Trip
When my wife told me she was pregnant, she kept jerking her head like she was trying to deny it. She didn’t give me a chance to speak. She hurled herself out of the house yanking her suitcase behind her and kicked the front door shut. I was already uncomfortable about this trip, so I don’t know what the hell I’m feeling now.
Laura sits huddled far away from me, clenched against the car door with her shoulders bent inward, but she has no problem launching herself alive whenever her brother addresses her. She thrusts herself forward and torques her hands as if wishing she could hand-deliver him her words. I’m always surprised by this behavior and yet I shouldn’t be. She spends hours talking to her brother on the phone after work, sitting in her car in the driveway with her elbow angled out the window as if on a joyride. When she finally comes in she goes straight to making dinner, and if I’m stressed, or anxious, or simply want to feel the close warmth of my wife after the long cold chaos of a courtroom trial, she says she needs to finish making dinner. On the couch she slaps on the television and we watch Family Feud as we chew our lasagna. After that she says she’s too tired to do anything physical, and then cleans up the kitchen, walks the dogs, does yoga, and talks again to her brother outside in the driveway, running her palm across the hood of her Dodge Charger, the slightest tease of a smile to her lips.
Reflecting on all this still makes me feel foolish. Laura says I have a nasty, unfair habit of overanalyzing and sometimes I think she isn’t wrong. Family is important, I know that. Their father had left them early, likely for another woman but no one knew for certain, and their mother had apparently been abusive, so all they had really was each other. My mother’s been gone not one year, and I still feel trapped up in a whirlwind, lurched and whirled and throttled, never able it seems to find a clear view or firm grip of anything.
Up front my sister-in-law turns in her seat, her eyes following something out the window. “God,” she says. “I could go for some Dunkin’ Donuts right now.”
In the rearview Brad’s eyes shift toward Laura and Laura, of course, jumps forward, her eyes sparkling with urgent yearning. “Krispy Kreme,” Brad says, and his right eye shuts, pauses, then opens.
Laura touches her fingers to the bend of her neck. I stare at her caressing her skin. She glances at me and stops. The vents are pumping chilled air and yet I feel scorched.
“That’s me,” my wife giggles suddenly, like a softly purred hum.
My blood moves like slush, taking things within me forever to collaborate. My jaw is working, and then my mouth is moving, and then I realize I am asking, “What do you mean, that’s you?”
“She used to eat so many Krispy Kreme donuts,” Brad says quickly, “that I called her that.” His eyes gleam bright sapphire green in the rearview. “Krispy…Kreme.”
He says the second word through a small nudge of air that might as well be a moan.
Or is all this overanalyzing, too? Have I overanalyzed so many times that I forget how to properly analyze without compromising something?
My wife keeps giggling as two fingers pull her hair out past her nose. When they draw to the ends of her hair, instead of dropping her hand, she keeps it there, letting golden threads of hair float and wave between her fingers.
My wife is imagining something very firm and clear in her mind and that is not overanalyzing.
Jill swivels around and shoots her eyes into mine, a very particular frown screwing up her face, and I immediately point my eyes out my window, trying to shove back down what her frown is excavating from my memory. I want to tell her it has no relevance, it means nothing, that Saturday evening when Jill and I went to the Piggy Wiggly for beer and I forgot my wallet, and opening the front door I saw in the kitchen Brad and Laura leap away from each other, their faces a shade of red I told myself was normal from bending over and examining the rotisserie chicken in the oven. It was insignificant, how still and rigid and tensed they kept their eyes fixated on the wall, as if nothing, nothing at all, could be detected if they simply did not move.
“Yum, yum, yum,” Brad says, and smacks his huge, disgusting lips.
This must be the magic trick, this must be what had to be accomplished before anything else could proceed, because now his eyes unstick from their spot in the rearview and center back on the road, his fingers dancing along the steering wheel as if in sync to his own exuberant heartbeat.
Jill glares at her husband, his dancing fingers, and then she makes a face I have to turn my head from.
The road goes on. That’s the thing about this goddamn road. It goes on and on and on, the trees on either side proliferating with the growing dark of night, closing us in. Disney World might as well be spiraling away into oblivion. Disney World, where I met Laura at a lemonade stand and I thought from the way she was acting was buying lemonade for her boyfriend that stood next to her but who was actually her brother. Disney World, where Brad suggested we celebrate Christmas vacation. Disney World, where the magic happens.
I need to ask Brad where exactly we are, but I don’t want to overanalyze his answer. I can’t even remember how long we’ve been on this road. I guess I’ve never realized until now how terrifying it is to imagine how much longer we have to go.
James Hartman’s fiction appears in Blue Fifth Review, December, Raleigh Review, Gris-Gris, and New World Writing, among others both online and in print. His story, “A Junior Whopper, Please, With Cheese,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and his story, “The Range of Acceptability,” was an Honorable Mention in New Millennium’s 50th Annual Flash Fiction Award. He lives in York, Pennsylvania.