“Fine. But I get to borrow your cold weather wardrobe,” I mutter, resigned to the abject humiliation I’m bound to face. Jackie has a killer wardrobe. If I’m going to get dragged in real life, I’d like to do it in style.
“One coat,” my sister, the master negotiator, counters.
“The Ralph Lauren Navajo coat.”
“Get real. No, absolutely not that one.”
“We’ll see.”
Chapter 3
“Did I get you with my elbow?” says the guy seated to my right in the aisle seat. Yes, he did as a matter of fact, for the third time as he adjusted his noise canceling headphones.
“That’s okay,” I answer, shrinking even more into my middle seat.
Let me tell you what hell looks like. In fact, let me tell you what hell looks, smells, and sounds like. Hell is the second to last row on a late flight from O’Hare to Albany sitting next to an oversized overweight giant who smells like a combination of sautéed onions, feet, and low rent booze, who breathes so loudly it almost drowns out the engines roaring next to my head, and not being able to recline and read because an angry six-year-old keeps kicking the back of my seat while he screams, “I want grilled cheese!”
The flight from hell lasts six and half hours due to two connecting stops. Six and a half hours of my life that I would like to permanently scrub from my memory. In general, I’m a good sport about stuff like this. As a journalist, roughing it is part of the job description. No, I haven’t exactly skipped through the war-torn streets of Idlib yet, but I’ve slept in my junker in pursuit of a story on more than a few occasions. And I’ve ventured into places that most people with a modicum of self-preservation would never step foot into.
That said, heading back to Lake Placid for an undetermined amount of time has me raw to the bone and feeling not at all forgiving of my liberties being infringed.
It’s not like my loathing of my hometown is baseless. I have my reasons. Lake Placid is trapped in a time warp for me. Everything about it triggers all the awful feelings that I’ve worked hard to leave behind. Which is why I don’t allow myself to think about it for more than a nanosecond. When I left for college, that part of my life died, and I’d like for it to stay that way.
Almost on cue, the number one reason for all my problems appears on the small TV screen embedded in the seat before me. God has a sick sense of humor.
CNN is on and the volume is off, but Dr. Zelda Anderson is flapping her lips and smiling at Chris Cuomo like she’s planning to eat him alive. And that’s not hyperbole; the woman is a super-predator. My mother is one of those celebrity therapist that writes books and makes TV appearances. I’m pretty sure she’s never had any legit patients that she’s cared for because that would require the ability to empathize. No, Zelda is content with spouting words of wisdom she doesn’t live by and getting her hair and makeup done.
I can’t press the button fast enough, and heave a sigh of relief when the screen goes dark.
The plane ride from hell ends around 10 pm with a bumpy landing and a kick to the back of my seat hard enough to displace the last vertebra of my spine. This happens second from me standing and screaming, “Will somebody get this child a fucking grilled cheese!”
The bone-jarring landing is followed up by a foot race to the car rental counters when we’re informed by loudspeaker that all connecting flights are canceled due to the mother-of-all-storms gathering along the East coast. With two large and overstuffed suitcases dragging behind me, running fast is a relative term.
When I finally get there, I’m the umpteenth person in line. I pull out my phone while I wait and check my Twitter feed. 1,038 new alerts to my tweet, which I refuse to delete out of principal.
Most of them are suggesting I do things to the orifices of my body that would end my life. One threatens to doxx me. For those of you unfamiliar with this practice, it means to post personal information like an address of where you live and work online for public consumption, quite possibly putting someone in harm’s way.
For the first time since I was fired, I’m grateful that I’m homeless and unemployed.
Turning off my phone, I shove it in the back pocket of my jeans. An excruciating half an hour later, it’s finally my turn. The woman working the car rental desk looks ready to quit. Late sixties, judging by the frizzy cloud of gray hair and slight hang of her jowls. The name tag on her red long sleeve polo shirt reads, Delores.
Delores is not a happy camper. Her thin lips are pinched, accenting the smoker’s lines around them, and she has the vacant stare of a person who has dealt with way too much BS for one day. Whoever came before me has obviously given this poor woman a hard time so I decide to kill Delores with kindness and slap a smile on my face. It always pays to be kind.
“Hi. Hello, Delores. I need a car, the cheapest you’ve got please.”
No surprise, Delores is not charmed by my forced cheerfulness. She sighs tiredly and looks down at her computer screen. “Don’t have much left. And I should warn ya, storm’s coming. You won’t get far.”
My temper is on a hair trigger and it comes up quickly. It’s close to midnight, I haven’t eaten anything outside of a free bag of potato chips in ten hours, and I know I have a two-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of me. A debate is not what I’m looking for right now.
“I’ll take my chances,” I tell her, my perkiness and fake smile fading along with my patience.
“They’re sayin’ a nor’easter––a bad one.”
My smile drops like a brick. “Duly noted. Can I get a car please?” I shove my driver’s license and credit card at her in the hopes she’ll stop giving me the weather report and start printing the rental contract.
But Delores is not deterred. Oh, no. She adds a disapproving head shake to her repertoire and presses on. “With a cyclone bomb.”
“Look––” I start, taking a deep breath to bank my frustration. “Delores, right? I’m not some showboating tourist, okay? I grew up around here. A few feet of snow are a walk in the park for me. We’re good, alright?”
Delores and the patronizing look on her face are turning out to be more annoying than the grilled cheese kid.
“We got one econ rental left. It won’t be good in the snow, but it’s all we got.”
A smile of pure unadulterated triumph breaks across my face. “I’ll take it,” I nearly shout, close to double-fist pumping the air.
She hands me the rental contract on which is written…Nissan Cube. I glance up into Delores’s determined expression and it tells me that if I say one word, that precious Cube is no longer mine. Needless to say, I’m not taking any chances of getting stuck in Albany with my almost maxed out credit cards. I mumble a thanks, and ten minutes later I am hustling out to the underground parking garage dragging two large suitcases behind me to claim my bright orange Nissan Cube.
As I pull the Cube out of the underground garage, snowflakes fall gently on the windshield. It seems everyone is watching the same weather report because the streets of Albany are nearly deserted. The light from the street lamps catch the snow, the night alight with a romantic glow as I navigate the backroads to the thruway. There’s something magical about softly falling snow and a tickle of hope stirs in my chest. Or maybe it’s wishful thinking. It’s in my nature to be positive.