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Be Right Back
Oh, thank God.
I remembered my inner atheist and cringed.
But that was definitely a bus a few hundred yards away. I thought I might die out there, a slow, agonizing death of dehydration in a desert.
Please don’t be a mirage. Please.
My car had broken down several miles back.
In Death Valley.
That irony stopped being funny shortly after I’d left my car behind and began walking this dusty road into hell. It was only two years old. I changed the oil and honored the suggested maintenance schedule with diligence.
I sat in it a long time before accepting the fact. Help wasn’t coming. There was precious little traffic on this road. I was only on it because it was the most expeditious route to my new job in Los Angeles.
I had been living in Beatty, Nevada because that was where my mom was born. It was also where she wanted to die. I was a dutiful son; when she called, I put my life on hold, and I went. After I set up her hospice care, the two of us fell into a routine. I would make her morning coffee (something her oncologist was adamantly opposed to), fixed her breakfast (two eggs…
