It was a warm, midsummer night. The kind of night where the air seems to have a presence to it. I steamy, warmth that envelops everything. Then it started to rain. The rain was coming down as hard as I had ever seen it come down.
Fortunately, I was cozily settled down in my home holding my 6 month old son watching television while I fed him a bottle. My wife was at work, having just been back to work for a couple of weeks. This had been our week of vacation for the summer. But, we had gotten pregnant, so it became a week where I took care of everything since she had to go back to work.
It had been a good week. I had turned out to be a pretty good father. I liked holding my son. I liked reading to him, and he seemed to like being read to.
My wife and I were in the middle of reading Stephen King's The Talisman aloud to each other when he was born. We just kept going, taking turns reading while the other held him. We had continued the practice after coming home from the hospital. We read a lot.
But, tonight I was home with him while Cheri worked. It was her week of evenings. The scourge of life with a nurse is the rotational shifts, at least early on in their careers. Bit, I couldn't go to bed, because I had driven her to work.
I enjoyed driving. I had owned smaller, sportier cars my whole adult life, but we now owned a Volvo station wagon. You know the cool off road type Volvo's that are 4 wheel drive with decent off road capabilities and turbo engines? This wasn't one of those. It was an older Volvo 245. A white box on wheels with no power, no handling and no luxury.
No, there was nothing especially nice about the Volvo, but I still enjoyed driving, even in it.
So, I had driven Cheri to work, and now we had a torrential downpour that I was going to have to expose my nine month old son to.
So, I laid him in his bed and let him get some sleep until time to go.
Driving from our home to Christiana Hospital, which was at the time a relatively new hospital, was about a 30 minute drive but I had left early just to drive and took the long route. The long route was a drive in any direction to kill time. This time, the long route was up route 40 until it merged onto route 13 and headed into downtown Wilmington, DE and then back onto I 95 to Christiana Hospital.
My son was asleep in the backseat when I noticed a broken down vehicle on the side of route 13 with it's flashers on. A quarter of a mile further up the road, I saw a girl walking in the downpour. Assuming it was her broken down car, I stopped to see if I could help.
