The Average Getaway - Vacation

“Come on, come one!” Jonas was mumbling, digging into his luggage bag vigorously. He didn’t need to glance at his phone to know that they were late. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” he utters under his breath.

“Few minutes!” Minna, his wife, shouted from the living room.

“I know, I know!” Jonas flips the luggage upside down, and digs through the pile of t-shirts, jeans, and other articles of clothes, scampering and pulling out each one, until he finds it; the treasure trove of his childhood, his old Mariner’s baseball cap. “I got it!”

Minna walks in. “Jonas!” She shouts.

“Everything is fine, dear,” Jonas swipes on his cap and crams their clothes back into his luggage, stuffing the recently tidy and folded clothes into a mound of cloth. “I will start moving things to the car.”

“You were supposed to move things fifteen minutes ago. And thanks for ruining all the clothes I folded,” Minna slaps his hat off. “Hurry. We are going to hit traffic…” Minna was ready to walk out, when she looked back and drew her eyes to the luggage. “How many t-shirts are you packing?”

“Enough,” Jonas quickly places his hat back on before resuming.

“We are only going for two nights! You don’t need that many shirts!” Mina approaches and takes some shirts off the bed. “Grab a smaller luggage. This won’t fit in the car.”

“No!” Jonas grabs Mina's hand, and swipes the shirt from her grasp. “We are going to the beach. If it gets sandy or wet, you won’t let me walk around the flat with a wet shirt on.”

“Jonas, you’ll leave it on the beach, now let’s go…”

“What if it rains? I checked the forecast, and there’s a chance of it. What if someone grabs it? What if a dog starts rummaging through our belongings. It’s a pet friendly beach…”

“Jonas!” Mina tries to grab the shirt, but Jonas swats her hand away.

“We can stay here and argue, or we can get things going. What will it be?”

Mina opens her mouth to say something, but remembering she has things she also needed to do, she slinks out of the bedroom, with a scoff.

Jonas stuffs the last t-shirt inside of the luggage, only to find he has trouble closing it, to the point he is not able to zip it up. “Great,” he breathes. Pulling out a few shirts, he rolls them up and tucks them along the side, before attempting to shut it once more, and, to his relief, succeeds.

Wearing his loose, baggy tropical shorts, sky-blue t-shirt, and unbuttoned Hawaiian over-shirt, Jonas runs out of the bedroom with his luggage in tow, spotting several more bags at the door.

“Did we grab the towels?” Jonas scans the bags.

“Yes, we did,” Mina shouted from the guest bathroom.

“The sunscreen and camera?”

“Yes.”

“Toiletries?” Jonas asks.

“For goodness’ sake… Yes! Now, go already!”

Jonas grabs a few of the bags, including his large suitcase and storms out the door, running to their SUV parked in the lot. He begins to throw the bags in the back, tucking his large suitcase along the flat side and pressed against the back. He then ran back and forth, tossing the rest of their equipment on top. Upon placing the final bag with his spare Velcro flippers, Jonas wipes his brow, satisfied with the overall job. Although in hindsight, Mina might not like it, but as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t going to collapse and it wasn’t going to take up space in the backseat, if he could help it at least.

“‘It won’t fit.’ Of course it fits, I even managed to get the duffel bag in that tiny corner,” Jonas mumbles to himself. Closing the automatic door, he shakes his head. It was a silly thing, letting himself scoff at Mina behind her back. There was no such reason to get worked up about it now. After all, this was their vacation time. ‘Relax,’ the word echoed in his mind. ‘This is time you both need.’

Clapping the dust off his hands, Jonas returned home.

“Mina?” Jonas stepped in the door frame. “Everything is set!”

The lights in the house were all shut off, save for one in the bathroom. Jonas turned inside, finding Mina putting makeup on.

“Mina!” Jonas shouted.

“What is it?” Mina says, unmoved, but she knew all too well what was about to be said.

“We are going to the beach. What do you need makeup for?”

“I will be done in a few minutes.”

“Oh my God,” Jonas rests his head in his hands. “We need to go now. Everything is ready.”

“I’m almost done,” Mina, hastily, dips her used cotton into the concealer glass bottle and rubs some on her cheek before smoothing it out.

“Love, you look great,” Jonas appealed with a tone of sarcasm, clapping his hands together. “Now come on, we are going to be late.”

“We can stay here and argue, or you can let me finish,” Mina retorted, glancing at the mirror towards Jonas’s reflection. “What will it be?”

“I swear to God, Mina. Are you planning on showing off to other boys?”

“Can’t a girl just look nice in public? I’ve done this for years. This is the first time you accuse me of fraternizing.” Mina grasped at her mascara and unscrewed the thin wand and, with careful precision, lifted her brows up.

“You don’t just yell at me to hurry up when you do this. I swear, if you aren’t done within the next minute, I am grabbing that shower head and washing everything off.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Then move it!” Jonas storms out of the bathroom.

As Jonas walks away, an audible groan escapes his throat, followed by some swearing. Once he collects his bearings, he takes a brief look around the house for anything else they might have missed.

Two minutes later, the loving couple were rushing out of their home, locking the door behind, and scurrying to the car.

“Alright,” Jonas started up the car. “Are we good?”

“Yes, we are,” Mina replies

“Great,” Jonas pulls the car out of the driveway. In about a minute, they should reach the highway ramp. “Can you pull up the GPS?”

Mina pulls out her phone and inspects the center console for the cable to connect her phone to the car. After thumbing through the excess papers and loose paraphernalia, she makes a stark realization.

“The cable is at home,” Mina quickly checks her purse, before looking into her backpack.

“What do you mean…?!” Jonas stops himself, checking his frustration and taking a few breaths. “Okay. We can charge it when we get there. I got a spare cable with a plug-in port. Just keep an eye on the phone and guide me.”

“Actually…I need it. My phone’s about to die.” Mina gives an embarrassed smile. 

“Oh…My…!” Jonas slams the breaks, pulling the car over to the side of the street and parks it. He quickly unbuckles his seat and runs to the house, fumbling for the right key in his hands.

“Jonas!” Mina calls out. “You could have driven back. Jonas!”

Jonas ignores Mina, not in the mood for arguing when every second is already so precious. Rushing up to the front door entrance, he unlocks the house and throws up the perfectly clean and tidy sheets of the bed and tosses them aside. Sitting in the corner of the bed was the long wire, plugged into the wall.

“Christ, just once…” Jonas mumbles. “Just once, can one of these days go right?”

Grabbing the cable, Jonas returns to the living room. His phone buzzes from his pocket. Pulling it out, he sees the call is from Mina, and picks up the call.

“I got the cable,” Jonas said.

“Why did you park the car here?” Mina asked. “You could have just driven back?”

“You really called me to waste time about this?”

“Jonas!”

“I am about to close the door. Last chance if you forgot anything else…”

Silence fell between them, with Mina’s voice humming through the speaker.

“No, that’s everything.”

Jonas hung up, locking the house once again, before running back to the car and buckling up.

“Jonas…” Mina started.

“Are…we…ready…?” Jonas articulated each word with frustration while clapping after each word.

“Yes,” Mina takes the cable and plugs it up. The console lights up with the path forward.

“Then let’s pray we don’t hit traffic…”

Jonas slams the accelerator, and the car takes off down the road.

“We are late. Traffic will be terrible…” Jonas groaned.

“We could have been gone if you didn’t waste time finding your stupid baseball hat.” Mina said.

“You spent five minutes on makeup! Why? Why did you need makeup?”

“I put makeup on everywhere we go.”

“Then bring it with you and do your stuff there instead!” Jonas fell short of breath.

“Don’t yell at me. What were you looking through the luggage for? Your stupid hat.”

“It didn’t take me five minutes to look for.”

“It didn’t take five minutes…” Mina repeated with a mocking tone. “That hat always looks terrible on you. I am going to toss it some day.”

“No you won’t.”

“Yes, I will. You won’t think twice about it once it's gone.”

“What’s your problem with my hat?”

“You’re a grown man. What is that? Twelve years ago. It’s old. It’s beat up. It barely fits you. It even makes you look like a teenager.”

“It’s a hat,” Jonas whined. “What’s wrong with you?”

“That hat is the problem with everything in our relationship.”

“Your eyeliner cost us more problems than this hat ever caused you. Not to mention, the expenses.”

“No! No! No!” Mina shouts. “Your hat. In the garbage!”

“That’s never happening, Mina.”

“Give it!” Mina pulls the hat off Jonas, and opens the window.

“Mina!” Jonas wraps a finger around the frame of his hat and manages to pull his hat away from Mina.

A car honks to the side, Jonas had accidentally drifted the car to another lane. Mina lets out a scream. Gripping the wheel, Jonas jerks the wheel back into position and straightens the vehicle back on course.

“Christ above! What is wrong with you?” Jonas shouts.

Mina takes a deep breath. And the two fell silent. Jonas concentrated on driving for a good amount of time, avoiding any further confrontation, and while focusing on keeping up with the car in front of him, his mind did wander to what the next argument was going to be like.

Although, during the thought process of preparing to enter the fray with his wife, the recollection of something important propped up.

“Hey, Mina,” Jonas whimpered, preparing to hear the tone of his wife.

“What?” Mina wasn’t as on edge as he might have thought.

“Can you check the reservation? What time does it say to arrive?”

Mina remained silent, although an audible groan slipped out. Thumbing through the phone, she quickly pulls up the copy of the reservation she received.

“Eleven o’clock,” Mina quietly says.

“If we didn’t have traffic, we could have gotten there in two hours, so we will be on time…” Jonas whispers to himself, thinking about the logistics of their current position.

“Wait!” Mina suddenly shouts.

“W-what is it?” Jonas glances at Mina.

“This reservation was from last week?” 

“No…no. That’s not right…” Jonas retreated into his mind, tearing up what information he had on the reservation. His heart paced faster than any argument with Mina. “No, I made the reservation for the nineteenth…”

But he had to check himself. While the traffic did move, he could not risk trying to perform a small investigation over this.

He pulled over, taking another exit and stopping at a gas station. Inspecting the reservation on his phone, it was made plain for him to see that he scheduled the reservation on the twelfth.

The gut wrenching pain swelled in his stomach, but it wasn’t comparable to the humiliation he felt. Every part of his body wanted to compress in on itself until he was the size of a peanut. He had mixed up the entire schedule and missed the vacation reservation by an entire week.

“How?” Jonas thought, though he knew the answer didn’t matter. He was bracing himself for his wife to berate him, to call him useless, to tell what a fool he was.

Standing by the driver-side door, Mina understood perfectly what had happened and what was done, and Jonas could not bear to look up to her eyes. Mina’s footsteps closed in on him and Jonas prepared for the worst. In those insufferable seconds of terror, he instead feels her hands, kindly and gingerly wrap around his and moves in to kiss it.

“Let’s go home, love.” Mina uttered.

But Jonas did not move.

“It’s okay, my love,” Mina leans forward to hug him. “It’s okay.”

“How is it okay?” Jonas wanted to cry, but held back his tears. “How is any of this alright?”

“Hey,” Mina lowers her voice to a whisper. “We can watch movies like we did before. We can even do a grill.”

“But this was our time to be together. Our time to enjoy ourselves.”

Mina laughs. “I think this morning wasn’t our ideal way of starting ‘our’ time together.”

“Oh, Mina.” Jonas wipes his eyes. “I just wish I could make it up to you.”

“Don’t worry, love.” Mina smiles, shooting her eyes up to his head. “I know how you can.”