“Well, I am a people person looking to expand out of her comfort zone,” I said in my best interview voice.
“What would you say are your greatest skills?” faux interviewer Joey asked.
I took a moment for a deliberate pause to make the response sound less rehearsed. “I’m punctual,”— unless I was having car trouble— “organized, and a fast learner.” All of that was true, if not the whole truth.
“Why did you leave your last position?” I asked in my detached interviewer tone.
The best technique for this loaded question. A classic serpentine followed by a bob and weave. “Foodservice isn’t something I am passionate about. I’m looking for a place to shine.”
My gaze cut to the rearview mirror and I nodded at the professional me. Nailed the sucker.
“Do you have any children?” I asked myself and, even knowing it was coming, couldn’t stifle the flinch.
Damn it. That particular question popped up often. I needed to come up with a good way to answer it. To prospective employers, my single status meant my day wouldn’t be interrupted by phone calls from schools or requests to leave early for dance recitals or soccer practice. To me, it always felt like admitting failure. I’d intended to have kids. And a husband. And a gold medal. Those things just weren’t in the cards I’d been dealt though. What I had instead was crap luck. A bum wrist, an ex who probably looked better in a thong than I did, and a penchant for being fired. If you looked up “underachiever” in a dictionary, there would be a duck-faced selfie of me.
The pity party was getting ugly. Time to focus on the road ahead. Literally. Firefly Lane was a couple hundred feet up on the left.
Earl’s left blinker was broken so I rolled the driver’s side window down and stuck my arm out into the chill mountain air. Unnecessary as no one was coming, but the way my luck ran, if I didn’t signal, that would be the moment a cop crested the hill.
The terrain turned steep almost immediately. Earl’s diesel engine rumbled like a locomotive as we chugged ever so slowly uphill. The road narrowed to a single lane which Earl ate up like nobody’s business. I hunched over the wheel, trying to see past the low hanging fir branches that hung even lower with heavy wet snow. The road was pitted with potholes and partially washed out. No signs of utility poles or chimney smoke. As far as I knew, no one lived this far from town. Strange spot for a life coach to set up shop. I hoped he or she wasn’t some kind of hippy woo woo tree hugger that lived in a yurt. Frostbite wouldn’t make for a pleasant working environment.
Then again, the views were incredible. I chanced a glance to my right. Through a gap in the trees there sat a jaw-dropping meadow. Slanted sunlight kissing rolling hills. A waterfall crested downward into an ice-encrusted pool. I couldn’t hear the roar, not over Earl’s grumbling engine, but I could feel the power of it—nature. Raw, untamed, wild. Having lived in the mountains all my life, I’d grown accustomed to breathtaking vistas as just part of the landscape but this was something special.
The trees swallowed the view and I could see the incline crested up ahead. The trees had thinned as well. There was the occasional pop of gravel. I saw two deer darting through the trees and they gave the truck a curious look. No sign of humanity or my potential job interview.
An unexpected bump in the road lifted my ass off the seat. I banged my head on the roof hard enough that I saw stars. Then Earl just…stopped. Like he had been caught in a great big butterfly net. The engine chugged once, twice, and then sputtered its last.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I yelled. I’m not sure to who, maybe the universe. Earl was a behemoth, a beast. His engine was Hulk-smash strong.
And yet it had given up the ghost in the middle of nowhere.
My rotten luck had struck yet again.
Grammy B was going to kick my butt halfway down the mountain.
My suit was ruined. Possibly my fingernails too as I’d been digging around in Earl’s innards, trying to look for the reason why the big engine would have just died like that. No torn hoses, or leaks. No weird steam billowing out. The oil level was fine according to the dipstick. Plenty of gas. Of course, I wasn’t a mechanic but I was putting off the inevitable—calling for a tow for the second time in a day.
Could Georgia’s truck even make it up those series of switchbacks? Only one way to find out.
Not bothering to lower the hood, I used one of my grandpappy’s handkerchiefs that Grammy kept in the glove box to root through my bag and extract my cell.
The face of it was blank. Weird, I didn’t turn it off, did I? I depressed the power bar on the side and waited for the face to light up with a picture of me and Darcy, Margaritas in hand on her last birthday party. Nothing.
“Oh no,” I breathed. “No no no no NO!”
But like Earl’s engine, the battery was kaput. My heart thumped against my chest in a frantic tattoo and for a second, I wondered if I was gonna have a heart attack. That would be just my luck, wouldn’t it? Fired, stranded at the ass-end of nowhere and cardiac arrest? Maybe my luck was trying to do me in.
I gripped the door of the truck and tried to focus on my breathing. “Okay, Joey. Don’t panic. Analyze the situation from a place of reason. Consider your options.”
I could hike back down the hill to the county road and flag down help. People knew me around town. Someone would stop and pick me up. My teeth chattered as I imagined that long, slow, slippery slog. The sun was already going down. No way I could make it before dark.
I could stay inside Earl. He blocked the wind at least. But the temperature was dropping. More snow had been predicted in the overnight forecast. Without heat, I would freeze.
My gaze lifted to the crest of the hill, about a hundred feet ahead. I’d come up the mountain for a job interview. That meant there must be someone up there. A person who presumably had a working vehicle and a functioning phone. Not that my current state was the best first impression for a potential employer. But compared with my other options, there really wasn’t much of a choice.
I abandoned my heels but retrieved my purse and then closed Earl’s hood and turned to tackle the hill. My grimy suit wasn’t the best at cutting the winter gusts or for allowing freedom of movement but at least I had on good hiking boots. The wind tugged hair out of my twist. I swiped a hand over my face to get it out of my eyes, only after which I realized I had just probably smeared grease all over my cheek and forehead. Fan-frigging-tastic.
My breath puffed out in little white clouds as I slogged up the hill. Shouldn’t have had that ice cream in my coffee. Or the second helping of Shepard’s pie the night before. Or the big glass of red wine that I’d had with it.
Holy crap, was I ever out of shape.
“Diet. Starts. First. Thing. Tomorrow,” I huffed as I slogged ever upwards. My Olympic hopeful self would have kicked my middle aged-kiester if she could see my sorry state. I was breathing so hard that I didn’t notice the point when I crested the hill. I did however notice when the road came to an abrupt halt by dead-ending at a massive oak. I paused and took in my surroundings.
“Hello? Is anyone here?” I scanned frantically for any signs of human habitation but nothing. No vehicle, no cute little cottage, or newly finished mansion. At that point, I would have given my left boob for the dreaded yurt.