MamaKat’s Writing Prompt: Last week you chose a 6 word memoir to share…this week elaborate. Tell us the story or thought process behind the sentence you wrote.
So last week, I *mentioned* that I may have been responsible for wrecking my husband’s Ford Mustang. This week, I’ll elaborate a little bit.
This was a silver 2006 Ford Mustang that, in hindsight, was not our brightest purchase. It was at that time, however, still a beloved mistake that we didn’t yet regret. My husband loved that car. Not as much as his Jeep, of course, but an awful lot all the same.
He’d spend hours making sure it was clean, waxed and detailed. By himself, since no one else could do it just right, of course. He replaced the stock hood the car came with, with a snazzy light-weight carbon fiber hood. You know. For all that racing he did with it.
I have to admit that, while my love of the Ford Mustang was not quite as fanatical, I did enjoy sliding behind the wheel of it every chance I got. It was fast. It was smooth. And it was so much fun to drive.
On September 7th, I gave birth to one large-headed, hairy little devil that is currently known as Truck. Three weeks later, my sister flew out to help us make a cross-country move from California to Wisconsin.
My husband drove the Ford F150, towing his Jeep behind him. My sister and I had the Ford Mustang. We bought a pair of walkie talkies so we could keep in touch on the road. Because the cell reception was hit and miss. I was not at all upset to be driving the Ford Mustang on a cross-country road trip.
We were at the end of our trip when the accident happened. I had switched off my sister, because I was dead tired. My son had decided that he hated his car seat, crying almost non-stop from day one, and we had spent the night at a truck stop in an effort to lose as little time as possible. I fell asleep while my sister was driving, with one hand still trying to comfort my crying son.
After this semi-refreshing nap, we switched places again. And I was feeling great. We were less than 8 hours from our goal. We came to an intersection.
This was not just an intersection. This was the mother of all intersections. Two four lane highways intersected. That’s 8 lanes, for those of us who have issues with math. Controlling the traffic, for all 8 lines, were STOP SIGNS.
My husband pulled up to the stop sign first. My walkie talkie squawked as he pulled through, “I think we should keep going, and not stop tonight. We’re almost there!” I pull up to the stop sign, and look both ways. At all eight lanes of effing traffic.
I pull out, and depress the walkie talkie button. And all my husband hears is me, saying, “Yeah, oka…oh fuck.”
I had hit someone.
Just barely.
I clipped his back bumper with my front passenger fender, and scraped my door against the back end of his car. Both cars were drivable, thankfully. And the other driver never filed a claim against my insurance company, even more thankfully. But, oh, the look in my husband’s eyes.
The carbon fiber hood was junk. And he had just reached the end of his military enlistment. We were moving back home to Wisconsin, into his mother’s house, with no solid start date for his job (that was a whole different clusterfuck of a story). Coming up with the deductible to have the Ford Mustang fixed wasn’t really feasible.
We had kept the stock hood, so we were able to replace the carbon fiber hood and drive the car.
And, until the day we finally got rid of that Ford Mustang, the passenger side of the car looked completely destroyed.
(As did the driver’s side door, from when I slid on the ice, and scraped the door against a parked trailer in the yard. But the car was still drivable. Until my husband hit a turkey with the windshield. At that point, we gave up and parked the car. Which was CLEARLY cursed or something.)
Thankfully, my husband doesn’t bring up what happened to the car TOO often, or he’d win a lot more arguments.
xoxo
Jen ThePsychobabble
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