Fiction

Rena was staring at the spinning snow and speeding on the turnpike, adding miles between herself and home; then she was fishtailing, braking, braking, swerving left of the far-left lane. Her Honda bashed the guardrail. Her body slammed the seat. With her car stopped dead still, only the snow moved around her, and in the surprise of that stillness, she shook. The shaking was involuntary. But she could control other movements. Turn off the ignition. Lift her foot from the brake. She would suffer a bruise where the shoulder belt pinned her chest, but no worse. The windshield was unshattered. Steam curled and rose to melt the snow falling onto her hood.

This was nothing. She was fine. She unbuckled and felt around the passenger’s seat for her phone.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” the towing company’s dispatcher said.

“It’s nothing,” Rena said.

“Promise you’ll stay in your car until our driver arrives, for your safety.”

Still shaking after the call, Rena clutched her phone. A few years ago, she would have called her husband, Cameron. She would have said, “I must have been daydreaming. You know how I am,” and he would have said something brief and plain, like, That sucks. He would have walked her through diagnostics that might have led nowhere but kept them talking. Any warning lights? Smoke? Can you turn the wheel? He would’ve tried to fix her problems from two hundred miles away, in Evanston, even if odds pointed to futile. But after two strokes in two years, her husband couldn’t speak. Rena wasn’t even sure how much he understood. She slid her phone back into her purse. She watched cars pass and part curtains of snow.