Catharine Bramkamp
As you drive to work what would happen if you simply turned the car around and traveled directly out of town? What would happen if you just drove straight out of the state?
One average, typical Tuesday morning Jane turns her Volvo right instead of left and briskly drives away; from her job, her husband, her life, towards something she can’t identify.
Jane is a forty-year-old woman who runs away from home. Her adventures answer the question; what would happen if you chucked it all and just left town?
Catharine Bramkamp lives in California with her husband, one out of two sons and a dog that reproduces its weight in fur balls once a week. She has published over 300 newspaper and magazine articles most recently in Modern Maturity. She is a featured contributor to Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul, and has published a collection of essays Being Miss Behaved.
Catharine holds a BA in English from UCSB and a Masters in English from Sonoma State University. She teaches a journaling class The Inside Out.
So here she was. The cell phone was dead and the car wouldn’t fire it up because it too was dead or expiring here in the heat. She didn’t exactly pitch a hysterical fit when the car died, but then again she accepted the fate of both the car and herself with the admirable stoicism of the hardy pioneer stock. She also considered shooting the beast. If only she had a gun. If she had a gun, she could have blasted away both the phone and the car in a vast orgiastic mercy killing spree. But then again, with her luck, she’d miss and the bullet would ricochet off the bumper of the car and lodged in her frontal lobe.
Of course the wound wouldn’t kill her, it would be just lethal enough to inflict permanent brain damage to the point where it would forever be the main topic of conversation among her former friends and lunch acquaintances.
“There’s Poor-Jane.” (As added insult to injury she’d acquire one of those odious hyphenated names – Poor-Jane, just like, Susie-The-Yoga-Instructor, Melissa-At-The-Bank, Paul-who-Married-His-Cousin). Her former friends would whisper over balsamic tinted argula at the Lark Creek Inn. “She was injured in a freak accident.”
“Really where?’
“She was out in Nevada along Highway 80.”
“No, I mean where was she injured?”
“What was she doing out there?”
“No one knows, and of course” Here the speaker would insert a sympathetic gesture, a knowing shrug. “Now she can’t tell us.”
Jane carefully picked her way along the edge of the gritty asphalt. Her shoes were the only sound on the dirt. Well sand really, sand and raw edges of the asphalt that sort of ended like the end of the sidewalk, one of Kevin’s favorite poetry books when he was a small child and still willing and able to crawl in her lap.
And mother and son would read by the lamplight while the coyotes howled around the sod house.
No, that wasn’t right. The coyotes were far and few between in Marin. And they didn’t howl. Like business people, coyotes were silent until they attacked.
Oh hell, that was too sentimental. Kevin was grown, Sam Jr. was grown. And the father of her precious children, the man who started it all, was grown.
It was hot out here. She dabbed at her forehead with the back of her hand and lifted her hair off her neck in the hopes of catching a breeze. But there was no breeze. She couldn’t imagine walking all the way back to California. Maybe there was more to the Donner Party than anyone knew, maybe they ate each other out of frustration, perhaps revenge. She could eat someone. Who?
Her husband.
