Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [80]
It had become impossible to ignore.
Besides, his bags were packed and loaded in the car. Half a dozen Weebles, two ice cube trays, twelve jars of Smucker’s grape jelly, his bowling ball, and his entire DVD collection were piled in the backseat. The CDs were burned and loaded into the player, the engine oil had been changed, and the tank was filled with gasoline. The Highlights poem was safely in his pocket, along with Freckles’s address and phone number.
He felt as ready as he ever would be.
All he had to do was drop off Skywalker with Andy and he would be on his way. He had four days to make it to North Carolina, find Tess Bryson, persuade her to call her grade school friend, and return home before his clients would need him. Though Dr. Teagan’s words might serve as encouragement, he couldn’t risk them doing otherwise. Not with so many miles that lay ahead.
And though he was loath to admit it, it had taken only seconds to realize that Dr. Teagan would never endorse his plan. As much as it had made sense to him, he once again felt like that perfectly sane protagonist armed with a perfectly insane idea. “No thanks, doc,” Milo finally answered, rising to his feet. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”
chapter 20
The CDs hadn’t worked out as well as Milo had planned. In the spirit of every movie character who had ever embarked on a road trip, Milo had prepared a playlist of classic road trip songs to carry him on his journey.
Taken from films such as Forrest Gump, Garden State, and Jerry Maguire, the songs on the two CDs Milo had burned included such classics as Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Poison’s “Ride the Wind,” and less gusty numbers such as Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” and Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” But unlike in a film, when a three-minute montage can carry a character halfway across the country, Milo’s playlist of more than thirty songs ran out before he even crossed the Connecticut state line, leaving him with the option of playing the same songs again or switching to a significantly less thematic soundtrack.
Either way, it was a less than auspicious start to his adventure.
Milo opted for Supertramp’s Greatest Hits, an album that he wouldn’t normally play in Christine’s presence but one that he enjoyed a great deal when she was not around. Bands like Supertramp, Wham, and Abba weren’t exactly the trendiest musical acts on the planet, so to play their songs in Christine’s presence, as much as he liked them, risked appearing even less cool to her than he already feared he was. The album included Supertramp’s minor hit “Take the Long Way Home,” which wasn’t such a good song for the beginning leg of a journey, but Milo made a mental note to add it to his return-trip playlist.
Milo rarely traveled far from home, and almost never farther than New York City. In fact, he had only left the Northeast once in his life, and that was during his honeymoon to Disney World, a trip that had been difficult to say the least. As he and Christine had boarded the flight to Orlando, the word catatonic had lodged itself in his head, eventually repeating with the pulsating monotony of a nuclear-powered metronome. It was three days later, while in the line for the Tower of Terror (a ride that Milo thought was aptly named), that he had managed to trick the mother of two disinterested teenagers into saying the word as a means of describing her sons’ state of being after a three-hour wait under the hot Florida sun.
The entire trip had required more patience, endurance, and ingenuity than Milo could normally muster. Jelly jars had been nearly impossible to locate (a gift shop in Epcot Center sold miniature jars of souvenir jam, supposedly from various countries around the world, but none was nearly as satisfying to open as a twenty-ounce jar of Smucker’s grape), and the ice cube trays in their hotel room were