Claudia Hunter Johnson - Hurtling Toward Happiness: A Mother and Teenage Son’s Road Trip from Blues to Bonding In a Really Small Car

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(with Matt Stevens)

Fiction:

A Christmas Belle: The Carol Continues

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Copyright 2017 by Claudia Hunter Johnson

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First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Johnson, Claudia (Claudia Hunter), author.

Title: Hurtling toward Happiness : a mother and teenage sons road trip from blues to bonding in a really small car / Claudia Hunter Johnson.

Description: First edition. | New York : Arcade Publishing, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017019196| ISBN 9781628728156 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781628728170 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Johnson, Claudia (Claudia Hunter)TravelSouthern States. | Southern StatesDescription and travel. | Johnson, Claudia (Claudia Hunter)Family. | Mothers and sonsUnited StatesBiography. | Teenage boyFamily relationshipsUnited States.

Classification: LCC F216.2 .J635 2017 | DDC 917.504dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019196

Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

Jacket background image: iStockphoto; photograph of the author and Ross: Caroline Pitt Loomis

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated

with love and gratitude

to

my mother, Peggy Morgan Johnson, who told me our family story;

my daughter, Anne Loomis Thompson, who told me to record it;

and my son, Ross Johnson Loomis, who wanted to hear it on our road trip.

Camerado, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself.

Sren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death

Then came spring, the great time of traveling

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

PART ONE

C HAPTER O NE

I-10, North Florida

April 10, 1998, Good Friday

We are hurtling west on Interstate 10, my son Ross and I, the two of us leaving our troubles behind, though the label on the side mirror cautions OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR .

Ross is driving the getaway car, his slender hands on the wheel, his faux titanium Oakleys like a headband across his brown hair, but brown does not do it justiceits brown with red highlights, a color I cant quite pin down. Hes wearing his favorite T-shirtthe Death Star explodingand green plaid seersucker shorts. Dirty socks that smell like ripe sour mash. Ratty running shoes, untied. At five eleven, hes almost too big for the gray velour seats of the small black Mystique, a compact, el cheapo , per our shoestring budget of $900 for the whole week (less $194.43 for this car rental). $900, or our ship is sunk.

An hour ago at Alamo Rental, Ross fell in love with their ad for an electric-blue convertible Mustang. I knew the equationmore car/less foodbut, oh, I could see it, the two of us roaring down Interstate 10 with the top down, sunburned, hair flying, and I want him to remember this trip, so I said okay. Ross did a whiplash double-take Mom? but Alamo was fresh out of Mustangs. Disappointed, we settled for this. I waxed philosophic: The mystique of the road, and all that.

I can feel that mystique as we roll through the rolling hills of north Florida, an hour west of our home, Tallahassee. Up ahead, the road is unfolding. Thats our deallet the road trip unfold. We have no reservations, no real agenda, except to stay in New Orleans tonight with my childhood best friend, Ann Owens, now Tilton, and make it to Texas and back in a week.

Ross swerves into the left lane and passes a semi that looks like its covered with quilted aluminum foil. I grip the gray velour armrest. Hes driving too fast, but Im trying not to say anything. He signals for the driver to honk. The driver doestwo loud blasts. Ross waves and cuts back into the right lane.

My hand relaxes. So how does it handle?

Like a sports car, he murmurs, and compared to the cars that hes driven, it probably doesmy Mazda van and the 82 Rabbit my mother gave him when he turned sixteen. He slides his Oakleys over his eyes and shoots me a smile. Cool. The essence of cool. Tom Cruise at the beginning of Risky Business The dream is always the same.

Ross taps cruise control.

I click my seat back a notch and settle in for the ride. Its a glorious spring afternoona Good Friday if ever Ive seen onea cloudless blue sky overhead, what my father, an aviator, called the blue bowl. Pink phlox dot the Easter-green roadside. I roll down my window and breathe the cool air as we hurtle past kudzu cascading off oaks and pines that look like bears, giraffes, elephants lined up to watch us go by.

Georgia topiary, I joke.

Ross groans. Mom, please.

A year ago, he liked Georgia jokes, liked to tell them himself (Why does the St. Johns River run north? Because Georgia sucks !), but lately hes been a tough room to work, usually cutting me off before a jokes over Zz-zzt !like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers.

You never laugh at my jokes anymore.

Say something funny, I will.

That hurts. I roll up the window.

We used to be close, Ross and I. Kindred spirits. The familys in-your-face comics.

This guy calls, Ross told me last fall. Asks for Clara. I tell him hes got the wrong number. No one named Clara lives here. And the guy argues with me. Like I dont know if someone named Clara lives in my house. Like Im gonna say, Oh, hang on a minute, she just walked in.

We laughed like fools over that, but laughter has been in short supply this semester. Were both burned out, blue. Ross is burned out on school, but I suspect the burnout goes deeper. Not that hell talk about it. Weve drifted too far apart. Disconnected. Im not even sure how it happened. Or when. Theres no big blow-up to point to, no mother-son knock-down-drag-out. Our lives just slowly shifted. Continental Drift, not Big Bang. If I ask why, he clams up. Ive learned not to push.

Since his sixteenth birthday last August, hes become dramatically private. His room is strictly off-limits, not that anyone in her right mind would want to walk in. The floor looks like landfillboxer shorts, books, crumpled homework, an impressive assortment of Frisbees, a guitar, and a wrench. Ive cracked CDs and snapped off his boom-box antenna trying to cross the floor to kiss him goodnight, but thats how he seems to want itminimal physical contactexcept when he ambushes me in the hall and throws me over his shoulder and shouts, Torture Rack!his favorite World Wide Wrestling hold. But heaven forbid I should give him a kiss or squeeze his upper arm and admire the muscles hes developed since he started pole-vaulting and playing Ultimate Frisbee.