Page 92 of Every Beautiful Mile

“Finn! Are you okay?” I yell to him before turning back to Marin. “Can you get out?”

She nods—slowly—and I rush to the back where Finn is sprawled on the floor between the beds, moaning and rubbing his head.

“Finn, are you okay?” My voice is desperate as I search for blood, relieved when there is none.

“Mom?” he groans. “What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know. We hit something. It was fine, and then it wasn’t. The cab is destroyed. Can you walk?”

He reaches an arm out to me with an oof, and I help him up and out the side door, where we find Marin standing in the middle of the road with an angry red mark from her seatbelt slashed across her chest.

“Marin?” I cough, walking toward her through the light rain. “Do you see anything?”

Then I see it. A lifeless mountain of hair with a huge rack of smooth antlers that takes up most of the road.

“A moose?” I whisper. “We hit a fucking moose?”

My eyes are wide as I bring a hand up to my open mouth.

“Language, Mom,” Marin rasps out, rubbing a hand across the line on her chest from the seatbelt.

Finn coughs out a laugh that echoes across the quiet road as soon as it escapes his mouth. It spreads from him to me to Marin in a chain reaction, all of us looking between the moose and the ball of aluminum that was once the Avion. We laugh until tears run down our faces.

It’s ridiculous how hard we laugh about getting in an accident in the middle of a quiet mountain road in Maine, but we do.

“Now what?” Finn asks once he can speak clearly.

“Now.” I sigh, wiping the tears from my eyes. “We call a tow truck and get the hell out of here.”

Thirty-four

The tow truck driver is a man named Tony. Tony is a large, hairy man who wears a stained t-shirt and chain-smokes cigarettes in the cab of his truck with the windows up. He has more hair coming out of the collar of his shirt than most men have on their entire bodies.

His voice is reflective of how much he likes cigarettes and sounds like someone ran a hand mixer over his larynx. His northeastern accent is thick, and he ends almost every other sentence with the phrase, ya see.

Tony drives me fucking crazy.

“I don’t usually come up this far north, ya see. It’s lucky you got a hold of me. Bar Harbor’s nice if you’re into that sort of thing. My old lady and I don’t go there much because it’s for rich people, ya see. You folks rich or something?” He pauses but not long enough for anyone to answer. “Judging by that hunk of junk I’m hauling behind me, I don’t take yous as rich folks.”

He blows smoke into my face, causing me to fall into yet another coughing fit.

“Sorry about the smell,” he continues. “Had some old McDonalds on the floorboard, ya see.” He’s oblivious to the fact we might as well be riding in a hearse with the cancer he’s forcing down our lungs.

We sit crammed into the front seat like sardines—me next to Tony’s large belly, Finn squished next to me, and Marin wedged against the door.

“We come up to these mountains sometimes, ya see. My old lady and I like it up there, nice and quiet. Found a spot you can get all-you-can-eat ribs, ya see. Worth the trip every time.”

Another puff of smoke fills the cab.

“Tony, not to be a pain, but could you roll the windows down when you smoke? I’m just a little sensitive to it.” I try to swallow my cough, but it hacks out anyway.

“You one of those health freaks from the city? You’re not my first high-maintenance passenger, ya see. I think it’s a government conspiracy that they say smoking isn’t good for you. My uncle lived to be a hundred and smoked a pack a day, ya see. A pack a day!”

He shakes his head as if my request is absurd.

Ten minutes later, he lights another cigarette and does not roll the windows down.

When we finally arrive at the mechanic shop in Bar Harbor four hours later, we topple out of the cab of the tow truck in a cloud of smoke and smelling like we’ve been rolled in tobacco.

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