The Wedgy Steering Wheel

In our early days of marriage, when I was big with our first baby and only seventeen-years-old, I drove down the road happy as could be.

The steering wheel had moved at least a foot towards me in the last month or so, but I raised it a notch or three, after ratcheting the seat back as far as it could go, and continued on my merry way, convinced that we needed to get some tinting on the windows since the steering wheel was shrinking.

Khan was riding beside me after a short argument about the merits of me being a passenger, in which, I won as I held the keys and was hard to budge.

We drove down the road and I hummed a little tune finishing the song from the turned-off radio that Mr. Grumpy had clicked off. Something was said about distractions and I incorporated those words into the song I began to sing when I couldn’t remember the words.

We were stopped at a light and I brought out the map. We were looking for a place, (obviously, eh?), and I checked our route since the area was unfamiliar and Khan’s inner GPS was receiving interference from his mood and from the fact that it hadn’t been invented yet.

I was in the lane next to the left-hand turn lane and was sitting behind a truck with one of those HUGE ball hitches that stick out about the length of a full-grown man’s arm.

I was reading the map and saw peripherally that the light had turned green. I swooped the map into the back seat and pushed the accelerator.

BAM!

Evidently, the left-hand turn lane gets to go first and I wound up goring our radiator on the back of the obscenely long hitch.

A woman piles out of her truck and asks if anyone is hurt and I un-wedge myself from out of my seat and assure her we’re fine.

She begins throwing broken glass into the bed of her truck and informs us that she’s uninsured and that really, as long as no one was hurt, she needed to go and it was after all, my fault.

Before I know it, she’s gone like a shot and Khan is pushing our car to a restaurant parking lot. He hasn’t spoken a word as of yet and I fiddle with my belly button that keeps popping out from under my shirt. I tug down on the shirt and sit down on the curb in an impressive acrobatic move.

He calls my dad to come get us, since he’s the closest victim, I mean family, and I watch as Khan comes around the corner to sit down beside me.

Khan: You’re a stubborn woman, you know that?

I say nothing. I poke my belly out further to profile my shape and hopefully draw sympathy.

Khan: You’re too big to drive. You scared me.

Me: You? You’re never scared.

He shakes his head at me and helps me stand up. “Might as well get something to eat, it’s going to be a while before your dad gets here.”

Food is irresistible to me at this stage in my pregnancy. I beat him to the door through a half-hop, half-waddle move that would do a quarterback, with a broken leg, proud.

Later on that evening, I peeked out from my mostly-shut eyelids and watched as he hid my car keys. I just smiled and went to sleep feeling very, very loved.

Good thing I’ve grown up a lot since then, eh? He’s only had to hide my keys a couple of more times after that.

If you’ve got a moment, voting is going on for the best opening sentence of NaNoWriMo novels. Winners will be announced November 12th!

Stuart Nager and Marie Frizelle, (wonderful victims regulars on here), are both in the finals!

Wrimosftw Voting <— clicky

Stuart’s is: “You do know… I’d only eat you if I had to.”

and

Marie’s is:  A few wobbles of the crooked wheel on the cart and she was in the meat section, cruising past pork ribs, chicken breasts, frozen shrimp, when suddenly the answer was right in front of her, shrink wrap

Yay!