Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [102]
The brief sideways collision knocked the driver’s side mirror clean off, but otherwise my car was unscathed. I pulled over. The other driver begged me to settle down, to please stop crying. He insisted his truck wasn’t worth the trouble. It was halfway to the junker already. When I saw the two-foot-long dent that had stripped the paint from his truck, I cried harder. On a scrap of paper I’d found in my purse, we exchanged information quickly. He sped off, leaving a cloud of exhaust in his wake.
In the car, I set my trembling hands on the wheel and tried to make the world stand still.
I bypassed the exit to Copenhagen and went straight home, certain I needed nothing more that moment than to feel my mother’s arms around me.
I’d hoped for sympathy; I was given censure. She was angry that I hadn’t told her I was in Chicago. That I had been in an accident only confirmed every suspicion she had against highway driving.
“Fortunately, his information is bogus,” she said, returning to the kitchen with the wrinkled scrap of paper I’d handed over to her at the door.
She was dressed in a hot pink jumpsuit, her skin an orange tan and her hair frosted blond, an ensemble incandescent against our yellowing kitchen wallpaper.
“This isn’t a real insurance company,” she said. “That’s probably why he was so eager to get out of there.”
“If you’d have called the police, he would have lost his license,” Richard explained needlessly.
Mom propped her hand on her hip. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t call the police,” she said.
“I don’t know—I wasn’t thinking. Thirty years old, and I forget what to do in a state of emergency.”
Richard made an admirable attempt to cheer me up: “I’m fiftyone, and I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.”
“That’s reassuring.” I spun my coffee cup around and studied the rainbow on the front. Bubble letters read Virginia Beach or bust!
“I’ve had worse with the old Dodge. It’ll be taken care of. ‘Don’t be anxious about anything,’ ” Mom recited, joining us at the table. “ ‘But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.’ ”
“I think He has more to worry about than dented fenders,” I said.
“If He has the hair on your head numbered, He has your fenders counted.”
I gave her a look.
“What?” she asked.
She was too excited about Brian’s Big Day to share in my misery.
The wedding was a week away and already our house was as bustling and chaotic as Zoë’s had been silent. Dresses hung in plastic, corsages chilled. There were rehearsals and scripts and props. Everyone had their part and seemed comfortable with their lines, while I stood mute at center stage, staring at the waiting darkness, hoping for a cue.
22
Mom’s church friends Sandy Baldwin and Mrs. Jenkins drove over the afternoon of the wedding rehearsal for a complimentary Luna home-spa treatment. I had been coerced into attending. To my mother’s endless distress I’d pulled two all-nighters to finish my grading. Lack of sleep was terrible for the complexion: She would not have her daughter wearing eye bags to her son’s wedding.
I sat across from Grandma and to the right of Mrs. Jenkins, my third grade Sunday school teacher, who liked to take personal responsibility for the fact I’d turned out so well. I traded surreptitious glances with Grandma over the table while the women talked: I was still weightless from the first euphoria of summer vacation and had patience enough for the both of them.
“I have eight grandchildren now,” Mrs. Jenkins answered to my polite query. “Seven by blood; the eighth from my Robert’s wife’s first marriage.” She dipped her hands in the warm wax Mom had mixed up in our old popcorn bowl. The old lady’s manicured red nails had terrified me as a child. Though her hands had wrinkled and shrunk with age, the pointed red nails had