My Daughter Tried To Stop My Six-Week Solo Trailer Trip—Then One Question Made Me Realize What She Was Really Afraid Of

PART 3

I did not answer Kate’s question about the house that night because I did not have an answer.

That was apparently unacceptable.

“You have thought about it,” she said.

“I have thought about replacing the upstairs windows and getting rid of a dining set that seats ten people when I usually feed four.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“No. You asked me to predict every decision I might make after a trip I have not taken.”

Owen stood and carried the pie to the counter. “I think we have reached the part of Sunday dinner where nobody benefits from more Sunday dinner.”

Kate left without taking her salad bowl.

I washed it and set it on the drying rack because being irritated did not make me careless with Pyrex.

Tuesday morning I drove to the county fairgrounds for a three-hour towing lesson with Darlene and an instructor named Ray who had the calm voice of a man who had watched hundreds of adults discover that mirrors were not decorative.

The travel trailer from Valley RV was waiting in the empty livestock lot. Seventeen feet of white fiberglass suddenly looked much larger when attached to my vehicle than it had sitting politely between two other trailers on the sales lot.

Darlene walked around it with a clipboard.

“You nervous?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. Means you might listen.”

Darlene had been my friend for seven years, though our first three were mostly conducted across the garden-center checkout counter where she bought too many tomato plants and blamed me for stocking them. She had started towing after her divorce and had worked her way from weekend parks to three-month trips without ever turning herself into one of those people who spoke of the road as if the rest of us lived in captivity.

Ray began with the hitch.

He made me couple and uncouple the trailer twice. I checked the ball seating, latched the coupler, inserted the locking pin, crossed the safety chains, connected the breakaway cable, plugged in the seven-pin connector, tested lights, then repeated the entire sequence after he quietly pointed out that I had routed one chain badly.

“Nothing wrong with making a mistake here,” he said. “Parking lot is where mistakes are cheapest.”

I wrote that down.

Then came the brake controller.

Then mirrors.

Then turns.

Then the part I had been dreading: backing.

Ray put three orange cones in a row and told me to place the trailer between them.

I put the trailer beside them.

Then across them.

Then in a position that suggested the trailer had developed independent political goals.

Darlene leaned against her SUV and did not help.

“I thought you were my support person,” I called through the open window.

“I am supporting your right to look ridiculous until you learn.”

Ray walked to my window. “Small corrections. If you lose the picture, pull forward. There is no prize for saving a bad angle.”

That sentence worked better than every complicated explanation I had watched online.

I pulled forward.

Reset.

Tried again.

The trailer moved where I expected for six feet, then began drifting. I corrected too much. Pulled forward again.

By the seventh attempt, I put it between the cones.

Not centered.

Not elegant.

Between them.

I got out and looked at the result.

Darlene clapped twice.

“Do not make this sentimental,” I told her.

“I was applauding Ray.”

We spent another hour on wide turns, lane position, fuel-stop planning, and what wind felt like when a truck passed at highway speed. Ray made me practice slowing with the trailer brake controller in the empty lot until I could feel the difference between panic braking and deliberate correction.

At the end, he handed me a printed checklist.

“You ready for six weeks?” he asked.

“No.”

He smiled. “Correct answer.”

“Ready for Cedar Hollow?”

“Yes.”

“Also correct.”

On the drive home, my shoulders ached from holding the steering wheel too tightly even though I was no longer towing anything.

Kate had sent five messages.

Did they show you sway control?

What about tire pressure when the trailer is cold?

Does it have a spare?

Do you know the height including the air conditioner?

Please tell me you are not practicing on the interstate.

I answered the questions one by one.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Ten feet, four inches.

No.

Her reply came immediately.

I still hate this.

I stared at the message while sitting in my driveway.

Then I wrote: You are allowed to.

I expected that to make me feel strong.

Instead it made me tired.

I carried the training checklist into the house and put it on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like Wisconsin.

Jim and I had bought that magnet on a camping trip twenty years earlier. He had insisted Wisconsin was shaped like a mitten trying to become a chair. I had told him that made no sense.

The magnet had held school schedules, grocery coupons, appointment cards, and eventually condolence notes before I finally moved those to a drawer.

Now it held my towing checklist.

For the first time, the sight of something new beside something old did not feel like disrespect.

It just looked like a refrigerator.