Midwest Mantras

I lost John Wayne in Minneapolis. Lindsay, my lone contact, has already left for work when Mom and I stumble down to the parking lot at 7:00 am.
“Where’s the car?”
I hope I’ve just forgotten where we parked in my sleep-and-coffee-deprived haze.
A quick scan of the lot turns up nothing. We return to the parking space where I’d last seen my jeep, affectionately called John Wayne. At midnight it was parked here, in the lot of my childhood best friend’s apartment building. The back was loaded down with everything I owned, the first stop on my exodus to Montana.
Mom asks me if I put the guest-parking permit in the window, her voice pitching higher. Higher still when she asks me if the car was stolen.
“There’s not any glass,” I point out. “No one broke in.”
Not that you can’t steal a car without smashing a window, but saying the words out loud calms me. Maybe if I wish it hard enough it will be true.
Lindsay is panicked when I tell her. This has happened before, she says, to one of her fiancé’s friends when he didn’t park in a guest spot.
“You didn’t tell me about a guest spot. The office didn’t tell me about a guest spot.”
She stammers an apology and Google’s the name of the impound lot.
Mom is fuming on the front steps of the apartment building. I call a taxi, unusually thankful for smartphones, and sit down next to her.
“I think I hate this city,” she says.
The cab driver is Indian, and he laughs at our story.
“I’m moving to Montana for graduate school,” I say.
“That’s a long drive without a car,” he jokes.
The impound lot is in a seedy part of town. A man stands behind a thick glass window. A dingy sign riddled with grammar mistakes proclaims that I am the law-breaker. Don’t be mad at us. I cringe.
“Do you have the black jeep?” I ask.
“Do you have $300? Cash only.”
This must be what a drug deal feels like. I pass the money, and he points me to a back spot in the lot. I pull the car forward to where Mom is still huddled with the cab driver.
He waited for us. I’m again surprised at people’s kindness. Generosity can be found in the strangest of places.
We’re halfway through North Dakota and finally caffeinated when Mom laughs.
“Could you imagine making this trip in a covered wagon? God, I hate that city,” she says.
I shake my head, tell her I wouldn’t mind a covered wagon or more adventure.
I crank up the radio. It sings about old country roads. Take me home.
John Wayne rides again, and life is waiting at the end of this long highway.