Rick—my girlfriend’s dad—turned purple in the driver’s seat of the minivan, a rental whose timing belt screeched like a tortured cat the entire fifty miles from the airport to our vacation lake house, a rental that apparently doesn’t have trash pickup service, which we didn’t realize until I found two raccoons rummaging through a week’s worth of trash bags spilling over the top of the big blue garbage bin beside a marble gnome with a chipped left ear, which meant Rick and I had to load all eleven bags in the trunk and trek halfway around the lake to the Municipal Pay-As-You Throw Facility, which turned into a forty-five-minute drive of swatting flies and holding our breath, which made Rick turn purple and black out for four seconds, which caused us to crash into a boulder next to a “Beware of Wildlife” sign, which we anxiously stared at through the shattered windshield to the sound of FM static until the tow truck arrived, which took another forty-five minutes because the nearest auto shop was thirty miles away, which is where I finally got the nerve to ask Rick if I could marry his daughter, which means I will now and forever wonder if the nausea I feel at this very moment while awaiting his answer is from fear of rejection or from the lingering fear of death by a bobcat lured by the stench of chicken curry leftovers.
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