We made it back. It was a stressful drive -- we never did figure out why the car was making loud weird noises on Tuesday, and every time I heard even a tiny noise in that same range I was instantly on edge. We were a couple of hours from my parents' house when a large and alarming wrench appeared on the dashboard display. "Joe," I said, in the calm-calm-oh-so-calm voice that my children have learned to interpret (alas) as an indicator of significant inner tension, "pull out the owner's manual and let me know if that means we need some ordinary maintenance or if it's something more serious."
"Power train fault," Joe read, and I died a little inside. "Well," I said, even more calmly, "let's see what services are at the next exit." The combination of loud weird mystery noises and a power train fault seemed unlikely to end well. At the next exit there was pretty much nothing: a Dollar General, where I suppose I could have purchased a box of tissues to weep into, and a gas station, and nothing else. I pulled into the gas station parking lot. In Maximum Calm Voice I said, "Here is the plan. I am going to turn the car off, and we are going to pray, and then I am going to turn it back on." And do you know, the wrench went away and did not reappear.
I stopped at a Ford dealership further up the road, where they were utterly unhelpful. "Everybody's got problems today," snarled the man on duty when I approached the service desk. One might think that a service desk exists because everybody has indeed got problems, but apparently he did not view the matter in the same light. It would be at least a 90-minute wait, he said, and he didn't know whether they could tell me anything useful if the indicator wasn't on. "It could be something really bad, like your transmission failing," he said. (This prospect hurled me from Maximum Calm Voice territory into Never-Before-Observed Levels of Calm Voice territory, a development which struck dread into my children's hearts. Maybe I should just go ahead and freak out?) "Or it could be something like a throttle body. Impossible to say, but if you don't want to wait you can ask them to check it out at the auto parts store down the road."
The guy at the auto parts store was much friendlier, but he couldn't persuade his scanner to talk to my car. I did not know why the car had been making weird bad noises on Tuesday. I did not know why the Wrench of Doom had appeared and disappeared. I could not tell if driving off into the bowels of the rural Midwest was a reasonable risk to take or a terrible decision. But we talked it over and decided to head for home.
The bad noise did not recur; the wrench did not reappear. We weathered the storms and the uncertainty and I am really grateful. It's good to be home.
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