A+Father

My Father by: Jennifer Clark Evans

I crashed my father's car when I was fifteen. "You can take the car for the day," he said "if you pick me up from work." The terms reasonable, I eagerly agreed.

The downtown expressway, a tangled cobweb of swiftly moving traffic, confused me. The overlapping overpasses intimidated and every wrong off ramp led to bad neighborhoods with no hope for reentry.

This much be the exit, I thought, unsure. Paused behind a Toyota Camry, I waited my turn to enter the unbroken flow of rush hour. Watching the speeding cars, calculating the precise moment of my merge, I neglected the stopped one in front of me.

A confident push on the pedal took me straight into the back of the one in front of me. She hadn't merged yet. I totaled my father's car.

Waiting anxiously for him at the nearest Shell station in the bad neighborhood off the wrong ramp - I waited and worried.

I don't even know how he got there. Finally, my dad came to me with open arms and said: "I'm glad that you're alright."