a road trip story
Author: Nathalia
Rating: PG-13
Challenge:
Blue Raspberry #19 - falling apart
Honeydew #24 - countdown
Extras / Toppings: malt (Mod Appreciation: A.P. Roberts: picture)
Word Count: 506
Story: Misfits
Summary: Wes and Lynn have a bit of car trouble on their road trip.
Notes: This is nothing but an excuse for banter. I think I got carried away and forgot about the malt prompt while writing.
They had left the dingy motel with the broken shower and the broken locks early in the morning; put the few things they had brought into the dusty, battered Ford Explorer and hit the road with Lynn driving. Not because Wes hadn’t wanted to but because Lynn had managed to convince him that reading the map was just as important as driving which of course was a lie but Wes had believed it.
It was a hot, sunny day and they continued egging the car’s air conditioning on to make it perform at new heights it had not known it was capable of.
“We should have gotten a newer car,” Wes sighed in the passenger seat, wiping his forehead with his arm. He had discarded the hat that now lay on the backseat but that was the only thing that had changed about him since they had left Boston.
“If I remember correctly, you wanted some expensive German SUV that someone would have stolen at the first motel we spent the night in,” Lynn pointed out, drumming on the steering wheel.
She was worried that the air conditioning would give up its fight against the heat far too soon and then they’d have to stop their trip for a while. There was no way the two of them would be able to spend the day in the car if it wasn’t cooled. They were already at each other’s throats when they were in a good mood; she didn’t want to imagine how it would be if they were both in a bad mood, sweaty and impatient.
“Well, then our problem would have been a stolen car, not an unbearably hot one,” Wes shot back and took a big gulp from the bottle of what had once been cold water. By now it was closer to boiling than to its initial temperature.
“The next garage should be somewhere nearby from the signs I’ve been seeing,” Lynn informed Wes, ignoring his last comment. “I bet it’s cool there and we can stay till some mechanic fixes the air conditioning.”
“Why don’t you fix it?” Wes asked slyly poking the ventilation shafts that were barely emitting any cold air anymore. “I mean, you keep telling me that you should drive and pick the car and everything because you are a car expert and trained mechanic. You even brought a huge bag of tools. Why don’t you make it work again?”
Lynn had been afraid that this question would come up sooner or later.
“There is a difference between an air condition and a car. The air condition is in the car but it’s not my field of expertise,” she explained even though she had fixed car ventilations before, just never alone. There was no need for Wes to find out.
“I can take care of all farm animals in their completeness, not just their legs or heads or something. I win,” Wes informed Lynn, then pointed to a large sign that said Pertwickle Garage. “I think we need to go there.”