into the suitcase-laden car.
“Garage door is down,” AJ said as they drove away. The sentiment was echoed a few times from the back seat. In a few days, when they were hundreds of miles away, they wouldn’t have to wonder.
Highway I-94, south of St Joseph was busy and drenched. The sky was a sick grey, with rain falling as best it could on the rush of traffic, the drops being blown into streams before hitting the road. For a long time the only sound heard inside the car was the muffled whirring of wheels on the road, as if the family were all busy thinking a big sigh of relief. “Finally, we’re on vacation. Now what?”
B turned on the music to fill the void, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove. In the front seat, AJ unconsciously mimicked him. The car weaved through the lanes, around giants on 18 wheels, passing more leisurely drivers, then was forced to slow down at a bottleneck of road construction.
Traffic crawled and paused, one by one, filling the small asphalt gaps between bumpers.
AJ broke the silence. “I don’t know why, but the blinker on the car in front of us really bothers me. There are worse driving mistakes a person can make, and I’m guilty of them, but he’s not executing his intentions … he’s kinda unintentionally lying … by mistake,” AJ said. The black Prius’s right turn signal had been misfiring for a few slow miles.
The big rig beside them growled impatiently as it made room for the Prius that never followed its turn signal.
“That truck keeps giving the car room to get over, but it never does …” B murmured in agreement. The big rig's impatience slowly spread into their car. “Could you get on the phone and see … take a look at the map and …” B said and attempted to pick up a nearby cell phone. AJ grabbed it from his reach. “ … see if this is the best way?”
Her fingers glided and poked the screen for a few minutes. "The southern route says it’s twenty-four minutes faster. There’s a car wreck the other way.”
The south route, I-294 to Chicago, it was.
After an hour of silence punctuated by a few lone comments, Two, the youngest, piped up from the back seat, “I see an airport.” They were close, but not ready to fly yet.
The hotel was a country-fried version of any typical hotel, with spackled, cream-colored walls accented with burgundy and dark green wall paper, and natural-wood-colored everything else. It was a place to lay their heads before a cross-country flight and a place to park the car while they were away.
Within minutes of setting their suitcases down in the room, Two was in his swimming trunks, ready for the hotel pool, intent on practicing the swimming moves he had been learning at the YMCA. He came back an hour later with B, smelling of chlorine and with bluish, shivering lips.
“How did you get all this water on the floor?” AJ chided as she stepped into the bathroom after Two had rinsed off. “It’s almost out the door!”
Two just shrugged. In his young life, he had never had to clean a bathroom.
As AJ mopped up the deluge with a blue-striped pool towel, she noticed signs that told her that Two’s watery mishap was not the first in that room. Behind the bathroom faucets scrubbed mercilessly with inappropriately abrasive cleaner, a line of dark, damp growth highlighted the seam in the counter. Nothing in the room said, “new and improved.” The door had rounded corners where they should have been sharp, there were awkward additions and repairs, missing towel hooks and, as she discovered later that night when she tried to use it, a shower head that made sense to the water-worn room. The shower curtain didn’t shut all the way, allowing a wayward spray of water to trickle onto the floor.
That night, when the lights were out, AJ tried to push her mind down lower into the oblivion of sleep while all around her the walls and ceiling thumped with people walking, talking. Sleep was reluctant to visit her in the unfamiliar atmosphere. The AC blared billowing cold air into the room at awkward intervals. Sighs and the constant rustling of bed linens came from the bed next to hers.
“Lie down and go to sleep!” she yell-whispered to a shadow that tossed and turned. She repeated the command two more times in the next hour and a half, before adding gently, “… and lie still. Don’t move and you’ll fall asleep faster.”
With a sigh, the small shadow obeyed. Within an hour, the dark had coaxed the family to sleep.
And in the dark, 5 a.m. came early the next morning, heralded in with electronic alarms.
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