Page 23 of Kilt Trip

Besides, she was here already. In the parking lot, keys in hand. In Scotland after all this time.

Devika would tell her to go forth and conquer. Marc would give her an overly enthusiastic double thumbs-up. Addie could do this.

She swallowed whatever self-preservation instincts she still possessed, tucked her mom’s pictures into the passenger seat, and inserted the keys into the ignition.

It immediately became clear that after a decade of taking public transportation, Addie’s overconfidence in her driving ability was laughable. Not only was she driving on the wrong side of the road, but the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the van.

It took four excruciating minutes to locate the correct lever for the windshield wipers by a blind-groping technique and she wasn’t positive any driver’s-ed advice she could still summon was even relevant in this country.

How was Gigi so eternally calm? Stay in the center lane. Turn west in ten meters. As if any of that was helpful when confronted with forty-five fucking roundabouts.

What Gigi should say was Look right for oncoming traffic. No, not left. Pull to the far lane. Look how brave you are. You can do this. That’s the kind of encouragement Addie needed right now.

And she could do this herself. She’d done much harder things on her own. Granted, she couldn’t think of anything specific at the moment, but that was simply because cars kept zipping past from all sorts of unexpected places as she navigated the cobbled streets leaving the city.

She successfully managed to enter the motorway, but if the speed didn’t kill her, the weather certainly planned to. The menacing sky opened into a full-on downpour. Dammit.

The road narrowed with every streak of the wiper across the windshield. The roll of the hills and bare-leafed trees blurred on either side of her. Every bump of the patchy asphalt ratcheted up her blood pressure, and the stitching of the steering wheel bit into her palms. Was she more likely to hydroplane in a van?

Fantastically unprepared for this drive, Addie couldn’t ignore the voice in her mind chanting How will you get home?

“Rerouting,” Gigi announced and directed her to an exit for an A road that sounded familiar from Addie’s very brief perusal of a map last night. She maneuvered off the highway with only one car honking and congratulated herself on her impeccable driving skills.

The center line was more or less washed away, and Addie prayed there wouldn’t be a semi taking up both their lanes around each turn, but she couldn’t deny the smaller street was a vast improvement.

After twenty minutes of empty road, lulled by the pattering rain and the sweep of the wipers, Addie began to relax. The warmth from the vent cascaded over her and pushed the adrenaline from her muscles with every mile.

She’d show Logan. Everything was fine.

A meadow opened up ahead of her, the edges lined by old-growth forests and, beyond them, the shady outline of distant hills.

Addie took her first deep breath of the day.

If her mom was here—riding shotgun instead of printed onto photo paper—the floral scent of her Clinique Happy perfume would disguise what should have been a diesel smell in the van and better not have been Logan’s cologne.

Heather’s voice, loud and boisterous, would ring out with bits of trivia from a library guidebook. The second-grade teacher in her required it.

Seventeen-year-old Addie would’ve rolled her eyes.

But now... She’d memorize every fact, peel her eyes off the road long enough to find the crease that appeared between her mom’s brows when she was really concentrating. Wait for Heather’s resulting car sickness to set in, when she would suddenly crank the dial on the air-conditioning and jolt the vents to blow directly in her face, then cling to the handgrip with eyes pinched tight.

And when it finally passed, she’d turn on Van Morrison, settle her feet on the dashboard despite Addie’s dad’s swatting attempts to remove her, and pull out the gigantic bag of Twizzlers.

That first bite of sticky, artificial strawberry marked the beginning of summer for Addie. The last weeks of school were always a frenzy. Her mom came home tired from picnics and field trips, the graduation parties of past students. She belonged to everyone else.

But once the Twizzlers came out, Mom was all hers.

On that last trip, they’d followed roads with street names like Rio Vista and Narrow Gauge. Took exits for point-of-interest signs to Camel Rock and Buffalo Bill’s grave on Lookout Mountain. Searched for wonder in the Rocky Mountains.

They’d camped beneath the stars and ate gas-station hot dogs and relied on Brian’s exceptional sense of direction to get them home again.

The lush land around Addie, so different from that trip, hummed with secrets. Each fork of the road—dotted with croft houses, ancient trees, or expansive meadows—beckoned the explorer in her.

“Into the Mystic” came on the van’s speakers, and she turned the volume up. Heather used to belt out the chorus in the way that made Addie whine Mommm when her friends were in the car. Before she knew how much she’d miss it.

Addie ripped the bag of Strawberry Laces with her teeth, not daring to take both hands off the wheel. She’d seen the British equivalent of red licorice in the store the night before and bought their customary road-trip snack on a whim. The sweet, artificial flavor was almost the same, and the reminder warmed her heart.

While Addie meandered down a back country lane, she smiled, realizing her pulse had returned to normal.

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