All Wound Up by Stephanie Pearl–McPhee Read Free Book Online Page B

was able to make, in wedging the truck ever more deeply between the garage and pole.
    Every inch he convinced the truck to make smashed the sides of the truck in a little more, and by the time he called me, he was not only entirely and hopelessly stuck, he had smashed up the truck real good and had reconciled himself to the fact that any solution at all was going to involve ripping the mirrors off and further demolishing the sides of the thing. (Which, it turns out, he preferred to wrecking the side of his parents’ garage, because even at forty years of age, wrecking your dad’s stuff is A Big Deal.)
    He couldn’t ask his parents for help because he felt strongly that it would be best if they didn’t see this, for the sake of the parent/child relationship and because he had only recently convinced them that he was the sort of adult who would never be in this fix. To ice the cake, and just to make sure that this event reached catastrophic proportions, the truck, jammed diagonally as it was, had the entire alley blocked so that nobody in the whole neighborhood could get their cars in or out when daytime came and they all tried to go to work or school. He was right. I didn’t believe it, and It Was Bad.
    Me: “Dude.”
    Joe: “Exactly. You gotta come over here.”
    Me: “Okay. Walk over and get me and we’ll go back together. I’ll try to rock it and you can push it.”
    Joe said nothing. The silence was deafening. Joe is the sort of man who would never have me walk a neighborhood alone in the night, and I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t already on his way. Was he too frustrated? Was he too upset?
    Me: “Honey?”
    Joe said nothing. I heard him sigh.
    Me: “Honey?”
    Joe: “Steph. You don’t understand.”
    Me: “Sure I do. Truck stuck. Very Bad. What aren’t you telling me?”
    Joe: “Steph. Think about it.”
    Me: “….”
    Joe: “Steph. The truck is wedged between the pole and the garage.”
    Me: “Got it.”
    Joe: “I don’t think you do.”
    I waited and tried to figure it out. Obviously I was missing something, but I couldn’t think what it was. Joe gave me a few minutes, and then he said it.
    Joe: “Honey… The truck is stuck between the garage and the pole. I can’t come get you. I can’t open the doors.”
    This finished me. Entirely. I’d managed to hold it together until then, but that did it. The man had somehow gotten his truck wedged in an impossible situation, and not only had things gone from bad to worse, minute by minute, but that whole time, for the hour that he’d been trying to find a way out of it, he had been trapped in the truck and avoided telling me.
    I collapsed on the floor, practically laughing myself sick. I kept laughing as I pulled on my boots, coat, and mittens. I kept laughing as I jogged the five minutes over to his parents’. I’d almost got a hold of myself as I rounded the corner to the alley, but dissolved helplessly again when I saw him. Truck wedged, sides deeply lacerated, mirrors askew, deep holes dug into the dirt and snow beneath it, with my husband sitting patiently, trapped in the dark. (For some reason, he wasn’t laughing much.)
    I shoved the truck hard while he rocked it, and somehow we managed to get it out of the rut it had dug so he could finally back up, scraping what was left of the paint off as we went. (We did not hit the BMW.) I came around and joined him in the truck, and we began to drive silently home. As we rounded the corner and he slowed the pickup, it shuddered a little and made a new noise, another variation on an automotive death rattle, sort of a “urrrrhhhhgggg,” and it lurched around a bit. I looked at Joe. He looked ahead. We drove. At the stop sign we slowed again, and the truck repeated its mechanical-sea-cow-with-indigestion noise, and this time I asked Joe when that started. “At the thirty minutes stuck mark,” he replied, and we drove on.
    We got home, parked, and walked together quietly toward the house, and