Here is the opening chapter of my work-in-progress, tentatively titled "Helicopter Mom". It will be a middle grade novel.
I remember riding with my grandparents on the interstate one afternoon. I don’t know where we were going or how long ago it was, but I am certain it was a summer weekend, or maybe a Friday. The traffic was pretty heavy and there were lots of RV’s and luggage racks passing us. Some distance ahead was a sparkling white pickup truck hauling a long motor boat, a runabout, my grandfather had said. The truck was traveling pretty fast despite its load. Suddenly the wind swept into the boat’s open cockpit, scooped out one of the blue foam seat cushions, and sent it tumbling through the air like one of Lucifer’s angels, into the speeding traffic behind it. There was no way that seat cushion was going to do any damage on its own, but it landed on the windshield of a very young girl driving a bright green car. She must have recently earned her driver’s license because she panicked when the thing slapped dead center on the glass and stuck there like a pancake on the ceiling. She swerved sharply to the right, then to the left into the fast lane where her car was struck hard by a minivan. The driver of the car behind the minivan swerved into the right lane to avoid a collision, narrowly missing a tractor-trailer. The driver of the tractor-trailer jerked his truck out of the path of the swerving car, sending the big rig off the highway and into a ditch. Traffic on the highway on that summer afternoon came to an abrupt halt, and those of us behind the wreckage waited quietly for several hours while emergency vehicles cleared the scene.
The driver hauling the motorboat, however, continued on his way, oblivious to the calamity he had created. I imagined him arriving at a little cabin along the river, or maybe a condo at the bay, unhitching the boat, and discovering the missing seat cushion. I pictured him blaming his wife for not having secured the cushion more carefully, and his wife blaming him for being in too great a hurry to allow time to attach the boat cover. I imagined him complaining about the great inconvenience it was causing him, now having to spend part of his vacation searching for a replacement, or sitting on a hot plastic seat with no cushion. I thought of him reading about the horrendous accident on the interstate and thinking, “What a shame! So glad I wasn’t involved in that mess.” And he would go through life never knowing, never believing it was possible that he was more than just “involved.”
The driver of that pickup truck is my mother.
I don’t mean she was actually driving the truck that caused the accident on the interstate that summer afternoon. But she is the kind of person who can walk into a room or a building or a life, go about her business as she sees fit, and leave behind chaos and carnage without ever looking over her shoulder.
And I—
I am a blue foam seat cushion.
