Signs at Intersections

Last night I was smoking a cigarette on my front porch when the woman who lives with her husband and four children in the house next to mine stormed out her front door carrying a suitcase. Her husband called after her, his arms held out in front of him as if he was expecting her to fall into them. She did not turn around. When she reached her Toyota she shoved the suitcase into the trunk, and then she hopped in behind the steering wheel, slamming the door behind her. After screeching out of the sloped driveway, she sped past my house.

I turned and looked at her husband standing in the doorway, the four children crowded in shadows behind him.

But the wife did not get farther than the stop sign on the corner. By the dreadful sound her tires made when they locked against the pavement I was sure an accident had occurred. I watched her husband and children race to the corner where they hung about the driver’s side window for a long time. Finally, the woman’s family stepped back and the Toyota inched into the intersection, looped around and returned home.

I found the whole incident puzzling.

This morning after she kissed her husband off to work, and helped the kids onto the school bus, I flicked my cigarette away and approached her. Even though we only shared a loose acquaintance with one another I asked her about her short-lived escape.

She looked at me and blinked several times. Her pale face colored, an almost riffling, cuttlefish effect.

“If I’m being too nosy—“ I began to say when she did not offer an explanation.

Shaking her head and smiling, she said, “No. That’s not it.“

I stood waiting expectantly. She stared down the street in the direction of the stop sign and said, “Have you ever done something you wished you hadn’t?”

Although I couldn’t think of anything specific, I nodded and said, “Of course.”

She went on and added, “We all make mistakes. Do things without thinking and sometimes those things lead us to do other things, thinking we can fix them. Also, without thinking.”

I shrugged. I could tell she could tell I was not understanding.

Before whirling to reenter her house, she looked one final time at the stop sign on the corner. “Sometimes the most unlikely signs,” she said, “force us to stop and see things clearly.”