To this day I still don’t know which of them initiated it. Or if either of them suspected the other would do what they did.

I was eight, they were in their thirties, the car was on the side of the road halfway between our house and my Grandmas. Were were two hours north of home.

Smoke pouring out from under the hood was the first sign something was wrong. Seconds later the loud clanking noise followed, then that of metal grinding on metal as my dad pulled off onto the shoulder. As usual my father became instantly aggravated. My mom tried to ask him a question and before she was even finished he snapped at her. ‘I don’t know’ he said, kicking open the door stepping out and slamming it shut.

A few nights before the trip my parents had a fight. A big fight. Things were said that, at the time, I didn’t understand what they meant and it almost came to blows before my father left the house that night. I look back now and I’m sort of glad that I didn’t know what they were saying and that I only saw what little of it I did. When I heard the shouting and the words that I didn’t know the meaning of, I got scared.  I could tell by how they were spoken they were meant to harm. But I do wish that I had seen and been able to understand everything else that was coming. It would have made dealing with it a bit easier, if there is an easy way to deal with such a thing.

My dad walked to the front of the car and popped the hood.  A huge cloud of steam and smoke rose up, blotting out the hot mid-day sun for a few seconds. We were on our way to stay with my grandma for a week or two as we did every summer. This summer, we’d never really make it, not all together, and this would be the last summer for almost a half dozen years that we would make the trip. We being my mother and me.

“Is is anything you can fix,” my mother asked in a tone that I hadn’t ever heard before. it was a different kind of question, almost as if she was talking about something else.

“Not without tools.”

“Don’t you have any?”