Driving along yesterday I heard the most peculiar squeak.
“Stop talking,” I instructed all three kids, who were strapped in the backseat talking all at once to everyone except each other. “Do you hear a noise?”
Tyler put down his Transformer, who had been patiently listening to one of his epic tales, and listened. “It’s a squeak,” was his diagnosis, and then he went on with his story.
A half mile passed. “Everyone stop moving,” I demanded. “Is anyone rocking in their car seat?”
“No,” the three chimed simultaneously. Eva added, “Maybe Daddy has to oil the tires.”
I turned up the radio and attempted to ignore it, but it didn’t work. The squeak grated in my brain, louder and louder, until it echoed like a New York City sewer stuffed with dog-sized rats.
“What the hell?!” I demanded to no one in particular. “Is there a dying rat in my engine?”
To make a grueling twenty-mile story short, I discovered I drove from Harwinton to Simsbury with my trunk flapping up and down in the wind. Yes, I was that jackass in front of a stream of traffic—the kind who unknowingly drives with his blinker on mile after mile, plastic shopping bags flying out the backseat window, a pididdle for a front headlight and a cup of steaming coffee on his roof.
The open trunk: a direct result of a well-meaning mother who borrowed my car earlier that day and filled it up with gas. The trunk button, the gas tank button…it’s all the same.
Mom, about that DNA test I requested all through the teen years? The one that was supposed to prove you are indeed my biological mother? It’s no longer necessary.