My husband and I crawl along the 101 northbound on our way to see author David Sedaris read at UCLA. We treated ourselves to events like this before Mom descended into dementia. But lately, my cell phone has me jumping, and Mom’s facility doesn’t call to share good news. They’ll tell me Mom fell again, or she’s hit a nurse, or one shoe has wandered away, and I’ll reroute to the hospital, her facility, the shoe store. Despite these hazards, my husband and I have gambled on tonight’s tickets. The interchange ahead is backed up, and now we’re stopped, stuck between the exits for Van Nuys and Sepulveda. But I’m unconcerned because we left home early, and I am congratulating myself on this when we are rear-ended.
smasho-crasho
The other driver looks young and pretty in her out of state driver’s license picture. She doesn’t produce proof of insurance or registration, offering instead a convoluted story and a scribbled phone number. I recognize this as fishy, but if we don’t wrap this up quickly, my husband and I are going to blow the 8:00 curtain, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss David Sedaris for anything other than a Momergency. So, we leave the scene, and I watch the performance with a bag of ice on my neck, and only later do I learn the driver’s phone number is bogus. This discovery is a prelude to an insurance shitshow, but what I worry about most is the car, getting the car back. “My mother has dementia. She relies on me, so I need the car soon,” I tell the collision estimator. “Please.”
it’s my nerves
The estimator has kind eyes, and the body shop moves heaven and earth to return my subcompact, which is gleaming and flawless when, almost three months to the day, my husband and I find ourselves stopped again on the 101 northbound between Van Nuys and Sepulveda. I glance in the rearview mirror and say, “Oh shit,” because a sedan is barreling toward us. The driver is apologetic as we survey the damage, worse this time, while I say, “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it.” And when I return to the same body shop, I don’t mention my mother or needing the car quickly, because this time the collision estimator’s eyes are hard. I am mortified because this is not a scam. This is all I can salvage as Mom and I collide.
that shatter
Tracy Royce is a writer and poet living in Southern California. Her work appears in / is forthcoming in Blink-Ink, contemporary haibun online, Does It Have Pockets?, Frogpond, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere.