The heater was barely working, the two front tires were balding and Adam cringed each time the wiper blades grinded across the windshield just knowing they would stop before the next rotation. The transmission wasn't making the happiest noise in the world either each time his Mother shifted gears as they drove west out of Fargo on Interstate 94.
At least Ellen Cabbell's car was running. Adam's was still sitting in his dorm's parking lot back at North Dakota St., broken down and waiting for him to make enough money to get it to a garage. It was part of the reason he was headed back home to Jamestown with his Mom for Spring Break rather than joining a few of his friends in Cancun.
The sliver of selfish adolescence that remained inside Adam made him want to ask his Mother several weeks earlier if he could barrow some money to make the trip to Mexico. But as he rode in her barely running Camry through the falling late Winter slush accumulating on the Interstate, he'd matured enough to know she was still struggling herself just to make due.
Adam never knew his Father, really never had mustered the courage to dig all that up with his Mom. Ellen had been 19 when she got pregnant and it wasn't long before the guy she was seeing had left town. Those were the days before DNA tests and frankly, at that time of her life, Ellen wasn't completely sure who the Father was. While she didn't consider herself 'loose', she was involved with a couple of guys in the timeframe Adam was conceived.
When Adam was born, from how he looked, Ellen was pretty sure she knew who the real father was. But by then she'd made the decision to pull herself up by the boot straps and make a go of parenthood herself without complicating Adam's life any further with a Father who didn't want to be there.
Even as she drove down the highway that evening, out of the corner of her eye Ellen could see Adam's profile as he sat there and that combined with the sound of his voice, she shivered in private amazement of just how much he reminded her of Adam's Dad at nearly the same age when she was with him.
The two continued a steady dialogue as they drove on until the occasional pitter pat of sleet hitting the windshield grew too incessant to ignore. The stark North Dakota plains landscape was still covered with its usual late Winter snowcap and as the evening dusk gave way to darkness, it was clear Ellen and Adam were driving straight into the oncoming storm.
"Why didn't I just go to Cancun?" Adam jeered as the gravity of their situation started to creep in.
"Guess we probably should stop for the night and let the storm pass," Ellen admitted begrudgingly, knowing her car wasn't equipped to handle the weather that lie ahead, a fact that was reinforced several times by the tractor trailers whizzing by at 80 plus and covering them with slush.
"Let's start looking for some motels Adam...the traffic is already starting to thin out. Finding a vacancy's gonna be tougher with the weather the later it gets," Ellen said, knowing the lodging options would be few over the remote stretch of highway between Fargo and Jamestown.
Money had always been a sensitive subject growing up and even though he never went to bed hungry or cold, it was quite often a tight squeeze financially. From the shape his Mom's car was in, Adam guessed correctly that helping him with his tuition had put a serious strain on her pursestrings. Trying to think of how much cash he had in his wallet, Adam was going to suggest paying for the motel room when they stopped but he kept the offer to himself when he remembered only having about 12 bucks in it the last time he looked.
"Let's try to find a place a little out of the way...all the chain places along the highway will be twice as much as a 'mom and pop' place," Ellen suggested, her knuckles more than a little white now as she gripped the wheel, fighting the elements covering the road.
"I've got a credit card I keep around for emergencies...I guess this qualifies," Ellen added, relieving some of the angst she could sense coming from her Son. "The next turnoff leads to that Indian reservation...there should be some old places along the way."
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The Livermoore Inn wasn't the Ritz-Carlton. Motel 6 either. But it was a roof over their heads out of the blustery wintery mix that had settled over the area.
Stepping into their room, both Ellen and Adam commented on how strange it felt checking into a motel without any luggage. The only extra clothes either had was the basket of dirty laundry Adam had brought back from school to wash when he got home.
"I don't guess they have room service," Adam quipped, taking a look around the room and the way the dingy wallpaper warped in several places on the walls.
"I don't think so," his Mom replied. "The old lady at the desk said there were a couple of diners down about 2 miles or so but I don't feel like going back out in that stuff...the places might close up early anyway. Here...here's the bag of Doritos I brought in from the car."
The two tried their best to settle into such a cramped space. Thankfully they'd stopped soon enough to get one of the rooms with double beds but unfortunately the room was located at the far northwest corner of the motel and its thin, rickety walls took the brunt of wind from the incoming storm.
The heater in the room 122 did work, barely, but at least the toilet did flush and there was lukewarm water in the bathroom sink. The blankets on the bed did look relatively clean but neither Ellen or her Son wanted to be the first one to peel the covers back to see what waited beneath.
An avid reader, Ellen always kept a couple of books in her purse to read when situations allowed so she was more than content to pass the evening propped up under the covers catching up on one of her romance novels. Adam on the other hand flipped on the tv but there wasn't much to choose from. The motel didn't have cable and the few channels he could pick up on the antenna were fuzzy at best considering the weather outside. Exhausted anyway, Adam decided to just crawl under the sheets and call it a day.
Seeing his Mom was off in her own little world reading under the dim light of the lamp on the nightstand between the beds, Adam stripped down to his teeshirt and boxers, peeled the blanket back and crawled in bed. Pulling the covers tight over his head, Adam spent a couple of seconds trying to build up some frictional heat until the chill in his bones steadily disappeared. It wasn't until he was about three quarters of the way asleep that a long forgotten memory filtered back to him.
Adam couldn't have been more than 7 or 8 at the time in a circumstance eerily similar to the one he and his Mom had found themselves in that night. It had been Thanksgiving night all those years earlier and they were making the three hour trip home from visiting his Grandparents for the holiday when their car had blown a tire. Pulled over on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, it wasn't long until the late Autumn chill had taken its toll. In those days before cellphones and without the muscle or equipment to fix the flat, Ellen decided it would be safer to huddle together in the car under several blankets and wait for help than to walk aimlessly to the next town. It was nearly an hour before someone finally pulled over and stopped to help.
Young Adam just knew it was going to be a chainsaw killer that pulled up behind them and with the bright headlights flooding the interior of his Mother's car, he huddled even closer to her knowing he was about to meet his maker.
"Its gonna be fine," Adam remembered her telling him before giving him a confident hug.
It still didn't prevent Adam's spine from turning to jelly when he heard the loud creak of the pickup truck door opening in the vehicle behind them and the slow trod of approaching footsteps on the ground outside.
