900 words
Oof, I am tired this morning and this was a struggle. I thought this prompt tied nicely with the “Middle Child” prompt, so I’m continuing the story. Of course, I’d need to go back and edit “Middle Child” if I wanted to put these together; for instance, Tina wouldn’t be wearing shorts if they’d set out in the early morning, and Susan can’t read in the dark. But it’s looking more and more likely that Tina’s going to be left at a gas station.
Tina gave Susan a final shove, earning a glare from her mother. Susan curled up next to the window in exaggerated comfort, smiling as if this seat was the most luxurious situation she’d ever experienced. Tina slumped forward, wedging her face between the two front seats. The front of the car smelled like the Juicy Fruit gum, her mother’s Oil of Olay lotion, and, faintly, old cigarette smoke. Neither of her parents smoked, but her mother would sometimes drive her friend Barbara to doctor’s appointments, and Barbara smoked a lot.
Tina’s mother was staring out the window, worrying a crochet project in her lap. She wasn’t working on it, she was feeling the rust-orange yarn between her thumb and forefinger as if she were checking its quality before purchasing it. Tina watched her mother. Her expression said she was someplace else, reliving the past or daydreaming. Tina had a moment of wonder: do parents daydream? If so, what do they daydream about? It was like the time she’d seen her soccer coach at the movie theater and had the realization that all kids have at one point or another. Parents and teachers and coaches were actually people.
Tina cleared her throat. Her mother turned and was startled by the closeness of Tina’s face. “Tina, sit back,” she said, stuffing her yarn and hooks in the colorful plastic bag on the floor in front of her. Tina had seen many projects emerge from that bag: plant hangers, baby blankets, even a stuffed owl a couple of times. These items were distributed to friends and relatives; Tina thought hard but couldn’t think of a single item that stayed with the family.
Tina did was she was told, sitting back with such velocity her back bounced off the seatback before she settled dramatically with an audible sigh.
Her dad looked at Tina through the rearview mirror, smiling a little. “Kid, you’re in for a long day,” he said. “Better just accept it.”
Tina scowled, which made her dad chuckle. They’d left home in the middle of the night—well, it was dark, so it was the middle of the night to Tina—but now they were more than an hour into the drive, and tendrils of orange and yellow were sneaking into the sky. The novelty of the drive was already wearing off. When her parents woke them from their sleep and bundled them into the car, Tina could pretend they were escaping a great evil like a monster or enemy attack, and they were on the run with all of their worldly possessions. But after a while, the facade was difficult to keep up, mostly because of her mom humming along to Linda Rondstadt and The Captain and Tenille. As good as Tina’s imagination was, she couldn’t reconcile “Blue Bayou” as a thrilling getaway soundtrack.
The landscape devolved from their suburban neighborhood to the outskirts of town to the industrial warehouses to nothing. They were in the part of the drive that Tina found excruciatingly boring, miles of desert scrub, sporadically dotted with ancient gas stations, seedy-looking motels with cool neon signs, and occasionally a roadside attraction boasting real turquoise jewelry and rocks and gems. They never stopped at the attractions, so Tina was left to imagine those shacks filled with what she assumed was gleaming, sparkling diamonds and rubies, much like the mines the dwarves worked in Snow White.
“Okay, Cass, what’s our next turn?” her dad said, glancing at her mom briefly before turning back to the road.
“What?” her mother said.
“The map. What’s the next turn? I always forget.”
Her mother laughed. “I don’t have the map, Robert.”
“Ha ha, very funny. It’s in the glove compartment.”
“No it’s not. I was just in there.”
Her father sighed. “Yes it is, Cassie. I put it in there myself.”
Her mother popped the latch on the glove compartment, and it fell open heavily. Her mother pulled everything out in a single bundle as if it were packaged for sale. Tina watched as her mother took inventory: paperwork, pens, hard candies, gum wrappers, a single sock, a plastic comb, blurred credit card receipts.
“No map,” her mother said, presenting the collection in her lap as evidence.
“Jesus Christ. Cassie. What did you do with it?”
Her mother’s head snapped back as if she’d been bopped on the forehead. She smirked. “What did I do with it? Me? I didn’t do anything with it.”
Tina could see her father’s knuckles on the steering wheel go white. “Okay, Cassie. So, what? The map just flew out the window like a bird?” He removed one hand from the steering wheel long enough to flap his hand around like an escaped sparrow.
Her mother laughed, but without humor. Tina knew that laugh was the start of a fight; it was full of the precise amount of scorn that enraged her father.
“No, Robert, I don’t think it flew out the window. But you think I just took it from the car for shits and giggles?”
Tina had a horrible, sickening feeling in her stomach. She had a memory from last week playing in the backyard with Amy. The two of them had spent a considerable amount of time making pirate’s booty by coloring dried cherry pits with metallic Crayolas, fashioning a treasure chest with a shoebox, and burying it in the soft ground beneath her mother’s bird of paradise shrubs. The only thing they were missing was a treasure map.
Clamhead 