“I’m afraid that now, our only option is to drive to Chicago ourselves.”
I gawked at her. “Are you nuts? Our COMBINED age is not old enough to drive!”
She gave me a cool—freezing—look. “I am well aware of that. But would you care to take a bus when the driver won’t be able to reach the steering wheel a few
miles into the trip? Or an airline flight where the pilot and co-pilot need the stewardesses to burp them and change their diapers halfway through the flight?”
I sighed, acknowledging the point. “All right, fine. But we still can’t drive to Chicago! Even if we can find some way to make the driving part work—a BIG if—don’t
you think someone would report a nine year-old and a three year-old driving a car?”
“We can take the back roads,” was her reply.
“All the way to Chicago?” I asked incredulously. “And what about gas?”
“We can bluff our way around small service stations,” she assured me. Adopting an air of innocence, she sweetly said, “Daddy asked me to pay you for the gas,
please.”
I gave her a look. The plan was still full of a bunch of holes, and we both knew it. But she was probably right—it looked like our only option at the moment.
Cindy stood upon the car seat, peeping over the steering wheel out the windshield and steering the car, while calling down to me to push with both my pudgy little
hands on the accelerator, or the brake. If we weren’t actually risking our lives, it would have been funny.
[Please note: The author is writing this for fictional purposes, and not endorsing such actions by children by any stretch of the imagination.]
Of course, even on the back roads, people drive. As fate would have it, the first car we passed was a cop, who (Cindy told me later) first did a doubletake, then raced
ahead of us, to block off the road ahead of us. Cindy told me what was going on (I couldn’t see,) and we both agreed we had no chance of escaping the cop.
What do you do?