Miranda Campbell
Miranda Campbell graduated with her MFA in creative writing from Georgia College and State University. She freelance edits for Triplicity Publishing. She’s a sucker for tacos, The Office, people who can quote The Office, and a good used bookstore. Much of her inspiration comes from her favorite place—her home, Flagler Beach, FL. Her work appears in The Laurel Review, Hippocampus Magazine, littledeathlit, The Helix Magazine, Saw Palm, Dime Show Review, fresh.ink, Apricity Magazine, and more.
F-150
2001
On our way to Movie Gallery to rent VHS tapes for family movie night, my stepfather, John, played 96.5 The Eagle on the radio in his red Ford F-150. I stared out the passenger side window as we passed Buddy Taylor Middle School, a McDonald’s, The Palm Harbor Golf Course, and neighborhoods organized alphabetically through my small hometown in Florida. We passed tall pines and dense underbrush, listening to classic rock.
John lowered the volume on the radio. “Guess the artist,” he said.
I turned to face him, confused.
“Guess who’s singing right now.”
After another moment of silence, he laughed. “I know you don’t like my music, so guess the artist. If you can guess correctly, I’ll let you change the radio to whatever station you want.” I thought of the pop and hip hop songs I listened to, how music can make or break a drive.
I was seven years old, so I guessed at random, artists whose names I’d overheard my mother or John mention. Aerosmith, Eagles, The Police, Led Zepplin. None of my guesses were right, so we stayed on 96.5.
He told me the song was called “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones. For a long time after, when John and I played his music trivia game, The Rolling Stones was my first guess.
2003
When we pulled up to the motocross park, Pax Trax, John parked his truck behind the bleachers. He came to the park every weekend where he rode his KTM dirt bike around the looping track. Every so often, my sister Katie and I went with him.
When we saw John finish his ride and start to take off his gear, we tossed our Barbies inside the cab of his truck, hitting the locks on both doors before walking toward the track to meet him. He asked if we were ready to grab dinner. We nodded and raced him back to the truck.
He let us win with a smile. When he pulled the truck door handle and his hand sprung back with a jolt, his face went still.
“Who locked the truck?” he yelled.
I could never bring myself to meet John’s eyes when he yelled. Something about its infrequency, the hard stare and deep voice so unlike him. Whenever something small set him off, it was always startling. I looked at Katie instead. “Were we not supposed to?” she asked.
He ignored her. “Why would you lock the doors?”
“So no one steals anything.”
“There’s nothing in it to steal.” He looked at us like we should’ve known better.
“Where are your keys?” I asked. Katie nudged my side, shaking her head in warning.
John gave me a look as he climbed into the back of his pickup. “They’re under the floor mat where I always leave them.” For the next fifteen minutes he jimmied the two small panels that split in the middle on the sliding rear window. He grunted and mumbled, “God, fucking damn it.” Something he rarely said. He held his fingertips to his lips in pain, waving his hand in the air. Katie and I knew to stay quiet, to not get involved even if it meant helping. We stood by the front of the truck, out of John’s sight.
After twenty minutes, he grabbed a screwdriver from the small toolbox he kept in the far-left corner of the truck bed. “If I have to break this latch to get in…” Inch by inch, the rear window edged open. Eventually, we heard a pop. He wrenched it open all the way. The window was so small that only I could climb through in order to unlock both the driver’s and passenger side doors. I searched for the keys under the mat and handed them to John. He yanked them from my hand.
On the ride back, John didn’t speak to us. That wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was how he didn’t turn on classic rock to fill the silence.
2005
My mother asked John and me to pick up the takeout she ordered from Houligan’s Irish Pub. John grabbed his truck keys from the kitchen key rack, I put on some shoes, and we walked out to the driveway. I heard John open his driver’s side door. I waited for him to pull the handle on my side and unlatch the manual lock. But he didn’t pull the handle right away. Instead, he got in, started the truck, and stared straight out the windshield, pretending to forget I was there. Then with a look of mock disbelief, he turned to me, his eyes wide and mouth hung open as if to say, Oh! Have you been there this whole time? I didn’t even see you!
I smirked and rolled my eyes, communicating that this joke had gotten old, though it always made me smile, and waited for the thunk of the handle so I could climb in beside him.
2007
One time when we were driving down Belle Terre Parkway, I remembered neither of us had locked our doors. I swung my arm up and slammed down the passenger side lock as if my hand were a mallet in the high striker strongman carnival game. Not out of a safety precaution, out of the pointless amusement we invented to pass time. Who could remember to lock their door the fastest?
“HA! I beat you,” I said.
John leaned his propped-up elbow closer to the window toward his driver’s side lock. I heard a thud. He knew I’d heard it and jerked his head, his eyebrows raised. I smiled.
I pointed my finger at him. “See, I did win.”
The skin around his eyes stretched as he tried not to laugh. “I don’t know what you mean. My door has been locked this whole time...see?” He moved his arm to show the sunken nob on the door, but we both knew he’d been caught.
“Uh huh, I’m not buying it.” We slowed to a red light.
His foot eased into the brake, and he shook his head. “You’re just too quick for me.”
2008
John asked me a math problem on the truck ride to school, something from a lesson we went over the previous night. He usually did this on an important test day. At the time, I couldn’t keep geometric sequence formulas straight, something I learned a few modules before. Rarely did he show frustration at my not understanding a concept, even when it took hours for me to comprehend. If there’s anything I remember about studying with him, it’s his unwavering patience. But that time was different. John turned to me, his palm open as though he were standing at the front of a classroom giving a lecture, and said, “You can’t forget something you’ve already learned, even after you’ve been tested on it!”
I waited for him to finish.
“Miranda, I know you hate math, but you can’t just throw each chapter away. You’ll need that knowledge later—”
“I know!”
He sat back into his seat.
I lowered my voice. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Then tell me the formula for an explicit geometric sequence.”
I pretended to think about the math problem. All I could hear was the pissed-off voice in my head. I searched—scrambled—to come up with the jumble of letters and numbers just to shut John up.
“I can’t remember,” I said.
It’s the only concept that I forgot from the sections we’d gone over. Everything else I understood, had memorized. But still, John couldn’t help himself. “I hope you don’t fail your test.”
2010
John set out small, orange cones in the deserted Food Lion parking lot. He set up a weaving pattern, a regular parking spot, and two cones that represented the front and back end of a parallel parking spot. I sat in the driver’s seat of the truck with the windows rolled down so that we could hear each other as he spoke.
“I want you to swing wide as you take this spot,” he said, moving his arms in an arc. “If you can, you always want to swing wide, especially in a truck.”
We’d been out here for over an hour. I leaned my head out the driver’s side window. “I haven’t hit a single cone the last five times.”
“So do it a sixth.”
“Please—"
“Again,” he said.
I pulled the gear shift down into drive and edged forward, making sure to swing wide.
2011
I had to be at the field early for warm-up before my home soccer game. Earlier when I’d asked John if I could take his truck, his head rolled back, and he sighed. He let me anyway. He usually rode to the game with my mother in her van. Afterward, he’d ride with me for the brief two-mile trip back home. We always talked about the game.
That night, we tied with Spruce Creek—our biggest rival. I sat in the driver’s seat and waited for John to put his camera gear back into his duffel bag. He took our team photos and, after editing them in Photoshop, posted them on fpcsoccer.com for my teammates and their families to check out.
There were times right before he slid into the truck when I stared straight ahead and pretended to forget John was waiting for me to unlock his door, just like he did with me. But that night, this joke of ours felt exhausted, like I’d be forcing it. I wasn’t happy with the way I played. I leaned over and pulled the handle to let him in.
“Good game,” he said.
This dialogue felt tired and familiar. I didn’t know if John meant that I actually played a good game or if he felt obligated to say it. I put the truck in reverse and backed out of the school parking lot.
“You guys should’ve beaten them.”
“But we didn’t.” We needed a win to be first in our conference.
“Miranda needs to go after the ball more. Miranda’s a great player, but she needs to be more selfish, a ball hog even. Don’t be afraid to keep it.”
I hated when he referred to me in the third person, something he always did when we talked about soccer. He must’ve felt the frustration radiating from me, saw me replaying the game in my head. I often wondered if by referring to me in the third person, he felt he was keeping his criticism—himself—at a safe distance.
I wanted to tell him he wasn’t my coach, that if he really cared so much maybe he should get out on the field and show me what I was doing wrong. I never wanted to say that I was trying, never “I’m trying.” That wasn’t good enough. Not for him, and not for me. Instead, we sat in silence because sometimes that’s how John and I understood each other best.
2012
John told me to put on clothes I was willing to get greasy. I walked outside wearing soccer shorts and an old gym shirt from Catholic school that my mother used as a cleaning rag. The hood of his F-150 was propped open. Two black circular pans sat on the driveway next to a jug of 5W-20 Havoline oil. One pan held a thick dark brown liquid almost filled to the top. The other held a small canister covered in what looked like the same dark brown sludge.
“I’ve already done the hard part,” John said, looking down at the oil-filled pan.
“What are we doing?”
“I’m teaching you how to change your oil.”
“I don’t even have a car.”
“You will someday. Come here.” We lied down on the driveway and looked under his truck.
“The oil circulates through the engine to keep it lubricated, to keep it running. The bottom of the engine holds all the oil.” He pointed up toward a knob. “See that plug there?”
I nodded.
“That’s the drain plug. The ring around that is the gasket. This is where you let all the old oil drain out.” Every few sentences required a nod, an “okay,” or an “uh-huh.” All of John’s lessons needed these small reassurances that I was, in fact, keeping up. “It depends on how hot the engine is, but in the summer or if the engine’s just been running, it should only take about three minutes for the oil to drain completely.” He pointed to the pan on the driveway. “I’ve already done that and put in the new oil filter.”
“I suppose now is the fun part?”
John smirked. We inched out from underneath his truck and stood over the open hood.
“What I mainly want you to remember is how to measure the amount of oil you have.” He unscrewed another black plug branded with an oil can symbol on the front. It reminded me of the oil can Dorothy uses on the Tin Man. He grabbed a plastic funnel to put over the plug hole and told me to pour six quarts. I gave him a blank stare, the kind you give when you’re thinking hard. I’d never eyeballed six quarts.
“I’ll tell you when to stop,” he said.
I poured and watched the oil disappear beneath the funnel. After, he showed me how to check my oil level with the dipstick. He pulled the top of the ring and a metal stick with a curved end slid out. Small pinholes and hash marks lined the bottom. The metal stick was wet with oil up to the fourth hash mark. “This,” John said, “means you have a full tank of oil.”
“What if it’s only at the third?”
“That’s all right too. When you first change the oil, you want it to be at the top. As long as the oil isn’t below the first hash mark, you’re okay. If it’s below, pour more oil in.” He took a dirty rag, wiped the end of the dipstick, and handed it to me. “You try.”
I pulled the dipstick in and out, offering my own readings even though they all showed the same amount. I knew that for John, it was about the work, the proficiency and the retention that comes from repetition.
When we were done, John told me that changing a vehicle’s oil yourself costs the same amount of money as taking it into a shop. This didn’t surprise me. “You learn by doing,” John said. Sometimes I wonder how he didn’t end up a teacher.
“Besides, mechanics love to tell you that something else is wrong with your car. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ‘needed new tires.’” He curled his fingers around the words needed new tires and shook his head. For a moment, I pictured John having a blowout on the highway. If this were to happen, he’d still find a way to prove he wasn’t culpable. There would’ve been something in the road before he blamed it on his resistance to let someone—even an expert—tell him what to do when he’s fully capable of checking the tire treads himself.
“What if I really do need new tires?” I asked.
“I can tell you if you need new tires.” After, John gave me a lesson on the difference between acceptable tire treads and ones that are wearing. I couldn’t decide whether to roll my eyes or laugh.
2013
I set my JBL Bluetooth speaker in the middle console between John and me and queued up the music library in my phone. A hip-hop song called “Berzerk” filled the truck with a harsh, tinny beat. The song is appropriated, sampled from an old Billy Squier song. I wondered if John recognized this as we listened to it.
John looked over at me and said, “You like this garbage?” An untimely lyric—“Say fuck it before we kick the bucket”—played before I could answer. We both laughed.
“It’s not garbage. Besides, sometimes I just enjoy the melody.”
He nodded, not quite convinced. We listened to the song all the way through. On that ride, I played songs by The Weeknd, Drake, Kendrick Lamar. No matter what I played, he didn’t once ask me to change the music.
2015
John asked if I wanted to ride with him to Walmart because he needed car parts, again. Sometimes it felt like he wished for something to break down, a gadget to stop working. Mr. Fix-It, “but only on his terms,” as my mother liked to say. His headlight nozzle popped off years ago, but he keeps the nozzle in the middle console when he needs to turn on the headlights. I often wonder if he’ll ever replace it or glue it back on. The longer he waits, the more I’m convinced a part of him prefers it this way. Because this way—popped off and pending—the nozzle will always be in a state of fixing, of needing to be mended.
When we walked out to his truck after Walmart, John did something he’d never done before. With his keys in hand, he walked to the passenger side door and unlocked it so that I could climb in first. My head jerked back, and I looked at him. He walked around to the driver’s side door. A sad, somewhat weightless thought filled me. Something big just happened. It felt like John and I had outgrown a phase. I lingered at my door a second longer. I wanted him to see that I was shocked. I wanted to talk about it without having to bring it up myself. But he didn’t notice me. He unlocked his side, and without looking said, “Well… are you getting in?”
2016
On our way home from trivia at The Brass Tap, my mother asked John if he could stop at Pentair-Union Engineering, the CO2 process plant manufacturer they both work for, to pick up her laptop charger that she forgot.
“Man, we were so close!” I brought my fist down on my knee.
“I know,” my mother said. “We can never get the order right.” In the last round of trivia, the host asked us to put the following affairs in order. Most times it was events in history. One time it had to do with the geographical locations of cities: list them in order from most west to east. The one time we got the chronological question right, we’d been asked to put the release dates of the following movies in order from earliest to most recent: Mask starring Cher, The Mask, starring Jim Carrey, The Mask of Zorro, and V for Vendetta. We won $40 that night. My sister’s boyfriend shouted that we were rich. We laughed all night.
“That’s because the years are always so close together!” I said. “Ugh, it’s frustrating.”
“Next week,” John said. “We’ll get them next week.”
We were approaching our turn onto State Road US1—a road that runs parallel to the woods. John wasn’t slowing down. Instead of making the right turn onto US1, a turn he’s made since 1996, he drove straight. It almost sent us into possible oncoming traffic, and then into the woods, into thick compact pines. We were going 50 mph.
“Woah woah woah, slow down,” I said.
When he realized what he’d done, we were already in the middle of the other lane. He braked hard and jerked the wheel to the right. We hadn’t quite reached the trees. He maneuvered his way across a grassy median and back onto the right side of the road, the truck jerking up and down as it drove over divots and other hidden bumps in the grass. I realized I wasn’t scared. I was embarrassed for John because I knew, almost immediately, he was embarrassed himself.
I asked him if he was alright. He stayed quiet for a long time before saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t see it.” He was silent the rest of the ride home. I knew well enough not to say anything else about the incident. My mother did too. She looked back at her phone and kept playing her Mahjong app. The three of us chose to forget it happened.
2017
On the way to AutoZone, I looked up and saw a green, plastic toothpick with a slightly curved end fastened into the driver’s side visor. This didn’t surprise me. John always kept one close: in his wallet or pocket, an empty cup-holder in his truck. If it weren’t for the fact that every so often (though probably not often enough), I noticed the mounted toothpick change color, I’d worry it’s been the same one stuck up there. The thought, at first, made me cringe. But if I were to learn he’s never swapped this toothpick out for a clean one, I think a part of me would find it comforting to know that some things never change, how not enough stays the same anymore.
“How old’s that one?” I nodded my head up toward the green toothpick.
John smirked and shrugged at the same time. “Hell if I know.”
2018
Driving to Terranova’s to pick up pizza, John asked how my writing was going.
“It’s going,” I said.
“That’s vague.” He looked at me.
“I just wish I was more productive this summer.”
“It gets away from you, doesn’t it?”
I nodded and thought for a moment. “I guess that means your three-month check-up is soon then, huh?”
“Yep.”
He’d been fighting bladder cancer on and off for the past two years. When family and friends asked him how he was doing, my mother usually did the talking. Please keep him in your prayers. The same cycle: surgery, catheter, three-month check-up, dark spot on scan, surgery, catheter, three-month check-up, etc. Normally I didn’t ask, but normally John didn’t ask about my writing. These kinds of prying questions felt necessary now.
When my mother and I talk on the phone, she’ll sometimes ask when I last spoke to her mother.
“Not in a while,” I usually say.
She responds the same way every time. “You know, I don’t know how much longer we’ll have grandma.” I often wonder if she’s started to think the same when it comes to John. If she does, she doesn’t say it out loud. Though it’s something I’ve started to think about, I certainly haven’t brought it up.
“You nervous?” I asked John.
“Not even a little,” he said without taking his eyes off the road. I didn’t press him anymore, because I knew he wouldn’t offer much more than that. Besides, his certainty and fixed stare when he answered was somehow enough.
After that, we were quiet, a comfortable quiet, the one that felt right and satisfying. As we settled into the stillness, not saying a word to each other, not even playing music at a low volume, the kind of volume that John finds “just right,” I contemplated taking my old high striker arm and whacking down the lock on my door. I contemplated stirring us both from our reverie, letting John know that even though I was 24, I was never too old for our games.