You’re looking out the passenger side window and, in the backseat, our son is doing the same. We are at a standstill. The boot of the car in front is stacked to the roof. I can’t see the road ahead.
The cars in the middle lane begin to move. I resist the urge to swap lanes, knowing each single shuffle extends the stop wave. Ahead, somewhere, clear road. A paradox.
You turn your head from the scrubby roadside bank and look at me. I keep my eyes on the road. Our son removes his headphones, looks at them, puts them back on. I watch him in the rear-view mirror.
You unwrap a sweet and hand to it me, offer the bag to the back of the car. He hands an empty wrapper back to you, his hand snaking between us through the seats. The silence between him and you, his mother and him and me, his father, are not the same.
We inch forward, stop again. The car beside us now is a long-slung sports car, hunkered to the road against the hulking articulated lorries bracketing it front and back.
More movement, the frequency of the stop wave loosening. I should get ready to move, but I don’t. If we stay stuck, we can’t arrive, and all the possibilities still exist. The possibility of me giving my son a hug for the first time in a decade. The possibility of you holding my hand as we leave him at his fresher digs. The possibility that our house will still feel like a home when we return.
A horn beeps behind me. I put the car in drive, lift my foot from the brake and let the car roll by itself for as long as possible before I touch the accelerator.
Rachael Dunlop is an award-winning writer of fiction from 100 to 100,000
words and everything in between. Writing talk on Bluesky
@rachaeldunlop.com
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