“Laura,” Mr. Mulligan’s tone was not joking in return. “You know that the only thing worse for me than being near a ledge is having someone I love on a ledge. Please back away from the cliff.” The “please” made the sentence sound like a request, but Laura’s familiarity with this tone indicated that it was not a request, nor a demand, but a statement simply describing what she was about to do.

Annoyed at still being told what to do after a year of college freedom, Laura nevertheless backed up.

“Thank you.” Her dad’s look softened with gratitude, then he bent down to remove the flat tire.

Laura invited her mother and sister over to take selfies with her (though at a safe distance from the edge). She didn’t notice that they refused to look at each other, and as she focused on getting the most flattering angle of her face in the shot, she was left unaware of how forced her sister’s smile was. Then they turned around for a selfie with Mr. Mulligan changing the tire in the background. He looked up with a glare, but chuckled after the photo was snapped.

“This is what spare tires are for!” Mr. Mulligan sang as they all piled back into the car.

“Yeah,” Laura said, “and I’m actually happy we stopped so we could snag some pictures of this amazing view.”

Mr. Mulligan turned back to his daughters with a smile. “Everything happens for a reason.” Laura rolled her eyes. Katie didn’t look at either of them. She glanced only briefly at her mother who was sitting silently directly in front of her.

As Mr. Mulligan started the car back up and pulled back onto the road, Katie’s discomfort settled in. The word that had caught her attention on the prescription bottle was Clopidogrel. Off the top of her head, she was sure it was a medication for some sort of heart condition. As far as Katie knew, her mom didn’t have a heart condition, though now she worried that she was missing some very important information. She wanted to look up the medication on her phone to confirm what she remembered about it, but they were definitely out of range for data and without WiFi while in the vehicle. Besides, she was afraid that Laura might see what she was looking up and ask loudly about something their mother obviously wanted kept quiet.

Katie had only seen the bottle for a moment, but she was sure she had seen something else on the bottle that provided an important detail. She tried to focus the picture of the bottle in her mind’s eye, but like a word on the tip of her tongue, it was just out of reach.

Katie thought about her mom napping in the car. Was that related to a possible condition? No, her mom was a regular car napper – wasn’t she? The more she thought about it, the more she doubted herself. The more she questioned everything, the more she wanted to talk to Katie about it, but they didn’t exactly have anywhere private to speak.

As Katie imagined what Laura’s reaction might be, she remembered the constant jokes her big sister had been making all trip long about Mom and Dad being old. Those were definitely no longer funny.

Then again, what was the big deal? If Mom had a heart condition, but she knew what it was and was on the right meds, why the big secret? And how had Katie even missed this? Laura had the excuse of being away all year, but Katie still lived with their parents; still shared a car with them and ate most meals with them. How had her mother developed a heart condition without Katie having the slightest clue? Or maybe it wasn’t a recent phenomenon?

Katie remembered the way her mother had looked at both Laura and Mr. Mulligan as if she had been afraid they had also seen the bottle. Did that mean her dad didn’t know about the condition? Why would she keep a medical issue like that from her own husband?

Just as Katie was about to start tearing up, her internal spiral was interrupted by one of her big sister’s stories. “So one of my friends who I went to Mexico with during Spring Break is really…” Laura bit the inside of her cheek as she searched for the right adjective on the ceiling of the car, “…organized. She planned the whole trip. And mostly it was really nice. I didn’t have to do any work. She told me which plane ticket to purchase and then pretty much sent me a bill for my part of the hotel reservation and everything. She even made reservations for dinner at different restaurants every night we were there so we could try different places. But one night, we got to the restaurant we had reservations for and we had to wait a little bit. Like, they didn’t lose the reservation or anything, they just miscalculated or something and the table wasn’t ready exactly on time. We ended up having to wait, like, 15 minutes for it.”

“Oh, that’s not bad,” Mr. Mulligan said.

“Well, that’s what I thought. But Serena – my friend who planned everything – was freaking out. Going on about how we would have to rush through appetizers if we were going to get to the club around the corner before the 10pm cover and how hard is it to honor a reservation and she didn’t care how packed the place was, this was a how a place loses business. She was freaking scouring the internet for a place to leave them a bad review. I was so relieved that she didn’t find one.”

“Ooh, look!” Mrs. Mulligan interrupted, pointing out the window toward the ocean. “A cute little beach town!”

Even Katie, drowning in doubt, was momentarily distracted. “Wow! Talk about paradise on Earth.”

“Well,” Mr. Mulligan said as he scanned his side and rearview mirrors routinely, then glanced at the dashboard clock, “it is lunchtime. Do you guys want to go check it out?”

All at once, the three most important women in his life exclaimed excitedly in agreement. Chuckling at the overwhelming unanimity, Mr. Mulligan switched lanes to take the next exit.

“See,” Laura said, “this is what I’m talking about! Serena never would have been okay with something spontaneous like this. I guess the point I was trying to get at was traveling with friends made me realize how stressful travel can be and I’m so grateful that we don’t travel like that. Like literally two, no three things have gone wrong so far on this trip and we’ve just rolled with it every time. I just love it.”

“Roll with it… hide and bottle up negative feelings… same, same.” Mrs. Mulligan mumbled not as quietly as she meant to.

“Wait, what?” Laura said, leaning to get a better view of her mom, kiddy-corner to her in the front seat. “You literally said on our first day here how you’ve come to accept things usually go better than planned.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Mulligan spoke up a bit more, “I was not referring to me.” Then she glared clearly at her husband.

Glancing at his wife, Mr. Mulligan took one hand off the wheel to point to himself. “Who, me? I bottle up my feelings?”

“Absolutely,” Mrs. Mulligan retorted as she reached for the handle above her door in response to the continuous switchbacks that were leading them down to the coveted beach town.

“I do not. I’m quite expressive.”

“Ben, you never share the important stuff.”

“Well, maybe we just have different opinions of what’s important.”

Then they broke through the tree line and their jaws dropped at the stunning view in the oh-so-attainable distance. It was as they came down the last switchback, when they were struck by the beauty, the serenity, and the effortless flow of the people, as if the town itself had come to embody the movement of the neighboring ocean, that the second tire went flat and Mr. Mulligan was forced to swerve.

…to be continued…