We couldn’t believe it. There was, just as the song had predicted, a traffic jam from here to Louisiana.
We had decided to use my Camry for the road trip, as it was, thanks to my accident last year, a lot newer than Otis’s car (a dim silver Honda Civic with 250,000 kilometres on it) and thus, likely more reliable. Despite the lingering, inexplicable twitchiness that still plagued me from that fender-bender eighteen months ago, I agreed to take the first shift. I knew that traffic coming out of our city, even at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, could prove dicey, and I wanted to spare Otis the stress of driving through it. He seemed out of sorts when I came by his tiny, west-end townhouse to pick him up, lost in thought as he loaded his suitcase next to mine in the Camry’s trunk and then
