Summer Roadtrip

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The July sun pressed against the windshield, turning the interior of the car into a warm, humming cocoon. It was the kind of heat that felt heavy and sweet, and as I watched the telephone poles zipping past, I felt like I was drifting.

“Abby! Remember that sign?” Mum pointed through the window, her voice girlish and excited.

She was pointing toward a peeling billboard for ‘Upside-Down Town.’ A giggle bubbled up in my throat. “Yeah! I always hoped we’d get stuck and just be upside down forever!”

Mum was standing on the ceiling.

I framed her against the inverted parlour of Upside-Down Town Visitor’s Centre in my phone’s camera. She grinned like gravity was something she’d decided to ignore. Mum knew magic! “Get in here with me, Abby-girl!”

Of course I did. I handed my phone to a stranger and rushed to my mother’s side.

The photo we took is one I keep coming back to—two auburn heads hanging the wrong way, both of us laughing. If you didn’t know us, you’d say maybe sisters? If you knew us six weeks ago, maybe the same thing. If you really knew us now…?

Back in the car, we were about two hours away from Neon Cactus Desert Park. Yesterday we’d hit The Institute for Imaginary Animals featuring a taxidermied jackalope. This morning we’d stopped at The World’s Largest Gumball Machine. That was my favourite when I was little. I always guessed how many gumballs were inside, Mum always told me I was right and won a prize, and then she’d buy me something silly from the gift shop.

I was flipping idly through the old photo album Mum had brought along. We hadn’t even opened it yet. It fell open to a picture of Upside-Down Town, a decade ago. Little-me hanging from the ceiling, hair everywhere, squealing with delight. The next was the Gumball Machine at seven. At nine. At twelve, tongue out in concentration as I counted. Mum in every photo too, barely older, more like my big sister.

Me at six, asleep in her lap in the car, cheek smashed against her collarbone. I grinned at that terrible idea.

I guess us MacLeod girls have always gone our own way.

“I love this one!” I leaned back and started singing along with ‘Dashboard Confessional’. In the periphery of my vision, I watched Mum—her hair, highlighting the soft curves of her profile. She looked so vibrant, so ageless. Every time her hand moved to adjust the air conditioning or reached over to brush a stray hair from my face, a thrill shot through me.

It was a strange, beautiful tension—being suspended between the woman who had raised me and the woman who loved me.

“What’re thinking about, Lovebug?” she asked, glancing toward me.

I felt my cheeks flush, the heat of the car suddenly feeling much more intense. “Just…thinking about ‘Echo Caverns’,” I half-lied. I was thinking about the darkness, the cool, damp air of the caves, and the way they sat right at the edge of ‘Lake Lethe’. I was thinking about how, in those deep, echoing spaces, the rest of the world would disappear.

“The river ride tomorrow?” she beamed. “I can’t wait!”

“Mmm,” I agreed softly, then went back to singing with Mum’s mixtape. “Hands down, this is the best day…”

Mum drove and we harmonised to every song as it came up. I stole glances at her hand on the gearshift and thought about where it had been last night. The trip felt like one of those half-dreams you have in the small hours of the morning. Nothing is real and everything is real and it’s all immediate.

The construction sign came up fast. DETOUR. Mum followed the arrow. There was a second sign—there had to be a second sign—but we missed it.

The transition was barely perceptible at first. The smooth hum of the highway gave way to a crumbly vibration as asphalt turned to gravel. The road wound deeper into a thicket of ancient oaks and swaying pines that seemed to lean in, and became bitumen-soaked clay.

“It’s really quiet,” Mum remarked, her eyes scanning what had become single-track ahead. The sunlight filtered through the canopy in shifting, dappled patterns.

“This can’t be the detour,” I said, scanning the landscape around us. The GPS had given up, the blue line of our intended path swallowed by a grey expanse of ‘Return to Route.’

We passed a hand-painted sign, the wood weathered by years of rain: Secret Creek Scenic Lookout.

“Should we turn back?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

Then it happened.

Not quite a bang, but a thud then a thwap-thwap-thwap that sent a shudder through the entire car. The steering wheel jerked in Mum’s hands, and we drifted toward the soft, grassy shoulder.

“Frick,” she said quietly.

Cicadas. Heat shimmering off the hood. No spare in the trunk—of course there wasn’t, I’d meant to get it replaced in April. Mum got the tow company on her last bar of signal. Ninety minutes, maybe two hours.

She hung up, looked at me over the roof of the car, and something in her face changed. “Well, Lovebug. Guess we’ve got some time to kill.”

We climbed into the back seat and cracked the sunroof. It was marginally cooler.

“Wanna play some cards?” I started, but her hand was on my knee before I’d finished asking. “Mum?”

I looked up. She was leaning in.

Her mouth was hot and tasted like coffee. Her fingers were on my buttons before I registered them moving—she knew this dress, she’d helped me pick it out—and then my bra was pushed up and her hand was cupping my breast like she was weighing a melon.

“Mum,” I whispered—a confession. A prayer.

Then she was pushing me back against the door, one of my legs going onto the back of the passenger seat, my other heel resting on the package shelf. My panties came off before that? I’d lost track. Mum knelt awkwardly in the footwell, her hair spilling across my thighs, and looked hopefully up at me.

It was her face. My mother’s face. Same widow’s peak, same nose I saw in the mirror every morning, the chin I’d inherited. She was looking at me like I was her deepest desire. Her mouth had never been there before. Six weeks of us, six weeks of everything, but not this. Now she was giving it.

“Look at you,” she breathed against me. “My beautiful girl. Look how wet you are for me, sweetie—That’s my Lovebug. Just breathe. Mum’s got you.”

Her tongue. Slow at first. Searching. A long flat drag from bottom to top and then a soft, curious flick that made me whimper as my hips bucked. Two fingers slid inside me, curled up, found the place I’d guided her to our first time.

“That’s it, Abby-girl, that’s my good girl, you don’t have to be quiet out here, nobody for miles.”

She kept talking but I was losing her words. “Sue,” I squeaked. “Susan,” I tried again.

“Mum,” she gently corrected.

Understanding fled.

Mum’s syllables ground down into sound, into warmth, into the vibration of her mouth against my pussy. …so proud of you….so pretty like this…my Lovebug, my…" and then just the music of her voice, transformed into something new and unforgivable and perfect.

My fingers were in her hair. Clenched, pulling. Did I do that?

My hips lifted. Her tongue was deep inside me, her teeth ground against my clit, my breath caught and I heard her—felt her—flinch in surprise as my thighs crashed against the sides of her head.

My whole world vanished.

Blank. Mum’s mouth. Mum’s fingers curled up inside me like the most beautiful encouragement I could imagine. My leg spasmed against the passenger seat and I felt my belly flutter, like we’d taken a hill too fast. Something came out of my throat that I’d never heard before, a secret my body had kept from me. Keeping for Susan—only for Mum.

She stayed with me. Her tongue slowed, lingered, then just held. Her words started making sense again.

“Oh, Abby-girl! That’s my Lovebug. There you are, sweetie.”

I opened my eyes.

The sunroof framed a brand-new rectangle of sky. I’d seen a summer sky before, but I’d never seen one from here. From this exact seat, this exact life. No paint was this blue. Somewhere, two hours south, a park full of neon cacti was standing, unvisited, waiting for a version of us that had followed the detour.

I didn’t grieve that version of us.

Mum pressed a kiss to the inside of my thigh and rested her cheek there, her hair a warm caress across my skin.

Somewhere, far away, the world had a word for what we were. I turned the word over in my head like I held a rotten apple. I let it drop.

The tow truck came, eventually. The driver was a kind, sun-baked man who didn’t look at us at all. He fitted a new tire and got us back to a real road. We didn’t even try to make the cacti.

That night, in a motel with a buzzing ice machine and scratchy sheets, Mum was the ‘big spoon’. “Do you still want to do ‘Echo Caverns’ tomorrow?”

I thought about ‘Lake Lethe’.

“I want all of it, Mum,” I said. “Tomorrow, and the day after, and the gumball machine when we drive back, and the cacti next summer, and you and me like this. Everything.”

She was quiet. Then I felt her lips against my neck.

“My greedy Lovebug.”

I fell asleep smiling.

Knotty

Abby MacLeod on Knotty Biscotti

Summer Roadtrip