Left Neglected

Chapter 35





There’s no Mangia in Vermont,” says Bob. I say nothing. We’re all piled into Bob’s car, going to dinner at Mangia, my favorite family restaurant in Welmont. But I’m not conceding any points to Welmont for Mangia. There are plenty of decent restaurants in Vermont. Normally, I can’t see Bob when he drives, but for some reason my field of vision is expanded to include part of his profile, enough to see his right thumb poking around on the screen of his phone.

“Stop!” I yell.

He hits the brakes. My seat belt locks and presses into my chest as I lurch forward. Sandwiched in a long line of 35 mph traffic, we’re lucky we weren’t rear-ended.

“No, not the car. Put the phone away,” I say.

“Jeez, Sarah, you scared me. I thought something was wrong. I have to make a quick call.”

“Have you learned nothing from what happened to me?”

“Sarah,” he says in his singsong, please-don’t-be-over-dramatic-and-ridiculous voice.

“Do you want to end up like me?”

“There’s no right way for me to answer that question,” he says.

“I’ll answer it for you then. No. No, you do not want to end up like me. And you don’t want to kill someone either, do you?”

“Stop, you’re going to scare the kids.”

“Put the phone away. No more phones in the car, Bob. I mean it. No phones.”

“It’s a quick call, and I need to catch Steve before the morning.”

“No phones! No phones!” chant Charlie and Lucy from the backseat, loving the chance to tell their father what to do.

“It’s a two-second call. I could’ve already been done with it.”

“We’re ten minutes from Mangia. Can your call wait ten minutes? Can steve and the big important world wait ten minutes to hear from you?”

“Yes,” he says, drawing out the word in an exaggerated calmness, an attempt to mask his annoyance towering behind it. “But we’ll be at the restaurant then, and I’m not doing anything now.”

“You’re DRIVING!”

I used to fill my morning and evening commutes with calls (and even texts and emails in stop-and-go traffic). Now I’ll never use my phone in the car again (assuming I’m someday able to drive again). Of all the lessons I’ve learned and adjustments I’ve made so far following this experience, No Phones in the Car is probably the most elementary.

“How about this?” I ask. “You could talk to me now. Let’s have a nice ten-minute conversation, and then when we get to the restaurant, and you park the car, you can make your call, and we’ll all wait for you.”

“Fine.”

“Thank you.”

Bob drives and says nothing. The kids have stopped chanting. The six of us sit in the car through an entire red light with the radio off and no DVD playing, and the silence feels oppressive. He doesn’t get it, which worries me at first, but through the catalyst of his silence, I quickly convert from being worried to being mad. When we wait through the next red light, and he still doesn’t say anything, I go from being mad that he doesn’t get why I don’t want him using his phone in the car to being mad that he doesn’t get why I don’t want to go back to Berkley or why I want to live in Vermont. We slow down behind the car in front of us, which is turning right, and I can’t believe that he doesn’t get me.

“What do you want to talk about?” Bob finally asks, Mangia now only a couple of blocks away.

“Nothing.”