Live Through This by Debra Gwartney

Author:Debra Gwartney [Debra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I called a tow truck from the Chevron station where the woman dropped us, and when that driver arrived, Stephanie and I traveled back out to the Stafford highway with him. As soon as we pulled behind my car, Riki and Amanda leaped out. "Where the fuck have you been?" Amanda yelled. "Do you know how long we've been sitting here?"

The tow-truck driver—an older man with a potbelly and black suspenders, gray whiskers, and bad breath—stood up straighter. His fist clenched and he shot me a quick look. If this were my kid, that look said, I'd knock the teeth out of that sass-mouth. He went around to the front of the car. I pushed past Amanda and climbed in; Mollie reached over to wrap her arms around my neck. Her face was red and puffy, and Mary's chin trembled. They'd burrowed into the back of the car, Mary said, and stayed there while Amanda and Riki stood outside and smoked, threatening to leave as soon as they found a ride. But Amanda hadn't left. Maybe she'd had the chance to go, but she had stayed to watch over Mary and Mollie. I'd let myself lose faith in her, sure she'd ditched her sisters, but she hadn't. I embraced Mollie and thanked Amanda, though silently. I still regret not stirring enough generosity in myself to tell her how grateful I was to find her there.

The driver poured gas in the tank, and I tried the engine. No matter how I fiddled, the engine wouldn't start. The fuel-injection system had seized, and there was no fixing it out there in the dark. Just as the tow-truck driver had warned me when I first got him on the phone—it's a bad idea, he'd said, a very bad idea, to let a car like mine run out of gas.

He packed our luggage and all of us into his truck, hooked up the car, complaining to himself and dragging chains back and forth, and hauled us to the nearest settlement, which was noth ing more than that same Chevron and a motel. He left my car in a bay to be attended to the next day, a time-and-a-half Sunday. While I wrote him a check, leaning over his hood, the teenagers, all three, ran away—gone before I could see them leave. I looked up, and they were no longer there. "Where'd they go?" I asked Mary, who shook her head. I shook my own head and cursed them, then lugged our bags and Mary and Mollie across the highway to the hotel. My mother was long home in Idaho by now. Once I checked in to a room, I phoned to tell her what had happened with the car. And to tell her that the three girls had jumped from the tow truck and disappeared. After I hung up, I settled into the pillows, though my back felt like a pile of bricks rather than soft flesh and warm blood. Mary and Mollie, already

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