Adelaide. Her name evoked images of serene mountain passes for most men, of an evening sun gently setting behind a jagged Alpine peak, plunging the green slopes of a hidden valley into the evening shadows. Yet Adelaide's life was a battle between who she felt herself to be and what her moniker implied. She was nothing like the stereotype of a flaxen-haired Swiss maid dressed in billowy pastel farm dresses – demurely milking cows and mechanically churning butter in between roaming the pastures and singing sweet mountain lullabyes to the farm animals. In actual fact, Adelaide met that prescribed image in only one way; her hair was flaxen, but only because she'd bleached it.
Adelaide had never seen a farm animal except in picture books or packaged in the plastic containers her mother brought home from the supermarket. And as far as her being demure, she was anything but in life and on the soccer field where she screamed for victory as she ran the course of the field. In fact, the grass of the soccer field was the closest thing to wilderness that Adelaide had ever stepped on. That was why she was so totally unprepared for where she was now, next to her broken-down Jetta on the side of a country road, with the sun already hidden behind the leafy branches of the road-side trees. "SHIT!!!!" Adelaide screamed again at her car as she kicked the front tire of her car with the same foot that had just scored three goals against some hillbilly team – which through some quirk of the school system, was in the city's College league – outside of her home city of Seattle. The car for its part, remained impartial to Adelaide's tyranny, and unperturbedly continued to leak steam from under its hood.
"SHIT!" Adelaide kicked the tire again, and then stormed to the rear door and flung it open. She ripped through her sports duffel and finally found her cell phone under her soccer cleats. Flipping it open, she punched in the number for the local AAA, only to be greeted by a persistent beeping. Looking at her screen, Adelaide saw that she had no signal. Adelaide muttered what was fast becoming her favorite word for the day, and eyed the trees around her. Adelaide flung off her jacket and strode over to a sturdy maple with evenly spaced and strong branches, gripped a branch at chest level, and heaved herself up onto it, scraping her shins on the grooved bark beneath her until she was sitting on the branch. "Shit," Adelaide muttered again, but she stood up and continued climbing in her first-timer's awkward fashion. At 15 feet off the ground Adelaide looked down to fish her cell phone out of her pocket, gasped at the site of the branches under her, and very nearly toppled off the branch she was standing on. Regaining her balance, Adelaide concentrated on the groove in the bark at her eye-level, and punched the AAA number in by touch. This time, she was greeted by a faint strand of country music. "Finally" Adelaide spit into her mouthpiece. Yet no operator came on the line, and the country music just seemed to grow louder.
Confusedly, Adelaide looked down into her cell phone and saw that she still lacked a signal. Bewildered, she looked around her, yet none of the squirrels seemed to be strumming a gut-bucket, and there was no hawk picking melody on a banjo. Then she heard the deep rattle of a heavy engine down the road, and she saw a young blond man hollering along with the country tune on the radio from behind the wheel of his dinged and muddy Chevy pick-up.
The Chevy slowed and stopped as it pulled up to Adelaide's Jetta, and the driver flipped open the door and lazed out of the driver's seat. "Hmmm, not bad for a country boy" Adelaide thought as she admired the 20-year old's unshaved face, his tousled hair, and the subtle outline of his chest muscles against his torn and dirty t-shirt.
The blond man looked around the landscape, couldn't see anyone, and was getting back into his truck when Adelaide called out, "Wait, I'm up here!"
Peering up into the darkening sky, the driver of the Chevy exclaimed, "Well shit! There ain't gonna be any keys up in that tree sweetheart."
"Fucking bumpkin" Adelaide seethed under her breath. But in a voice devoid of the distaste she felt inside, she called out, "Wait, I'm coming down." And with that Adelaide jarringly dropped from branch to branch until she landed on the ground with a sod-muffled thud.
"Name's Pete Rogers, I figure you could use a lift. There's a service station down the road. Hop on in," Pete stuck out his hand and Adelaide grasped it delicately, fearing to touch to closely the hand that for all she knew had been used the whole day to clear cow crap. "Adelaide," she responded, "and thanks." And with that Pete lifted himself back into the driver's seat, and pointed lazily to the passenger door of the truck cab. "A pleasure" Adelaide muttered as she opened the passenger door herself.
The interior of the cab smelled like hay and stale odor, because, indeed, Pete had been flinging shit all day at the farm down the road he'd worked on since graduating from high school. Adelaide, for her part, had no idea what the smell was, only that she hated it. All Pete could smell was the perfume Adelaide had sprayed on after the victory, and he couldn't figure out what the hell that was. He thought that perhaps a barn mouse had died in his glove compartment again.
Two minutes into the trip down, Adelaide's and Pete's self-control broke down, and they burst out together with "What the hell is that smell?" The two looked at each other stupefied for a few seconds, thinking that finally the other had smelled it too, and then they both burst out laughing. "I reckon a mouse went and died in the glove again" Pete said, giggling. Adelaide breathed in sharply, and drew her legs in close to her chest, keeping them away from the glove, which made Pete laugh all the harder. Irritably, Adelaide shot him a frosty glare, but Pete's laughter was loud and rhythmic, and as it continued, Adelaide realized how funny she must look, and how funny it was that a dead mouse was freaking her out, and she joined in.
