No Service, part 4

To read part 1, click here,
To read part 2, click here,
To read part 3, click here

My husband jumped to his feet and went over to greet the driver. I stood up not quite ready to say goodbye to these nice people and this out-of-the-way place. The hour it took for the driver to get there had flown by. But we needed to get going, still unsure how we would get home.

My husband jumped up into the cab first and I followed. I struggled to put on the one passenger seatbelt in the cab leaving my husband without one. As the truck started moving and bouncing to get up onto the pavement my knuckles clinched the open window frame. I glanced at my husband who gave my leg a little pat of assurance. The truck started moving but was geared so low that the driver had to shift gears every few seconds until we started building speed. Each gear change made an obscene grinding sound.

The tow company was from Mt. Jewett which I had never heard of before but my husband knew where it was as he is a native of Erie. I tried to size up the driver. He looked like a tow-truck driver. He was a heavy-built and rustic-looking man. He wore a hat, jeans and a long shirt left hanging to the outside. My assumption was that he may be one of those redneck types. Then we all started talking and asking questions. He wasn't at all like I thought he may be. He was very sweet and seemed like a real gentle soul. He knew the area inside and out.

We headed back into the woods for miles and finally came to the spot the car gave out. Funny how our car doesn't break down closer to home. With his expertise, the driver loaded up the useless vehicle and locked it down. He took us to the town of Warren to the Subaru dealership. I was afraid it may be quite a ways out of town and we'd have no way to find something to eat but it was adjoined to the local mall. When the truck came to a halt, I had to pry my fingers off of the door frame. I had been gripping it with white knuckles the whole 20 plus miles of curvy road since picking up our car.

As the driver was unhitching our car from the flatbed tow truck my husband saw his cell phone now had service and he called his parent's house in Millcreek hoping someone would be home. He figured if his dad couldn't come then maybe his sister's husband could. Turns out his sister and husband were out of the state for a few days but his dad said he would come pick us up. Half an hour later and he would have been gone attending a party and we wouldn't have been able to get a hold of them until the next day. We felt terrible asking him to come all that way especially right after he got off work and Father's Day being the next day and making him miss out on a gala event.

We thanked our nice tow truck driver and locked up our car. We walked over to a mall restaurant and had dinner. We were gonna miss what we thought was the Stanley Cup final game. As we were eating we both commented how lucky we were to be sitting down and eating right then. How things could have turned out so much differently. And that we both had a really good time. Weird, especially with the thought of a big repair bill hanging over our heads and after just forking out over $4,000 in repairs just a few weeks before for the same car.

We returned to our car and started organizing all our belongings that we couldn't leave in the car. My husband got an envelope out of the self-service box at the repair shop at the dealership. They were already closed and wouldn't open until Monday. He wrote down the symptoms of the car failure, dropped in the keys and dropped it into the slot on the side of the building. So there the car would stay and I was quickly losing fondness for it.

Just then my father-in-law pulls in and he even has a smile on his face. He is a very special person, most always happy and always willing to lend a hand. We filled the trunk with our stuff and loaded ourselves in and headed home. I wondered how long, this time, we would be without our car.......to be continued