BABE IN THE WOODS
By Jacqueline Floyd
On a back road in Maine, Gracie O’Donnell’s spirits sank into her shoes as her twelve-year-old Dodge lost speed. An impatient muscle-bound SUV roared up behind her, honked and sped around, as she attempted to maneuver to the side of the road. Before her car ground to a complete halt, the odometer hit 199,897 miles. She shut off the engine and restarted it; the Dynasty refused to move another inch.
“What?” she muttered to the pile of metal and chrome. “You can’t make it three more miles to Liberty House?”
With a quick call from the hospital she worked at in Hartford, she’d notified her grandmother about the breech delivery that had delayed her departure. But with rush hour traffic, and now car trouble, even her revised time of arrival to her grandparents’ bed and breakfast had come and gone.
Just her luck. It was dark and late, and her cell phone was out of juice, not that it would do any good on these back roads anyway. No doubt about it, she was stranded. She should have guessed that after one of the most excruciating weeks of her life, if something else could go wrong, it would. |
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It could be worse, she told herself, striving to resurrect her usual optimism. It wasn’t far to Gran’s, and she could walk if she had to, dark or not. But first, she’d check under the hood. “
You stay here,” she told her Scottish terrier, MacDuff, as she retrieved a flashlight from the glove box. “I don’t want you tearing off after some critter while I look at the engine.”
MacDuff cocked his head reproachfully.
“Don’t look at me like that.” She scratched the magic spot under his chin that turned him into a mop of puppy adoration. “Remember how long it took to get the burrs out of your coat when you chased that woodchuck last fall?”
As Gracie stepped out of the car, the spring air assaulted her with the familiar aromas of spruce and pine, laced with a hint of salt and seaweed.
She inhaled deeply and her spirits lifted a bit just from breathing in the scents of home.
She checked the dipstick and jiggled a couple of wires before a big fat raindrop plopped onto the crown of her head. A second one landed on her shoulder, and then buckets of water plastered her T-shirt to her back like a frigid sheet of shrink-wrap. With a perturbed squeak, she dashed through the deluge into the car.
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