When we rolled into a gas station about halfway across Missouri, the car was clunking and sputtering, so that I thought we had run out of gas.
“Phew,” I said. “That was close.”
“Yeah, apparently,” Thumper agreed. “But we should have still had like an eighth of a tank. We weren’t even on ‘E’ yet.”
“Weird,” I said. “What was all that sputtering about then?”
“Who knows?”
“Should we call Ryan?”
“On his new iPhone?” Thumper teased. “I’m sure everything’s fine. Let’s fill it up and see what happens. It’s been doing that sputtering kind of the whole time. I think Ryan just made us more aware of it. Did you smell anything funny?”
Probably everything was fine. Ryan had just made me paranoid. He was a cashier at a roadside gas station mini-mart, after all, not a mechanic. And, looking around,
