Sesame bagel with cream cheese. Medium hot coffee.“Crème an’ suga’?” asks the Indian woman behind the counter. Her eyes look tired. I nod. She pushes my breakfast across the putrid pink countertop and yells for the next customer to step forward.
The Dunkin' Donuts employees have their morning routine down to a science, meticulously manning the coffee and toaster stations like obedient soldiers, churning out liquid filled Styrofoam cups as if it’s a CIA operation.
With my morning sustenance in my hands I drive and eat, drive and sip, making sloppy right turns while narrowly avoiding smearing cream cheese on the wheel and cloth seats. My cell phone rings. I answer, only to hang up when a voice recording begins to question me about my last telephone bill.
As I make a hasty brake in front of a stop sign my phone vibrates again. I step on the gas and flip open my phone. It’s a text message from my sister. I expertly shift my hands to text her back, using my wrists to steer while my fingers punch letters into my Samsung mobile keyboard. Every time I do this I hear my dad’s voice in my head warning “if you ever text while driving...” with his teeth clenched and his ears turning cherry red. I also think about that YouTube PSA that became a viral annoyance on Facebook for a few weeks in August. The one where the girl’s head is slammed into the steering wheel and smashes her face into something unrecognizable while her best friend’s body hurtles through the windshield, spitting guts and limbs onto the highway blacktop. The girl was texting while driving.
Lost in my own thoughts, I try to type in my last exclamation point. My eyes shift off the cellphone screen to the road ahead. The car ahead of me is suddenly too close. The blood rushes to my head and my stomach seizes in fear. I slam my right foot down on the brake but it’s too late. My car slams into the bumper of the chrome ’96 Toyota ahead.
“Shit.”
Don’t text while driving.
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