Radio

This flash fiction piece was written as a story companion to the day 4 drawing prompt Radio from the 2020 Inktober prompt list. Click here to see the drawing.

For the longest time, it felt like we were going somewhere.

We'd get in the car, crank the radio, and drive. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. The first half of the trip always felt like climbing a mountain. The building up, the excitement of anticipating, the wonder of wandering. Where were we going, and who would be once we reached the summit? What would we see from there, who would we meet, and what would we know once we arrived that we didn't know now?

But somewhere around the fiftieth mile or the third day, when the pocket change ran out and the cassette player jammed after trying to rewind The Best of Queen again, that's when I would realize — we weren't going anywhere. We were riding a treadmill, a hamster wheel that spat us out back in the same place as always, no matter how far away we got.

"Stop messing with the radio, the tape player is gonna start eating the cassette again," my brother poked at my arm to get me to leave it alone, but I ignored him.

"You know, there's this really neat thing they have now called a CD player, ever hear of it?"

"Yeah, right, like mom wouldn't go too ballistic if I blew a paycheck on something that wasn't for her."

"Think she noticed we're gone yet?"

"Nah, it's only been, what—" He feigned looking at his watch, "Two days? The money I left with her could buy enough bags of heroin that she won't even look up from her spoon for four."

The plastic knife I was using to coax the radio to release our favorite tape finally did the trick and, with a disconcerting scraping noise, out it came.

"Voila," I said, deadpan. Peter applauded without looking. After a few minutes of manually winding the cogs so the tape was back at the beginning, I slid it back in and the heavy baseline of Another One Bites the Dust started thrumming through the floor boards.

“Where are we headed?”

“Oh, you know,” Peter gestured to the open road in front of the dash, “Out there.”

I knew better than to expect a more specific answer from Peter. When I was 10 and he was 15, extracting me from the dirty carpet in our druggie mother’s house and taking off in the Plymouth was a grand adventure. Now, it was starting to feel just as empty as staying in the house. I used to pepper him with questions, and he would smile and lead me on like he had answers he just wasn’t sharing.

But there were never any answers.

My stomach grumbled loudly enough for Peter to hear it over Freddie Mercury and he laughed.

“Sounds like you’re hungry,” I joked.

“You’re right, let’s eat.”

Something in his voice told me we’d be heading home after dinner. The money was running out. He never told me how much we had, but his smile always got smaller the more we spent.

The blinking sign on the side of the road said Mabel’s Eat Place, and the number of cars in the parking lot said the food wasn’t exactly five star. We always stopped at places like this. As an old woman, when I long from the home cooking of my childhood, I’ll think of roadside diners and greasy spoons.

“Are you Mabel?” Peter asked the hostess. I tried not to roll my eyes. At least I had someone to embarrass me in front of wait staff since I’d never met my dad. I used to imagine that any man on the street could be him, I would pick one out, here or there, and make up a story about why he left and imagine this was the moment he tracked me down and came back to me.

According to mom, in her rare moments of clarity, Peter and I had different dads. It made sense, what with his red hair, green eyes and pale skin, compared to my jet black everything and olive complexion. Neither of us looked like mom. I used to wonder if she’d kidnapped us both, just to get checks from the government. Hell, maybe she did.

We sat in a booth by a window and stared silently at the sunset for a while, tumbleweeds blowing past every now and again. Five years of spontaneous road trips and we’d finally run out of things to talk about. Last month, I tried to talk to Peter about college and he told me to shut up. He’d never said anything like that to me before.

He worked as a cashier in the supermarket 6 days a week, and mom took almost all his money to feed her habit. Last year when he tried to get a scholarship to the vocational school in town, she found his application when we were out driving and ripped it up. We found it scattered all over his bed like the saddest confetti in the world, and then she came in screaming about who was supposed to take care of her if he was in class all the time. So Peter wasn’t going to school.

It was one of those old diners that still allowed smoking inside, plastic ashtrays next to the napkin dispenser and salt and pepper shakers. Peter lit up and I tried not to wrinkle my nose at the acrid smell.

When the waitress walked up, Peter grabbed my menu from my hand before I could order and gave both of them back to her.

“We’ll share a short stack of pancakes with scrambled eggs and,” He looked over at me, blowing smoke out, “What do you think, sausage or bacon?”

I ground my teeth silently. I wanted to order the Monte Cristo sandwich. The money really must have run out this time. Plastering a fake smile on my face, I turned to the waitress.

“Sausage.”

She smiled back at me, just as fake, and went back into the kitchen. We sat in silence while Peter finished his cigarette. These trips aren’t gonna be fun any more, not after Peter told me to shut up last time. Neither of us can keep pretending we’re going somewhere.

The radio in the diner switched from a DJ yammering on to a Queen song and Peter and I shared a brief moment of eye contact before bursting out in laughs.

“I’m gonna hit the ladies’,” I told Peter, and he nodded, not looking, but still smiling.

All in all, he was a good big brother. Saved me when he could, entertained and distracted me when he couldn’t. We should have planned to get out, we should have stashed money and left one day to a new town and a new life. But every time I floated that idea, he would say, “What about mom?”

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. Who cares about mom? I never understood his loyalty to her. He said it was different, when he was little. He said when his dad was around there was no heroine in the house, every weekend was a different activity: swimming, biking, camping. He said there was breakfast in the morning, and dinner at night, and mom cooked it all. Somehow I never believed him.

The girl looking back at me in the mirror was sick of going and going and never ending up anywhere, and that was the moment I decided the only person who was going to save her was me.

Slipping out the back door of the diner, I caught up to one of the less scary looking truckers who’d just left out the front.

“Hey, mister. Think you could give me a ride?”

“Well, uh … I reckon I could, but I’m headed back east, all the way to Pennsylvania. That the direction you’re looking to go?”

“Sounds perfect.”

He jerked his head toward the other side of his rig and I clambered up into the passenger seat. As we pulled away, I saw Peter, still staring out the side window of Mabel’s Eat Place, a thousand unpursued dreams clouding his face.

Maybe this would shake him up, maybe he’d finally make some choices of his own. Or maybe he and mom would be stuck forever the way they always were. I felt bad, in that moment, that he would worry about me. But then, he never really had room to worry about anyone as much as he worried about mom.

As for me? I was finally in a vehicle where something was playing on the radio other than Queen. I was finally going somewhere.