By: Owen A. Macleod

My mom and I packed into the Jeep Wrangler, and made short conversation through a few stop signs on the way to my high school. I usually walked to school, but on the rare occasion that my mom gave me a ride, we usually jabbered about school work I was behind on, or an  “after-school-activity.” Today though, she had something on her mind.

She was weathered and tired. Closing her eyes for long, slow, appreciated blinks. Her hair had been gray for years, but she had stopped dying it a few months ago and the white hairs were creeping through the thicket of red perched on her head. She had her seat stuck next to the steering wheel the way old women with four-inch-thick glasses do.

“I go in with your dad today,” she said.

I knew what she meant. She and my dad had “separated” in 2003. Before there was an eminent certainty about the end of her marriage, my mom and I had talked. I found her alone in the living room one night; my dad was away on business and my brother and I had been put to bed hours earlier.

We began with a simple exchange about the phone conversation I had overheard. She had received advice from an old friend– with whom she hadn’t spoken for almost 10 years– who had recently divorced her husband of 15 years. “Are you guys gonna get divorced?” I’d said to my mom while starring at my feet. I said it through uncontrollable laughter to keep myself from breaking down but when I looked up, she had already started crying, and the only answer she could give me was, “I don’t know.”

We cried together, and I could tell it was the first time “divorce” had been said. Certainly my mom knew where her relationship was heading, but it’s a self-realizing, hollow moment when your child asks “divorce?”

My mom had told me everything that night. It was a no-holds-barred, dirty-laundry-type scene of question and answer; things a thirteen-year-old didn’t need to know, but needed to hear for his mother’s sake. I had formed opinions and alliances, and I could never look at my father in the same way. I sympathized with my mom, and in turn, became her emotional rock.

It took a few months after that late night in the living room for my parents to “separate.” My brother and I were told in the living room on a cold December night, and in the morning my dad moved out. The next five years were a montage of court appeals, mediators, nasty emails, and a daily commute between parents.

On this Tuesday, as we pulled into the parking lot of my red-brick high school, all that could be over.

A settlement that took five long, painful years to draw up was now on the verge of being signed. My mom was excited, but understandably reserved. My parents agreed on nothing, in spite of each other, and she was running through reasons for him not to sign it. Wrong color ink, wrong day of the week, wrong font on the pages of the document, wrong people in the room watching the signature take place; all viable options for my procrastination-prone father.

“Have a good day,” she said, as we pulled up to the curb. “Don’t forget you have your driving lesson today.”

My driving instructor, Harold, was waiting for me in the parking lot when I got out of class. He stood tall next to a red sedan that had one of those pizza delivery signs that could not have made it more obvious that I was a novice driver. There was a cherry tobacco smell that followed Harold and consequently enveloped the car.

It occurred to me, while buckling my first driver-side-seatbelt, that my mom had probably dropped me off that morning because she realized it was one of the last chances she’d have. Harold’s car was going to take me where I wanted to go. I needed a night without a parental chaperone. High school was about breaking free from virgin chains, and burning rubber through the finish-line of childhood. I couldn’t burn rubber through anything with my mom in the front seat.

To get to the housing development a few miles from my high school, I needed to follow the main road straight, make a right past the hospital, then make a left into the complexes. It was a simple enough route, and we’d be home by five, Harold said. I waited for a clear gap to merge onto the Boulevard, the main road that connected the North and South end of my town. It’s a straight road with a lake on the left (depending on which way you’re going), and McMansions on the right, highlighted by a few churches. There wasn’t anything new to see, and that allowed me to focus on the road. Cars were passing me and riding my ass all the way to our first turn.

“Alright, turn on your signal, flick the left bar up, and accelerate through the turn,” Harold said as the hospital came into view to the right of the car. I swerved through the turn and skipped the car out of the bend as we sped past the hospital.

My mom texted me as we approached the turn into the housing complexes and Harold scolded me for having my phone on while driving. He thrust into a story about his days as a highway cop for the state of New Jersey.

“I’ll tell ya, I seen some things out there,” he said. “Most of them preventable. There’s nothin’ like telling a mother her son’s died.”

I braked and signaled as Harold continued on about cell phone crashes, drunk drivers and reckless speeding. I hadn’t looked in the rear-view mirror since entering the car, and was more concerned with the way I looked to my classmates when I made the lonely walk to Harold and my pizza boy car.

As I rolled the wheel in my hands and meandered into the complexes, a woman (who had been driving behind me for the 300 feet I’d been on the scenic road) in a silver Toyota, smashed into the front end of Harold’s little red car, ripping out a headlight and leaving the grill in pieces on the street as I tried to make a simple left turn. It was something that left me in a tunnel-vision, twilight zone-like state that Harold woke me out of.

“Okay, just turn off the car, are you okay? Are you alright, kid?” he said as I shook out of my daze. The woman passed me over a double-yellow-line; a  clear violation that jarred the car and shock adrenaline into my veins. She carried momentum about 400 feet down the road, then backed up and parked next to my busted car, to make it look like she hadn’t been speeding; at least that was Harold’s explanation.

“I’ve seen this shit a hundred times,” he said. “They’ll back it up to make it look like their speed didn’t cause it.”

The woman and my instructor had a tiff in the middle of the street. A few cars passed us, as I sat in the driver seat of the now mangled car, waiting for instruction.

“Are you okay?” a woman asked as she passed me, just as the Hispanic woman that Harold was talking to had, minutes ago.

“Yeah, thank you,” I said, embarrassed. Harold assured me it wasn’t my fault and called my Mom.The conversation was short and to the point. Through Harold’s gravelly, smoker’s voiced explanation of the accident, I heard my Mom screaming into the phone.

“I don’t give a fuck about your car! Is my son okay!”

Harold drove me back to my house in the tattered red sedan that now had a front fender that scratched and scraped the pavement, acting as a backup emergency break if needed.

My mom saw us pull up, and she met me with a hug before I got to our front door.

“Are you okay?” she said, apron on with a dish towel over her shoulder.

“Well, hurry in,” she said. “I’m making dinner.”

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Owen A. Macleod – I am a Sophomore English major at Coastal Carolina University. I have bee published in The Folly Current and also write frequently for Bleacher Report. I write about things that happen in my life and try to form a narrative with them and make sense of them through that narrative.