I leaned forward between the seats to try and see her face but she’d angled her body away from my dad towards her window. When I put my hand on her arm to get her attention, I felt a flinch course through it.
“Mom, are you okay?”
I snuck a look at Dad when she didn’t answer me but his face was unreadable.
“Dad, I have to pee and I’m sure mom’s got to go too. Can we stop somewhere?”
He didn’t answer for a few minutes and I was about to ask again when he let out a tired sigh.
“Can you hold it for a few more minutes? We’re almost there.”
I sat back against my seat and nodded at him in the rearview mirror, as scared and confused as I was about what I had seen in the last few hours I was also really curious about where we were going. I was just a baby when my dad was a soldier. Mom said the last time he deployed I was two-years-old and I screamed for him all through the airport when he left. That was his last tour and when he came back he started up a business as a construction contractor. Even though I envisioned a cold damp cave full of bats, I knew Dad would never bring us to such a place to live long term. He’d made the trip to his cave at least once a month for as long as I could remember so I knew that he would’ve fixed it up into something habitable.
A huge rut in the path made the truck lurch and Mom let out a low moan. I was really worried about her and let a heavy breath of relief out when Dad slowed the truck to a stop. My peanut-sized bladder was screaming for relief but I knew Mom would be even more desperate so I grabbed a box of tissue from the seat and scrambled out the door before opening hers and helping her down. We moved away from the truck behind some bushes and I tried to brace Mom so she could go pee but she waved me off and braced herself against a tree. I spun away and found my own tree to balance against and did my business. I might be a mall girl at heart but I had caved and camped with Dad a few times so I knew to bring the used tissue back to be burnt later.
Mom was back at the truck before me and she passed me a travel sized bottle of hand sanitizer after taking my tissues and putting them in the plastic bag Dad used as a garbage in the front seat. As I rubbed my hands together, I looked around and saw nothing but wilderness. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath of the late summer forest smell and tried to let the stress of the last few hours go. Opening my eyes, I looked at my mom’s strained face and sighed. As crazy as this living in a cave business sounded to me, at least we’d all be together.
I was wrong.
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Stranded (Book 4): City Escape Page 21
