Then it sputters and dies all over again.
My little spawn smiles right back at me, mouthing, “Ten percent.”There are times when I wonder just where I fit into her DNA, and then there are moments like this, where she has snarky little zingers, and all I can do is grin with pride.
There I am.
“Now what?”
“You have a cell phone,” Lark reminds me.
“Ah.” The moose stares on as I fumble around in the car for my cell phone. “Where’d I put it?”
“Mom.” Lark points to the dash, where my cell phone sits in the little claws that hold it in place.
I rip it off the doodad and open up the app to make calls. “Oh no.” We crashed in a dead zone. Not one bar winks up at me from the corner of the phone.
“That won’t work for me, Mom.” Lark snatches the phone from my hand, her preteen self knowing how to work the darn thing far better than I do. “Oh no.”
“Yep,” I agree. “What did the last sign say? How many miles to the next town?”
Lark throws the phone back at me, reaching for the console, where a map rests. “Aren’t you glad I grabbed a map at the last rest stop?”
“No sense of adventure in that.” I point at the map. “It lies.”
“A map does not lie, Mom.” Her little fingers hover over the state as she frowns. “Mom.”
“Yes.” I tap the steering wheel as I continue my staring contest with the moose. I think I’m winning.
“See that mountain?” Lark points at the pretty snow capped mountain ahead.
“Skiing.”
“Mom. That mountain should be to the left of us.” She tosses the map to the ground, mumbling under her breath. “I don’t know where we are! You must have taken a wrong turn.”
“That’s entirely plausible.” In a conspiratorial whisper, I say, “Everything turned white from the sky diarrhea, and I can’t tell which way is up or down.”
“We could die out here!”
“Nonsense.” I unbuckle myself, wincing at the seatbelt bruise blooming across my chest. “If I go out there, will that thing kill me?”
“Do you want the probability?”
“Give it to me straight, kiddo.”
“It seems you’ve come across her territory, and she might attack you.”
“Might?” I squint at the moose. Can I outrun it? To the next town? I laugh to myself. No, no, I cannot.
“It seems she is standing there to see what you do.”
“There’s no way moose are that intelligent.”
“Do you really want to challenge a seven-hundred-pound beast?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“It will eventually go away.”
I begin tapping nervously on the steering wheel as the sun begins a fast race toward the horizon. Despite my amusement, I know we don’t have a lot of time before the temperature drops. One way or another, I’m going to have to find a town and get us to safety.
