Fast and Furious, Family Style

No no no no no no no no…

He looks under both of the front seats, slithering among the fermenting raisins and chunks of cereal bars. It’s not under the floormats…not wedged between the seat and the door…not under the moving blanket in the back of the van.

He picks up a small wooden toy car and pauses. He feels he has never seen it before. He pockets a worn dime and tosses the car toward the back of the van.  Then once more to the floorboards.

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

He stands, encrusted in filth.

“FUCK!!”

He looks around for neighbors’ open windows, then back at the ransacked van.  He hisses under his breath.

“No. Fucking. WAY!!”

He slams the sliding door.

In four steps he’s around the front of the van and in the driver’s seat.  The lever drops to “D” before he has the door closed.

ding. Fasten your seat belt.

He wheels the rig around in a tight U-turn.  Asphalt loosened from the midday sun shotguns from under the tires, peppers the door panels.

DING. Fasten your seat belt!

“All right, all right!” He fumbles with the belt.

DING! FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT, ASSHOLE!!

“It’s fucking fastened already!  Shut up!”   He gets it snapped by the time he reaches the stop sign.

“Come on, come on…”

An old lady in a Buick Century creeps through the intersection.  She waves as she rolls past.  It’s Helen from two doors down.  He forces a clenched smile and peels his fingers off the steering wheel, raising them in greeting.   “C’mon, you old biddy…don’t die in the middle of the intersection,” he says through grinding teeth.

As soon as Helen is far enough through the intersection for him to swing around to the left, he stabs the accelerator and doesn’t let up until the bottom of the hill, where he rolls through the next stop sign, scraping the front suspension on the ground as the road levels out.

Then it’s up the steep hill on the other side of the intersection.

“C’mon, you old heap!” He rocks back and forth, urging the van up the grade.

At the top of the hill is the 5-way intersection.  Always bad news.

Only one other car there.  A silver Lexus to his left.  He comes to a full stop. And waits.

Come on, lady…c’mon…

She eases out into the intersection.  And starts…turning…right…

What th…

He flips her off with one hand while mashing down on the window button with the other until his fingernail turns red.

“USE YOUR FUCKING TURN SIGNAL, ASSFUCK!!”

The driver of the Lexus cowers.  He stomps the gas.

A small voice comes from behind him: “Use-a fahkha singing, ahsfahkh!”

Oh shit.

“Hey, kiddos,” he singsongs.  “What are you doing?”

“Ahsfahkh ahsfahkh ahsfahkh…”

“Hey!  We’re just going back to the playground for a minute, okay?  And then we’ll eat lunch! Yay! Lunch!”

“Ahsfahkh!!”

And from behind the passenger’s seat, the bell tones of the other toddler’s laughter.

“Ahsfahkh ahsfahkh ahsfahkh…” she repeats, to the delight of her sister.

“Ha ha ha.  Heh heh. Heh.  Hey! Let’s sing ABCs!  Huh?  ABCs?  Let’s go guys!  A-B-C-D…”

“A-B-C-E-G-ahsfahkh-ahsfahkh-ahsfahkh…”

He slows the van as he descends into the cul-de-sac, scanning the road ahead.  There’s only one vehicle, a white pickup, parked where an hour before there had been minivans and SUVs wedged bumper-to-grille.

Lunchtime has come and gone, and naptime is almost upon them.

Then he sees it.

At first, it could be anything.  A wad of paper, a milk carton, a dead squirrel.

As he slows to a stop in the middle of the street, the engine of the minivan panting like a racehorse, it becomes unmistakable: a child’s shoe resting against the curb.

But not just any shoe.  A Stride Rite tennis shoe that his wife had picked up at a the baby swap meet months before.  She had only paid $5.00 for the pair–barely used and in mint condition–and that triumph made them even more valuable than if she had paid their retail price of $45.00.

He had been losing shoes lately.  Or allowing the kids to lose them.  Being complicit in their loss, in any case.  A pair of sport sandals at the playground.  A pair of flip-flops at the zoo.  She said he was distracted, didn’t get enough sleep.  It wasn’t just the shoes, she said.  He was like a zombie half the time.

But as much as he stared at the shoes, marked their location whenever they left the feet of the children, counted them whenever they got in or out of a car, they managed to slip away.

Why did it have to be shoes, of all things?  Why couldn’t the kids lose shirts or hats on his watch?  His wife loved shoes like oxygen, like food, like her children.

He stuffed the shoe in the diaper bag, and then crammed in the other three shoes the twins had taken off while at the playground, and zipped it shut.  Then he opened the bag, counted the shoes–one, two, three, four–and zipped the bag again.

Once home, with the kids and all their shoes safely in the house, he ran to the bathroom and took the piss that had turned his bladder into an angry supernova more than an hour earlier.