Detour Vacation — Part Two

The rain had been at it since maybe thirty minutes after Samantha pulled out of the drive.

She didn’t mind it; driving in the rain. It was sort of therapeutic. Except for all the morons driving in the leftmost lane instead of passing. What was even going on?

Samantha sped around the cautious car, tutting along ahead of her. She rolled her window down to yell out of it, getting a face full of mist as she sped down the rainy highway.

“What’s the deal? Is water your secret ingredient? It’s a cup of idiot stirring up right in front of me! Christ!”

Passing the old brightly painted Volkswagen on the right-hand side, she thought about how odd the car looked, almost as if it were driving backward, it was going so slowly.

Samantha knew it was just a trick of the eye and some changing angles, but watching the anachronistic car disappear behind while it still technically chugged along lazily, like a silk scarf floating in the wind. It filled her with a bit of wonder, and thinking about it made her let out a tiny sigh of relief for some reason.

When she retracted her dampened face and rolled the glass back into place, she was slightly less animated and no longer felt the need to scream, though she was no less perturbed by the lack of decorum on the roads. She hated terrible drivers every day, but that wasn’t what had her so worked up.

She couldn’t help being on edge after everything that’d happened with Sandi. She just kept running things over and over in her head. She knew she was in the right, so why did she feel like such garbage over this?

After a good half-hour of silence — well, crying and sniffling could undoubtedly be heard from the bedroom, but silence blanketed the rest of the dwelling — Sandrine finally emerged, only peeking her face out at first.

“Samantha? Hello? Are you here? … tch… Who am I even talking to? And why? I know she’s gone.”

It took all of Sandrine’s willpower not to break down into sobbing tears again. Instead, she grabbed some leftover Chinese food from the fridge. Usually, she’d make them both plates, all of the different dishes served up in equal portions, with fresh rice and a pot of tea.

On this occasion, she dumped her choice of sweet and spicy pork on top of the lo mein, ripped the metal handle out of the sides, and heated the lot in the microwave. After eyeballing the level in the bottle, Sandrine finished off the red wine that had been started earlier in the week, poured a serving and a half into a wine glass, and returned to the bedroom. Leaving the steamed edamame and Samantha’s favorite, the beef and broccoli, untouched.

She carefully dropped items of clothing as she walked back through the bedroom into the en suite bathroom, sipping her wine as she went, a pair of disposable chopsticks poking out the top of her cardboard receptacle. It was their custom to get extras when they got takeout, so they always had some. A single tear slid down her cheek, uncontrolled and unnoticed. Their custom…

She started the bath, setting her mostly full carton of food on the tub’s rim, and got a pair of comfy pajamas out. Blowing her nose for the fiftieth time, she flipped on the television and set it to the evening news so there would be some distracting noise while she soaked, and ate, and mulled things over.

“I am obviously right here; there is no doubt about that. The real question is why Samantha would do something like this. Why make a huge vacation-ruining scene and run off without even attempting to fix things? There must be something more going on.”

Sandrine mused over the news of the latest school shooting, and stock prices almost seamlessly interposed over each other. This was reported by a brightly grinning woman in her late thirties to mid-forties who showed no visible signs of aging or understanding the words she was transmitting.

Sandrine scooted deeper into the bath, setting the food carton back on the tub's edge, letting her hair float in the water around her, stopping at her earlobes, keeping the canal above the danger line. Trying to relax, she focused solely on letting go, but that was no good.

All she kept running through were the likely possibilities for where Samantha went.

The green sign to her right indicated food, fuel, and lodging were all at the next exit. Since Samantha had technically left early, she could stop anywhere and still be ahead of schedule. There had to be something good down here, where there was fast food and houses; surely there must be something better.

Since Sandi wasn’t with her, she could stop literally anywhere, though this random exit off of the California coastal highway wasn’t exactly wowing her. McDonalds? Taco Bell? Those were available all of the time everywhere. Where was the buried hole-in-the-wall gem she was sifting for?

Samantha was finally having the detour vacation she planned for. Just bumping around some little seaside town she didn’t even catch the name of, and for once, it didn’t matter where she was. All that mattered at that particular moment was finding some dinner.

It called to her, through a break in the row of heavily weathered short wood board-sided houses, a taco truck on what appeared to be a thoroughfare filled with businesses. There, she could see folks in work gear of several professions in various states or ordering and eating. Even a few people in business suits took up the two plastic sets of lawn furniture the family had set up in front of the truck.

This was it. She just had to figure out how to get there.

“Ahhh, screw it…”

Samantha was hungry, tired, and emotionally spent; she screeched to a halt, parking the car on the street where she was. Before she made her mad dash, she looked both ways, of course.

“HA!”

Sandrine exclaimed, jutting out of the water like a torpedo. Bath water came sheeting off at the sudden movement, spilling in all directions into her wine, her half-eaten carton of food, onto the floor. Some even got on the counter behind her, traveling like a stealthy snake, moistening her pajamas before she could see or do anything about it.

“NO!”

Leaping into action, Sandrine went for the towel hanging on the closet door, only to kick the wine glass into the front of the toilet, shattering it and splattering red wine across the entire bathroom, rendering it almost entirely impassable.

A single gasping screech escaped her throat as she stood frozen, offending leg hanging in midair, dangling precariously as she watched drops of wine fade into the bath water. Concerned she may have sent shards of glass flying into the tub and unsure if it would be wise to drain glass shards into the plumbing, she was stuck in a feedback loop. Should she drain the tub and work from there, or should she leave the water for now and find another way out?

But what other way out? She finally escaped the circular logic path.

“The Towel!”

Almost falling over, naked, into the shards of paper-thin glass littering the ground in front of her from the force with which she uttered that realization. After gasping, to tighten up her core and save her face from the nightmare that was her once pristine bathroom floor, Sandrine refocused her gaze. All her attention, really, on the towel. She had to get the towel, her pajamas, anything she could lay over the glass and use to get out of the danger zone.

“I will have one of everything, please!”

Samantha said with a huge smile on her still slightly strained face. The soft older woman who took her order looked momentarily surprised, laughed to herself, and then spoke to the cook at the griddle just a few feet away from where she sat in the window. Samantha couldn’t quite hear what she said but hoped it was something along the lines of extra peppers or throw in something special.

It was something like that, as a few items were not posted on the fairly limited menu board. Samantha was still blown away by the inexpensive price and how quickly her order reached her hands. She contemplated taking it to the car, but knew she would get caught up trying to find somewhere to stay if she did that, so instead, just sat at one of the patio tables that had just opened up and tucked in.

They were by far and away the best tacos she had eaten in years. Every meat was juicy and succulent, not to mention piled onto the lightly warmed soft corn tortillas just crisped on the edges. Each morsel of shredded chicken, carne asada, and al pastor was completely saturated in flavor. The onions and peppers were crisp and fresh, barely touching the grill’s sizzling heat. The jalapenos and carrots were spicy, freshly pickled, not from a can.

It was good there was no one here for her to talk to because the only things escaping her mouth right now were dribbles of spicy juices and uncontrolled omm-noms. Usually, Samantha would be embarrassed by the mess she was making, but she had run out of fucks to give.

Once all the napkins and foil wrapping had been disposed of, Samantha pulled out and around the block to a small but clean-looking Motel 6.

“Cheap and close. Is there anything better than that?” Samantha asked to no one in particular as she grabbed her grocery bag filled with clothes out of the back seat.

“Not that I can think of, Hoo Boy!”

Shocked to hear someone answer her, Samantha stood up quickly, slamming the door to her car in the process, unknowingly trapping her shirt when she did so. She was faced with a heavy-set man in his… fifties? It was a little tricky to tell with a full head of blonde hair and a grey mustache. He seemed especially jolly to be checking into a Motel 6 on a Friday night. Samantha looked around but didn’t see anyone else. She wondered if he had a family somewhere around, in the car, or already in a room, or if he was traveling alone.

Almost as if he could read the questions running across her furrowed brow, the man took a half step back and introduced himself quickly.

The sound of glass crunching beneath her thick, absorbent bath towels was both anxiety-inducing and an audible relief since her feet seemed fine. She didn’t want to run across, possibly slipping and causing more mayhem, but Sandrine felt like she was moving in slow motion. Not the beautiful, floaty, catching butterflies in a field of falling flower petals slow motion. More like the strapped to a runaway shopping cart while clowns jump out from behind the trees on fire kind of slow motion.

When she reached the bedroom and spotted a pair of shoes, she put them on first thing. Then, beelined for the bed. Still damp, though mostly drip-dried from how long it took her to get out of the bathroom, Sandrine slipped the shoes right back off and curled up in the bed, getting dry and warm. Unable to cope with the series of increasingly distressing issues having occurred throughout the day. She fell into a fitful sleep.

“I’m Sorry, I should introduce myself. My name’s Sam, Samuel Tankler. I tend to sneak up on people, but it’s quite by accident. When I hear someone talking, I just can’t help talking back. My friends always joke I should have been named Sam Talkler! Bwahhh hahahaha”

Eyes wide, Samantha took a moment to register all that had just been said before bursting out laughing, slapping her knee, and ripping her shirt in the car door.

Expect a part three.

K.B. Silver

You can find me on Substack sending out a weekly newsletter.