Dick loves the powerful engine. Jane the safety. The twins love different things about the bright red wagon. Alice—the new car smell. Andy—opening and closing a window with the press of a button. On sunny weekend afternoons, Dick washes and waxes the car, nodding as he polishes the chrome door handles. He was right to insist they buy up. The boss says Dick’s in line for a promotion. The car will be paid for in no time.
Jane drives the twins to school, to Alice’s piano lesson and Andy’s soccer practice. She hauls the twins to play in the mountain snow, to movies and sleepovers. Turning the wheel with confidence, she scans the neighborhood streets from inside the sleek, roomy car. Sometimes she would like to go for a drive by herself. But where would she go?
Daydreaming in the backseat of the new car, Alice pictures sitting down alone at the piano, her fingers running up and down the keyboard, filling the room with music that reaches deep into the listener’s soul. But her teacher parks herself beside Alice on the bench, insisting Alice start with scales before playing “You Are My Sunshine” for the hundredth time.
Even boys who mimic Andy’s clumsy moves slow their warm-up drills as he gets out of the new red wagon. Maybe this game he’ll show them. But Andy can’t keep up with his team-mates. Passing the ball with strength and grace, they dribble without looking at their feet. If Andy looks up for a second someone steals the ball. He watches most of the game from the bench.
On the way home from school, a car runs a light and hits the red wagon. Jane and the twins are okay, but the back passenger door can’t be opened. Even after Dick takes it to be fixed, it takes superhuman strength to climb into the back seat.
Andy’s friends whine about how hard it is to pull that door open. Alice calls the car a gas-guzzler and accuses Dick and Jane of killing the planet. Most nights after dinner, Dick scrolls through reviews of bigger cars with DVD players, cup holders, and multiple ports for their devices. Mobile living rooms. Cars so big you could live in them. Closing his laptop, he climbs into bed. Jane is already asleep.
The day after Dick gets his promotion, he drives home in a shiny new silver minivan. It cost half his annual salary, but he got a killer interest rate because of his excellent credit score. He knows he’s being groomed for a top-level position. The red wagon, driven only for emergencies, waits in front of the house, windshield splattered with bird droppings.
When someone hotwires and steals the wagon, Jane is relieved. A week later the cops call Dick, telling him the car has been found, stripped, on a dead-end street a mile away. Dick keeps thinking he’ll pick up the car, but he always finds something more pressing to do.
One night a man, tired of sleeping under a bridge in the rain, climbs inside the abandoned red wagon. It stinks of mold, but there’s room for a sleeping bag, a box of clothes—even his camp stove and bike. The next night he tapes cardboard over the windows. Now, he can sleep without anyone looking in. The door that sticks? The perfect alarm.
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Phebe Jewell‘s work appears in numerous journals, including Milk Candy Review, Bending Genres, Pithead Chapel, Flash Boulevard, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender nonconforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.