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Callie yells in Sam’s ear so she can be heard, “We’ll hold it open if you can disconnect the battery.”
Sam connects with Callie’s kind eyes and knows these women will keep her safe. She doesn’t know how, but she just knows. She smiles back and they go to work. Callie and Raven brace either side of the hood with all their strength. Willow and Emily now come and do the same. The music blares even louder still and now the horn blares in their faces. The tires move side to side as some phantom driver tries to steer the car free. The windshield wipers frantically swipe side to side. The radiator spews out boiling hot steam. Through it all the girls never falter. All doing their part for one another. Sam reaches into the roaring cavity and removes all connections to the battery.
At once, the car slows to a halt. The music fades away. The moving parts seem to die before them. It all just stops.
Sam continues to work and yanks the entire battery from the car, leaving nothing to chance. She carries it to safety, yards away from the car. The others follow and they find themselves, again, in a semi-circle around the mess, staring.
Willow smiles at them all, far too optimistic for the moment, “Now, we just have to push it to the hole!”
Sam lets a hysterical laugh escape, “Yeah, that’s all.” She runs her hands across her face and winces as she brushes the tender flesh, still battered and sore, “Who’s going to steer?”
* * *
Moans and groans and huffs and puffs fill the air as the girls’ labor to push the protesting car across the wet, muddy ground. Sam leans out the window and calls out, “I don’t know why you’re all complaining. This is the easiest thing I’ve done all week.”
Callie giggles as she gives a hard shove against the car. Willow and Emily glare at their friend. Sam smiles sheepishly at them, letting them know it’s just a joke. Raven wipes sweat off her forehead and leaves behind a streak of mud.
Callie reaches up to wipe it away, “You’ve got a little something there.”
Sam spies them in the side view mirror, “Get a room, you two. We’ve got work to do.”
Callie and Raven blush, but return Sam’s smile. Everyone can at least agree that they are glad to have Sam’s jokes around.
“Guys, look,” Emily calls out in reverence.
They all look up toward the woods in front of them and gasp. What is usually a thick treeline, has opened up before them in a wide pathway leading them back into the forest.
“Boy, when your mom said she would clear us a path, she wasn’t kidding,” Sam says.
Nessa had been too weak to join them for the manual labor portion of the day, but she definitely did her fair share. There was no way they would have ever gotten this giant hunk of metal through the woods without her.
Callie, her eyes glowing with awe, looks toward Raven and then Willow, “The women in your family are seriously badass.”
The sisters smile at one another because they agree wholeheartedly.
Turning back to the job in front of them, the girls begin to push and shove against the car again. It is like pushing against something that desperately does not want to go where they are guiding it. The wheels turn on the soft ground but against their will. Sam steers them in the direction they need to go, but they resist at every turn. Each inch they move the vehicle is hard earned and celebrated as they make their way down an increasingly familiar path.
After what feels like a hundred years, a thousand miles, and a million dad jokes from Sam, they approach the cavernous opening with his body securely locked inside. The four on their feet take a breather and sit on the ground for a moment while waiting for Sam to climb out of the car.
“Uh, guys,” Sam calls from the driver’s seat, “My seat belt won’t come off.”
Emily groans, “You don’t put your seat belt on to fly down dirt roads at seventy miles per hour. Why would you put it on today?”
Sam glares out the window, “Well, I didn’t. It put itself on and now it’s getting tighter.”
They all rush to the car and Callie pulls out a knife. She saws through the belt until Sam is free.
Sam beams up at her, “You’re my fucking hero.”
Callie smiles back, “A girls got to be prepared.”
Sam reaches for the door, but it locks itself before she can escape.
“Window, it is,” Sam says.
No sooner than she has said it, the windows begin to roll themselves up, little by little. Sam scrambles up and out the driver side window just in time.
Emily helps her out of the closing opening, “Thank goodness they aren’t power windows.”
