Snydersville

If it was all a dream the only way out of it was to keep moving forward. My alarm would wake me up eventually and I would start another hectic Tuesday morning narrowly making it to work on time only to be stressed out for eight hours wishing I could quit. If it wasn’t a dream, well, then I still had to get up for work tomorrow and I’d already lost a lot of valuable time. The whole thing started with a road trip and a bad storm Since I’d moved to Lincoln for college I always made it back to my hometown for Memorial Day weekend. The town held a parade on Main Street on Monday and I drove back to the city directly after so I’d be fresh for work in the morning. Last year my boyfriend Karl joined me. It’s how I introduced him to my family just weeks after he moved into my apartment. But this year I made the trip alone again. Eighteen months into our relationship he decided he was better off taking a cruise with a bimbo from work. That’s how we broke up. He told me a week before that he’d have his stuff moved out of my place and into hers before their vacation. Classy. At the party, I got those pity looks from my parents. That was the worst part of going home. That drove me to drink more than I’d planned. I woke up with a raging headache because at twenty-eight I could no longer drink like I used to. I wasn’t blackout drunk. I remember ninety percent of the night including when my older brother Rory put his arm around me and said, “Ember, I never liked Karl.” That was sweet. Rory always had my back. I was born and raised in Bedford, Iowa. It didn’t seem so small when I was growing up, but a generous estimate of the current population would be around fifteen hundred. Minus me, of course. My parents insisted I go to college. I picked Nebraska so I could still drive home for holidays but once I tasted city life and realized what I’d been missing, I vowed never to be a small-town girl again. Thus, I was pretty anxious to get home to my apartment. The drive back to the city is more than two hours. The first good stretch of the drive is a two-lane highway with not much traffic. But on a holiday that slow-moving country traffic can add an extra twenty minutes or so. Nobody in small towns is ever in a hurry to get anywhere on a holiday. It drove me crazy. Plus, I still had a tinge of a headache. My mom filled us all with a hearty country brunch complete with pancakes, eggs, and farm bacon. It was the kind of heart-attack meal I’d never let myself eat except when I was back home. But it was the greatest comfort for a hangover. The spins were gone, but I still had the pain. I’d filled my water bottle when I left and had already chugged most of it. I’d driven from Lincoln to Bedford dozens of times over the previous ten years and never stopped anywhere in between. I didn’t pay much attention to the scenery. Farms, livestock, slowly imploding barns, and small towns like mine looked more and more decrepit every year. Ghost towns. On that particular day, my head pounded so it was hard to focus on the boring highway ahead of me. I saw the dark clouds stretching over the flat landscape and knew I was driving into something serious. The rain was light at first, but within minutes it came in sheets and I pushed my sunglasses up onto my head. The sky flashed in a spider web of lightning followed seconds later by a deafening clap of thunder. I was in it, but I wasn’t freaked out. I’d weathered worse storms. But the rain was relentless. Soon it came so hard my wipers couldn’t keep up. The lights of a big rig came at me and I realized I couldn’t see the truck at all. That’s when I decided to pull off the road. I was brave, but not stupid. I could have pulled off onto the side of the road and waited in my car for the storm to pass. But the highway was narrow and that semi had come close enough to my little Taurus to make it shimmy. What if the next truck couldn’t see me? What if one of them lost control? No, I needed to get far away from that. I pulled off onto a bumpy paved road. I planned to pull into the next farm driveway I saw and wait it out there. I’d only driven about a mile when I saw the vague outline of a building through the sheet of rain on my windshield. It was a long, low building. I pulled off into an overgrown parking lot and right to the front of the building and cut the engine. It appeared to be an old shop of some kind with huge boarded-up windows in the front. It looked run-down like it hadn’t been touched in decades. The rain finally eased up as I faced the ruin of the shop. Still, the streams of water created a swimming effect as I stared and imagined what it must have been in its past life. I was pulled from my daydream when the headlights of another car kaleidoscoped through my back window. Someone had the same idea to take shelter far from the highway. The car pulled in a respectable distance from mine. But the rain had slowed down significantly. If I got back on the road now I’d probably catch up with the storm again. So I waited and hoped the person in the other car wasn’t some chatty extrovert who would roll their window down and give me a holler. I tapped my phone on my dash to wake it up. There were no new notifications. No signal. “Stupid rural service,” I grumbled and glared at the 1G in the corner of my screen. As I scrolled through my apps to see if anything worked, a loud thump hit the roof of my car and made me jump. Then another. Then my windshield. Within seconds my car was pelted with hailstones the size of quarters. They collected on my idle windshield wipers like fake snow on an Iowa ski slope. The stones grew bigger and threatened to break my windows. Clutching my phone to my chest I cowered down in my seat as if that could protect me. Suddenly there was a knock on my window, not from hail, but from a human hand. A man’s wet face peered at me through the rain. He motioned for me to get out of the car. “Come on,” his muffled voice shouted through the noise of the hailstones. It took me a few seconds to react. Instead, I stared at him while I considered whether there was more danger in my car with the hail threatening to break my windows or under the eave of an abandoned building with a stranger. Meanwhile, he stood outside pelted by stones that seemed to increase in size by the minute. Leaving my purse in the back seat I shoved my hand with my phone under the bottom hem of my shirt and opened the door. The man turned and scurried to the front of the shop where he stood and breathlessly waited for me to catch up. Four long strides and I stood with him soaked to the bone. My jeans clung to my thighs like lead. Thank goodness my phone stayed dry. “Oh, wow,” the man panted. His eyes were blue. I noticed that first. His soaked hair clung to his forehead in dark curls. He was around my age and was the kind of non-threatening attractive that you look for in a coworker but not in a celebrity. He put his hand on the peeling exterior of the shop and examined it with wonder. I nodded at him and tried to fix my hair. Only ten seconds in the rain and it was as wet as if I’d just gotten out of the shower. Still, we weren’t completely out of it. The cover we were under wasn’t wide and the wind blew a fine spray at us every few seconds. “Maybe we can get in,” I said and went for a double shop doors. A heavy chain held them closed. The glass was missing from both sides and replaced with plywood on the inside. When I pulled the doors didn’t budge. So I pushed on the wood to see if it would give at all. It didn’t. “You’re going to just break in?” He sounded amused.