Nothing Too Serious
by Suzanne Grove
The reversal came after three vehicles blinked their warning—after Nick and Marcy crested the ridge to find the cruisers’ familiar primary colors sending their patterns ghostlike into the low ceiling of fog on the mountain’s eastern side. Dusk had come on like the neon violet of a fish tank’s LED lights, and when Nick hit the gear shift to send them backwards, Marcy imagined them beneath a dome, swimming.
“Checkpoint?” she asked.
“Doesn’t look like it. An accident, maybe.”
They were five exits from home, alone now on the four lanes of Route 28, save for a couple cars some five-hundred yards behind them and the police vehicles one exit ahead. In the rear of the cabin, their two dogs wobbled on the seat, their claws digging hard into the swath of leather.
Nick hit the brake, placed the car in drive, and maneuvered off the highway onto a thin black slab of county road. PA-286. Neglected in all seasons and punctuated by the carcasses of deer. Ten miles of trailers then a handful of custom luxury estates on the hill. Craters full of stagnant water and crumbling concrete. The ivy-covered sign for Delmonico’s Inn, defunct and rusted.
Marcy reached back to scratch the bristle beneath each dog’s chin. “We need gas. You know we’d be fine if you weren’t high. Always.”
“Weed’s legal in McGovern County.”
“We’re not in McGovern County anymore. And it’s not legal anywhere if you’re high while driving.”
They’d been visiting his parents, Nick’s temper lulled by the constant compliments his mother purred into his ear, by the whole chicken roasted in the Dutch oven, by the buttery, bourbon scent of his father’s beard oil. One whole weekend every single month.
“Don’t be a nag.” Nick flicked his tongue over his white veneers, sucked on the end of his vape pen. He reached out as if moving to hold her hand but instead gripped her wrist, pushing each fingernail into the skin. “There’s that station at the bottom of the hill.”
“It’s just a convenience store now. No gas.”
Nick threw his eyes at her, wound down the window, and sunk into his seat, all six-foot-five tucked beneath the truck’s roof. When she first saw him standing at the head of her classroom, the uncle of one of her students, she thought of men who played rugby. All that heft, the thickness of his thighs. Career day. An architect, he brought his drafting supplies, renderings and templates and blades. His firm had just won the bid for the hospital remodel.
He pulled around next to an old pump while a man in jeans and a Nike sweatshirt waved at them. It was June, humid, and he was sweating along his hairline, his sleeves pulled up against the dark hair on his forearms.
“Nice truck,” the man said.
“Diesel. 3500.”
“Truly, a beauty.” The man rested an arm over the old pump. “Sorry, no gas here.”
Nick winced.
Marcy only wanted to get home. She let the word sit in the center of her tongue, felt the weight of it as she pushed it against the backs of her teeth. A contemporary remodel of a McMansion from the 90s. Five acres, the Viking range, the Sub-Zero fridge. A sauna in the basement. But Marcy only cared that she had the guest room to herself. She slept there most nights with the two shepherds. Nick stayed up late, switching from pot to beer to the tiny, sugared sleeping gummies he inhaled in excess.
They pulled away. On the passenger’s side, State Game Lands undulated in the same repetitive pattern of pines. A VFW tucked behind a laundromat. The Croatian Club and Italian Club. Nick accelerated through a single-lane tunnel, and Marcy said nothing then thought of the dogs and said slow down.
But Nick whipped them down a dirt road. “I have to piss.”
“We’re only 15 minutes away.”
“Stop being controlling. It’s not healthy.” When he reached out this time, he flicked her cheek then yanked on her hair. She thought of telling people about these things. But what would she say? He pinches me like a brother might pinch his sister. He pulls my hair like a baby reaching while at the breast. She imagined a reaction of laughter.
He pulled into the sportsmen’s club. He’d leave her sit with the dogs in the heat while he chatted, drank. He’d done it before. This time, he took the fob but forgot about the valet key in the glove compartment.
She pet the dogs, watched him through the wall of windows, waited.
When he moved towards the restrooms, she inserted the key and drove, fast.
She backtracked, slowed past the gas station, where the man was still out front talking now to someone with an energy drink and bag of chips tucked under his arm, and continued north beyond the turn back onto PA-286. She’d go five miles and get back onto Route 28 at the ramp where the police had been.
Once there, she saw what had occurred: a four-car ordeal but nothing too serious. A teenage boy who looked regretful as he leaned against the guardrail. Three officers now, talking and smiling.
She thought about what she might say to them. Look out for a tall man heavy with muscle barreling this way in the borrowed car of a friend. He’s coming after me. She’d give one of these men all the details.
She hesitated, ogling the accident like anyone might, when one of the officers caught her eye. She watched him notice the dogs, watched the edge of his cheek lift, a happy little look on his face. And then she imaged being the kind of person who might assume a man is a good man because he likes dogs.
But she wasn’t that kind of person.
She looked away, reentered slowly.
She drove beyond the exit towards home, kept going.
Suzanne Grove is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and received the J. Stanton Carson Grant for Excellence in Writing. Her fiction and poetry appear or are forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, Barren Magazine, The Carolina Quarterly, No Tokens, Okay Donkey, The Penn Review, Porter House Review, Raleigh Review, Rust + Moth, XRAY, and elsewhere. She has been a flash fiction finalist with SmokeLong Quarterly and received honorable mention for her fiction appearing on Farrar, Straus, & Giroux's Work in Progress website. She currently serves as the associate editor for CRAFT and resides in Pittsburgh, PA.
