By Nancy McCabe

Later it became one of those stories you tell at parties, embellishing: how I’d forgotten that my 1976 orange Hornet was prone to rolling if I didn’t put on the parking brake, how I parked it at the top of a hill that sloped sharply down to Highway 71, which bisected Fayetteville, Arkansas, and hopped out to fetch my neighbor. How I returned to find my car gone. 

“Someone stole your car?” my neighbor asked incredulously, meaning, who would steal that car, with its ceiling that drooped like a tent’s, with an orange finish that had dulled and turned mostly black because, at 25 and in graduate school, I never had the time or inclination to wash it? 

A pickup truck chugged up the street. “Are you looking for a car?” the driver called out the window. “It turned thataway.” He pointed. I ran. 

Later I would reconstruct my car’s journey, how it rolled down the street, gaining momentum before suddenly, inexplicably, making a sharp left turn into the yard of a couple I’ll call Edith and Elmer. They were sitting in their matching recliners before their living room window, drinking coffee and waiting for Elmer’s brother to arrive from Little Rock. Elmer was recovering from a hernia operation. His doctor had instructed him to avoid strenuous activity and sudden movements. 

“Then that car turned into our yard and I said to myself, ‘What’s Bud doing driving in our yard?’” Edith told me later. “And then I said to myself, ‘Bud would never drive a car like that!’” 

Elmer nearly leapt up from his chair and popped his stitches when he saw my Hornet plowing straight for the picture window. Suddenly, it swerved, veered around a tree and a bed of newly-planted begonias, and cut a path right down the middle of the yard before it crashed into the back hedge.  

When a police officer came for the insurance report, he shook his head. “You were lucky. Last week a car got loose on this street and rolled all the way down to Highway 71, where it totaled a BMW.” 

I gaped at him, at the idea that out-of-control cars was a local epidemic, at the notion of what might have been.  

                     *     *     * 

Now I’m around the same age as Edith and Elmer, and I have a 25-year-old daughter who lives in Pittsburgh and climbs rocks and runs and in college was out alone all hours of the night. I live a sedate life in small town Pennsylvania, reading books and walking my dog in a cemetery on the side of a mountain where the gravestones are all starting to slide, tumbling and toppling down the slope.  

I think of the time when my daughter was six and she went out to our Toyota Corolla, a freshly washed tasteful white this time, parked on a hill outside a friend’s house, to retrieve a toy. She climbed into the front seat. Out the window, a house moved. It moved again, further away.  

Then she realized it was the car moving, not the house. It had fallen out of gear. It rolled, slowly, then faster as it gained momentum. 

Panicked, my daughter lobbed herself into the back seat, buckled herself into her car seat, and screamed as she went careening down the hill, sailing into a neighbor’s yard where the car churned up some grass, knocked a mailbox askew, and skidded to a stop. 

Minutes later, she burst through our friends’ front door. “Mom.” Her tone was urgent. “We have to go right now.” 

“Why?” I glanced out the window and leapt to my feet. “Where’s the car?” 

It took a while to get the story out of her. We spent the afternoon filling in the car’s tracks in the unhappy neighbor’s yard.  

That night I rocked her, my forty-pound daughter, both of us still shaken. She was missing a tooth, a gap in a row of jagged little bone-white teeth. Her hair smelled like Tea Tree shampoo. It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last that I felt overwhelmed by the Sisyphean task of keeping children safe. It wasn’t the first and it wouldn’t be the last that it felt like time was hurtling by too fast.   

Two tiny freckles pitched at the ridge of her cheekbone, sledders about to take off, divers perched at the edge of a cliff, cherries dangling from an invisible stem.  I traced those two freckles, those partners in crime, a matched set like relief and dread, like headlights, socks, eyes, like lungs, like wings.    

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Nancy McCabe is the author of nine books, most recently the middle grade novel Fires Burning Underground (Regal House 2025), the comic novel The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolary Story of Academic Pandemic Pandemonium (Outpost 19 2024), the YA novel Vaulting through Time (CamCat 2023), and the memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved? (Missouri 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Salon, and Newsweek, has received a Pushcart, and has been listed ten times as notable in Best American anthologies.