Stop Sign, Where We Were, & Where We Came To

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Gary Fincke

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Stop Sign

My mother, motionless and unblinking, studied the road for so long I began to imagine my sister and I standing on the shoulder, an ambulance parked nearby. Though I had no idea what her condition would be called, how dire it was, whether it was temporary or permanent. I didn’t speak, afraid that she wouldn’t stir, confirming the validity of my panic. At last, her thumbs lifted and fell, her tongue flicked over her lips. When we began to move, the silence that had settled among us grew heavier, the car more crowded with its promise we had agreed to share. I closed my eyes and tried to think us home.

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Where We Were

“Where are we?” our mother said, slowing down and looking back and forth as if she was searching for house numbers.

“We missed the turn,” I said.

“What turn?”

“To the big road.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, but we were almost stopped by now, and when she pulled into a driveway and turned around, my older sister, blinking, leaned forward from the back seat. “There’s three lanes to cross there. We’d get killed if we didn’t stop,” she announced like Miss Musser, my second-grade teacher, the first thing she’d said since she’d fallen asleep five minutes after we’d picked her up from her weekend at church camp.

What do you know with your eyes shut? I wanted to say, but as soon as we crested the first small hill going the other way, she could see Route 8 as proof. On Sunday afternoon, near the end of April, the traffic was steady, nearly every car and truck going faster than the posted limit of fifty-five while I started thinking she would be happy that we had ourselves a genuine miracle to talk about.

“Mom, you really didn’t stop,” my sister said.

“You didn’t even slow down,” I clarified.

“How come we’re not dead?” my mother said, getting into the spirit. She pulled off the road and sat us to take in the view, time enough that I started considering there might be a down side to a narrow escape, a trade-off that, sure enough, she started explaining as soon as she pulled back onto the road and crept toward the stop sign. God’s will, she would soon decide. His special plan for my sister and me. Even worse, because we would never know that secret blueprint, we needed to buckle down and work because God was counting on us.

I was wrong. Every time she brought up the Route 8 story through May and early June, she said she felt as if that miracle was a sign designed especially for her and her terrible headaches and the things she’d been forgetting besides a stop sign. She mentioned it in the weekly way my father brought up our minister’s sermons after church, brightening for half an hour before settling back into the fog that had puzzled her and our father for months. After school ended for the summer, when she dragged my sister and me to the doctor’s instead of trusting us with two hours alone, she told the receptionist all about it, talking loud enough to let the other two women in the waiting room know they were in the presence of the chosen.

But after we left, she was so quiet on the way to the parking lot that I didn’t fight with my sister about who sat up front. I crawled into the back and buckled up without being told. She drove so slowly that I was afraid we would be hit from behind.

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Where We Came To

My mother’s dresses, in late August, hung like curtains on her body. She held the clothes I would grow into against my chest and legs, dressing me for school and church for a year, two if we were lucky, showing me why I needed to furiously study, launching a sermon on pride and envy that ended with her guarantee I would thank her for the yearly lessons of ill-fitting and out of style. When she carried a shirt to the window for close inspection, I heard her declare the cloud-parting weather heavenly, and I tried to tear my eyes from the stacked layers of clothes-to-come, what I would be wearing when she was gone.

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