The Commute

The rain came down torrentially as Randall did his best to slide down into the driver’s seat. Despite his efforts, water poured in defiantly through the cracked door, fully soaking the leather that his pants would now have to rest upon for the next fifty-seven minutes, according to his GPS. Great. 

Disgruntled, and now uncomfortably wet, Randall reached over and set the soggy paper bag that contained the chocolate-covered nuts he was currently marinating his pants in rainwater for onto the passenger seat. Up until this point, he had been sitting forward to avoid also wetting the leather behind him, and he now wrestled off his raincoat, balled it up, and set it on the passenger seat floorboard. He turned on his car, looked over at the paper bag with the stupid chocolate covered nuts inside, reconsidered setting them on his leather seats, and moved them to the floorboard. 

That’s it. That’s all the dilly-dallying he had done inside his car, if you could even call that dilly-dallying, because a man could take a moment to get settled and orient himself of course, before someone honked at him.  

Beep!  

The horn was pathetic, but the message was clear. It instantly pissed him off. He couldn’t imagine honking at a person knowing that was the sound his car was about to produce. Or honking at a person here in general! This was a public parking lot after all, and if they wanted such a coveted spot near the front of the organic grocery store entrance you would think they could exercise thirty seconds of patience. People were so entitled these days.  

He put his car in reverse, flipped the offending driver the bird, and pulled off towards the stoplight at the exit of the lot.  

He hadn’t wanted to stop at that god-awful store in the first place. The store trendily entitled itself a “farmer’s market,” and, okay, it had some good snacks you couldn’t get at the normal grocery, but he didn’t understand what about it exactly allowed it to assume the label of a farmer’s market, since it was a corporate chain and all.  

That always kind of bothered him. He felt like the store was a bit pretentious, and everyone shopping there carried themselves accordingly, with their own strong air of pretentiousness. Everyone except him, obviously. Which was another thing that bothered him, that those people had no idea that he wasn’t pretentious, and that the fact that he had been forced to stop there did not mean he was one of them. Absolutely not.  

He wasn’t surprised to be running an errand against his will. It didn’t matter that the last thing he wanted to do after working in that stuffy building for the past eight hours was run out in the rain to stop at the snooty people store. On the clock or off, his time always belonged to someone else.  

His wife had “asked” him if he minded stopping by when he got off work, and although he had expressed mild discontent with the idea, she had pressed, and that was that. He knew he would never know peace if Katie didn’t get her way. All Katie was thinking about was this weird idea she had become obsessed with that the chocolate-covered nuts were essential to the perfection of the evening, and that’s all Katie was going to think about until she got what she wanted: tonight being perfect. Her impossible expectations always set her up for disappointment and he was always the one who had to deal with the fallout. 

The light turned green and Randall accelerated through the intersection, signaled his lane change, and took the exit towards the highway.  

“At least it’s just a straight shot from here!” Katie would chirp whenever she was in the car, and now Randall thought of it every time he was in the car. It always rubbed him the wrong way, because they always hit traffic at this part of the highway, inching bumper to bumper for miles before he would be finally able to cruise for the last few minutes. This part of the drive still sucked. Why couldn’t they just let it suck, without trying to guilt and shame themselves into convincing each other that it didn’t totally suck? 

Anyways, here he was, once again creeping through this miserable parade with all the other corporate slaves trying to beat each other home. It was so dystopian that all of them willingly made this journey every single day, willingly clogged up the roadways all at the same time so that a half-hour trip easily turned into an hour, or longer, to go to jobs that they hated and then back to homes that cost too much to maintain and weren’t even big enough to live in. And here Randall was, right along with them. Like always. 

A car cut him off and he casually nursed his brakes, letting it happen. Whoever that guy was, he was clearly in a rush to get home. Randall wasn’t. 

Home wasn’t so bad most nights, to be fair, but tonight, it was not somewhere Randall was looking forward to being. Tonight, Katie’s mother was coming over for dinner, and Katie’s mother and Randall did not get along. It wasn’t that Randall never liked Katie’s mother, but Katie’s mother did not like Randall. Nothing he did ever seemed enough to win her over. And after a while, someone not liking you starts to feel like a genuine reason to not like them back. 

He wasn’t torn up about it. They were two people who just did not jibe, and honestly, he wished that they could agree to mutually avoid each other and move on with life. He had no problem with Katie hanging out with her mother, he just didn’t care to be a part of it. She didn’t want him there, he didn’t want to be there, Katie was the only one who seemed to find a weird pleasure in torturing them both. She seemed to have this idea in her head that if they could all just pretend that they were a big happy family, they would magically become one someday, and she refused to drop the charade.  

The rain pounded the windshield in a steady rhythm. In tune with the wipers squeaking routinely back and forth, it provided the only music in the car as Randall continued to drive on in silence. The bag holding the chocolate covered nuts was nestled comfortably in his raincoat on the floorboard beside him. 

Those stupid chocolate covered nuts were a treat for Katie’s mother. He didn’t understand Katie’s relentless efforts to impress her. Personally, he had long since discovered she was not a woman who was going to be impressed. Two years ago, though, Katie had brought them to her mother’s Christmas party where the woman had made a mildly positive comment about them. Katie considered them a staple to have out for her mother’s visits ever since. And she just assumed Randall would pick them up for her. Like always.  

The drive lulled on, and the rain was coming down so heavily that it formed sheets of water as it poured down the car windows. It was nearly impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, making the traffic somehow even worse than usual. It figured his drive would be terrible. His day had been terrible, and his evening was going to be terrible. 

Work had been one headache after another today. He had spent his entire morning solving problems that never should have existed in the first place and hearing patronizing comments about it from his boss the entire time. And tomorrow it would start all over again, he would open his computer to the same problems from different clients, and he would start from ground zero having to hit all his daily call counts and books for the day.  

The media screen of his car lit up, the area code immediately betraying that it was a client who had gotten their hands on his personal number in a last-ditch effort to seek help with some “emergency” at the end of the day. It was as if he had negatively manifested it, he had been ruminating on how much he hated his job and here it was to remind him of exactly why. The clients had no respect for his boundaries. He reached over to decline the call, but the cheap touchscreen didn’t register his finger.  

God dammit. He poked at it again and again, jamming the tip of his finger unnaturally, but to no avail. He leaned over farther, taking his eyes off the road momentarily to press the button more accurately. He hovered his index finger very pointedly over the red circle, double checked his aim, and pushed down with intention. 

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! 

The shock of the horn snapped his eyes back to the road. He had mistakenly swerved towards the right-hand side and was seconds away from sliding underneath the semi beside him and into imminent death. His fear took over. There was no need for thinking, his hands instinctively jerked the steering wheel back into position.

The car behind his had made a desperate, piercing honk. That was the only thing that stood between him and becoming nothing but sludge smeared across the underbelly of a Peterbilt. His heart pounded at the gravity of what had almost been- his car, the leather seats he had been so proud to upgrade- shredded to bits, the metal frame crumpled up and twisted like a bug caught in a mower.  

One wrong second and he would never get another.  

His hands shook as he gripped the steering wheel firmly now with both hands. He could feel a bead of sweat running slowly down his forehead.  

He was struck by the thought of his own mortality. He couldn't shake it. He imagined his funeral, how the people he knew would react to losing him. Would they miss him? Would they gossip about him in hushed voices at his own wake, tsk tsking and reducing him to yet another cautionary tale of distracted driving?  

Would anyone even care? 

Randall shook away the thought as quickly as it had come to him. His chest felt so tight it hurt. His cheeks burned with shame to even have thought it. What was wrong with him? 

Instantly, he had thought of Katie at home, waiting for him. He imagined her calling and calling, growing increasingly agitated. He thought of how Katie would take the news. 

He thought back to a year ago, when they had spent all that time at the hospital. Katie was terrified of hospitals, but she went with him every time, holding his hand. He had told her, the first time, that she didn’t have to be there. She could wait in the car, or at home. But she had gripped his hand even tighter. She frowned at him, and told him, as if he should already know, that she never wanted to be anywhere in the world without him, that she wanted to be right there for him. Always. 

Katie would care so much. 

Traffic lulled to a complete stop once again. He looked out his driver’s side window. The rain had slowed down, too, and the window was spattered with a galaxy of water droplets of various sizes, tiny comets traveling at their own varying speeds. His eyes focused on a single drop. It was gliding down the window, faster, faster, then more slowly, until finally splaying out into a puddle at the bottom.  

Randall thought of himself. He thought of how when he was a little boy, he would lay his head against the shoulder strap of his seatbelt like a hammock. How he would pass the time in the car watching raindrop after raindrop race down the glass, making silent bets in his head over which one would win. How his mother would reach back without looking when she braked and touch him gently on the knee.  

God, he missed his mother.  

He noticed the person behind him signal cautiously before moving over into a space between cars to join the exit lane beside them. His eyes followed them momentarily in the rearview as it came to a stop in its place in the line, his own car picking up speed in pace with the traffic around him as it cleared past the crowded exit. His attention served as a silent thank you, and he hoped it would be enough. Enough that next time, God forbid there was a next time, an angel would be there again. 

The exit signs began to soar past the windshield as the cars picked up speed. The rest of the drive was easy; he would cruise in this lane for the next eight miles until it automatically turned into an exit only lane for the exact one that he needed to get off. 

Randall thought of what Katie had been like when she was a little girl. He wondered if she had sat in the backseat quietly cheering on raindrop races. He thought of a picture he had seen once of Katie at a dance recital. Her hair was tied up so tightly it made her ears stick out and her eyebrows raise like she was startled, but it was still Katie. Her cheeks still dimpled on just one side, but it was a deeper dimple than the one he was used to.  

He remembered he was surprised the day he found it in Katie’s mother’s house. He remembered noticing then, how weird it was. He hadn’t noticed before, but there weren’t any real pictures of Katie in the house. Of anyone really. There were a few perfectly staged and costumed professional beach portraits of her family, and there was a picture of her parents dressed in formal wear getting ready to receive an award for her dad, but nothing real. Katie’s mother’s house reminded him of a museum, full of boring, forgotten things that you weren’t allowed to touch. 

The picture of Katie rested in a macaroni frame, decorated with a hodge podge of glitter, plastic jewels, and beads. She had clearly made it herself, then tucked it away in this little corner, where it wouldn’t draw too much attention. Randall thought of his own childhood home, how impossible it would be to count the number of pictures of him that had decorated the walls, how every tabletop and shelf was cluttered with a memory.  

After his mom had gotten sick, the TJ Maxx baubles they had picked out on rainy days after school became treasures. He missed her so much.  

He wondered how Katie felt, missing a mother she never had.  

He pulled up to the stoplight at the top of the exit ramp. The light changed to green almost instantly, and he cruised through the next few lights. He pulled into the entrance to their neighborhood. As he made the turn, the paper bag on the floorboard tipped over slightly, and the nuts rattled inside their plastic container like a little maraca. 

He hated himself, then, for the tone he had taken earlier with Katie. For the way he had groaned when she asked him to pick them up. He hoped she didn’t stop asking. 

He pulled up into their driveway. He could see her through the window, busy in the kitchen, but she hadn’t noticed him yet. The golden hour sun was shining through the window, giving her an ethereal quality in its light. She turned and he could see her belly, so round and full of life. 

She was going to be an amazing mother. That baby was so lucky. 

That baby was going to know nothing but love. Every cloud that darkened their skies, Katie would give a silver lining. Katie would see that baby in nothing but the best light, the way she saw everyone, the way she saw him.  

He hated the world, then, for not loving her that way back. 

He looked over at the chocolate covered nuts beside him. He hadn’t wanted to pick them up, hadn't wanted to participate in the dinner at all, but now he felt resolute that his place was there.  

Katie knew her mother had been feeling lonely since her dad had moved out with his secretary. Katie wasn’t the kind of person who could let someone she loved hurt. Even if they were blind to her own pain. To what loving them cost her. 

If Katie was the Golden Princess raised to save her village, he would be her Saint George. She could put her heart on the line because he wouldn’t let her become a sacrifice. When Katie’s mother would inevitably call the chicken dry, or the mashed potatoes too buttery, he would be there to chime in to say that he liked them that way, that actually, he preferred his potatoes drowning in puddles of butter.  

He turned off his car, grabbed his belongings from the seat beside him, and paused a moment before opening the door.  

Yes, he would be there for her. And at the end of the night, when those stupid chocolate covered nuts sat abandoned on the counter, because even though Katie would present them with such pride her mother wouldn’t even bother taking them home, he would be there to quietly tuck them in the cupboard. And when Katie insisted that it wasn’t a big deal, he would know that it was. He would see her blinks and know her eyes were stinging; he would hear a tiny choke in her voice and know there was a lump in the back of her throat. And he would be there, to pull her into his arms, to rest his chin on the top of her head, to tell her it was alright. Like always.