Ai. As I drove past the bank on the corner yesterday afternoon at 4:30pm, the blinking sign informed the world that it was 108 degrees out. That's how it felt. The car's air conditioner was doing its best, but no matter how hard it tried it could not produce cold air. So Maddy, Lillie, and I had opened all the windows as far as they would go. We had just finished driving four hours in this heat from Whiteman AFB, where the girls had spent a week for Civil Air Patrol summer encampment. I had also driven four hours in the morning on the first leg of the roundtrip. All our clothes were permanently fused to our bodies in a damp, sticky mass.

As we turned into our driveway, I noticed my phone blinking, so I listened to my voicemail. My brother's voice informed me that I needed to come home "right now." I raised my eyebrow. I'd been doing my best. So I walked into the house and told my brother: "I just got your message, and here I am."

I needed to go pick up Thing from the shop where he was getting a new leg. Saturday evening my sister, Mercy, and I had ridden him to the library and gone in to get our books. When we came out, I noted that he was listing to the left, but I thought it was 'cause I had parked him on a bit of a sideways incline. We dumped our books in the back seat, got in, and started to back out.
"WUBWUBWUB," said Thing worriedly as he wobbled backward.
"What in the world?" I started to ask, but just then I saw my left front hubcap slowly roll away from the front of the car. My mouth fell open. I eased back into the parking spot.
"WUBWUBWUB," said Thing with relief.
His left front tire was very, very flat. "Oh great, I guess we have to call home," I told Mercy. I reached for my purse. Halfway there, I realized I had left my cell phone charging at home. With a sinking feeling, I turned to Mercy. "Do you have your cell phone?"
"No, it's at home charging," she replied.
So I had to use the library pay phone. Thankfully, I got my dad instead of my mom. He told us to hang loose. We did. In twenty minutes the library closed and everyone drove away. Poor lonesome little Thing sat in the parking lot, crippled with his broken leg. Poor lonesome little us sat inside.
After a while, a tow truck turned in, populated by a nice, clean-cut man and his 14-year-old daughter. They attached a hook to Thing's lower lip and hauled him onto the truck bed. We tossed his hubcap into his back seat and squished into the truck cab with the towing man and his daughter.
I doubt I'll ever know for sure why we had a flat, but we did have an awfully nice conversation with the man and his daughter, Rachel. He had no accent, but Rachel sported a bit of a Hispanic sound. She tried to seem a little tough, but I could tell she was gentle, and she loved riding along with her dad. He let her fill out the paperwork and call in on the handheld radio. For some reason I felt my heart go out to her. Somehow I felt that she was at a vulnerable point in her life and needed help.
Anyway, we talked about St. Louis, homeschooling, and high school. I even got to mention that "Someone must have been looking out for us" in the way our tire popped - in a parking lot, not on the highway. Then we arrived, and there was my dad with our 15-passenger blue van. The towing man let down the back of the truck to make a ramp and backed poor Thing off. Before he and Rachel left, we made sure to tell them "Thank you!" I think we all felt that we had made new friends.

End of flashback. That was Saturday. Monday evening I picked Thing up just before the auto shop closed. His new leg worked just fine, but they couldn't tell me what had happened to the old one. A man at the library had said that he had heard a tire pop and expire somewhere in the parking lot, so most likely Thing's leg buckled and went while he was just sitting there. Was it the heat? A weak point on the tire? Sheer Providence? Who knows?

Happy Fourth of July everyone!  ¶ 11:22 AM