A Rescue
You’re standing by the side of the road and the Honda’s hazard lights are syncing with the beat of your heart, a rhythm meant to signal do no harm and there’s Miles on his knees getting his chinos wet and his shirtsleeves are rolled halfway up his arms and he’s struggling with the lug wrench and he’s pained, saying, ‘We’ll get there in the end,’ which you don’t believe, even though he was talking to himself, because you’re wondering if grappling with the tire really matters now, there’s no way the spare will get you all the way to the wedding, and you call AAA anyway and the tow truck arrives before he can secure the final lug nut and the driver seems to be the opposite of Miles, there’s layers of life on him like a seasoned cast-iron pan, and when you and Miles get in the car, the driver’s eyes fall to your open dress, your exposed knees, freshly shaven, and Miles is in the passenger seat looking out the window, intent on punishing you for calling AAA, punishing you for making small talk with the driver, whose name is Nate, and whose leathery handshake you can still feel in your grip like the ringing of a cymbal, and when he asks where you all are going looking so dressed up, Miles replies, ‘An old friend is getting married,’ which he says as though it’s his old friend rather than your old roommate, Maura, from a half-remembered year at Skidmore, whom you see every six months just to keep the friendship alive, like driving a garage-kept car to keep it from deteriorating, and here is when Nate asks what time the wedding starts, and Miles, looking down at his dirty knees, answers and tells him five o’clock and Nate looks at his dusty Timex and says, ‘We’ll get there in the end,’ which gives you pause, and you want to point out to Miles that both he and Nate said the same thing within the span of an hour, and you look at Miles for a reaction but he’s expressionless, and Nate keeps talking the whole way, hole-punching the silence with cold reflections on the past, and now you know there was once a Dollar General where there’s now a dispensary and an Amazon fulfillment center where there was once a muffler manufacturing plant and it’s the stuff of ordinary dreams and it makes you long for something specific, how you used to spend Sundays, like a cat following the sun from spot to spot, and when he drops you two off at the wedding, he gives you the business card for his garage where he’s going to take the Honda, because it turns out he’s the guy who’s going to replace the tire, and Miles thanks him and then you slide out of the cab and you look at Nate for a second and you thank him a little more eloquently than Miles did, but what you’re saying is you want him to stay, though for no discernible reason, and he tips his tattered cap and you close the door and follow Miles into a large white barn and he asks why did he go through all that effort and get his pants dirty if you were just going to call for a tow in the end, and you remind him that you suggested calling AAA before he could even locate the spare tire in the trunk, and he says he’s going to the bar before it’s too late, and you follow him to a long linen table of white wine offerings and Miles is making small talk with the bartender in the form of running down the saga of the car, the tire, the tow truck, the two of you nearly missing the wedding, and he doesn’t even gesture to you or acknowledge your presence, but the bartender does and he looks around with a forgiving smile before locking eyes at you and he says, ‘We’ll get there in the end,’ which echoes in your head, and later, halfway through the wedding, you lean over to Miles and whisper, ‘What’s this whole we’ll get there in end saying about? Is this, like, a thing?’ and he shushes you because Maura’s sister is telling a story about staying in Provincetown and singing at a piano bar, and from afar it looks like everyone is happy, but it’s only when you get up close that you see the granular trappings of their malaise, and maybe that’s why weddings are packed with people, a gaze that rewards the eye with a kind of ease, the stacks of smiles, the beautiful clothes, except for the stains on Miles’s knees, which you know you’ll be tasked with cleaning, though he hasn’t asked for it already, you know he will, and during the reception when you finally get to greet Maura and Vinny not necessarily to rejoice in their bliss but more so to say, Look at this, I’m here, a roll call of the old friend group, you want her to know that you extended yourself to buy a new dress and find the right present and chide your boyfriend into tying a Windsor knot, and then Maura glides across the floor to someone else but you talk to Vinny and you congratulate him because secretly you always liked him more than Maura, he was always softer, more open, and he shrugs and says, ‘Eh, we’ll get there in the end,’ with a wink, and you stop dead in your tracks, not answering Miles when he asks what’s wrong, and it doesn’t take long to google the answer, that there’s a podcast called We’ll Get There in the End, which appears to be a mantra for millennial men, and this doesn’t mean anything more to you than lean in meant to Miles a decade ago, and you linger while old friends and familiar faces flow around you, and decide to leave when you’ve sufficiently stayed your welcome, your social battery frayed at the edges like the crackle of Nate’s voice when he was hedging his bets about the future of his hometown, and there in the gravel lot pooling around the barn is the CR-V, sitting on four good tires, and Miles is down on his haunches petting a poodle mix with a green collar, and he doesn’t listen when you tell him the car is there, he’s too busy scratching under the chin of the good boy, and you get behind the wheel of the car and start the engine and take the business card from under the windshield that you can see contains a handwritten note and you slip it into your pocketbook, and you wait for minutes for Miles and then decide to start the car and you drive—not very far, but far enough to warrant Miles running after you as though you were going to abandon him in the middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts and he drops down into the passenger seat and doesn’t stop wringing his hands over you almost leaving him there, and he asks, ‘How was I supposed to get home? Huh?’ and he asks it again, adding huh a second time, which you hate, it’s like a punctuation mark you can’t escape, and you’re quiet long enough for it to bother him, and when you open your mouth to answer him, you know exactly what to say.
Trent England won the 2022 Bridport Prize for his story ‘It Could Happen to You.’ His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, The Masters Review, Wigleaf, and more. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was named a Best Microfiction winner in 2020 for his story “A Quick Word About my Life”, which first premiered at Okay Donkey, and he is currently working on a short story collection. He lives with his family in a small New England where he is also a stay-at-home dad. Samples of his published work can be found online at tengland.com.