The sound was the worst part. It was not a bang. It was a long, slow crunch, like somebody folding a cereal box in half, and it came from the front corner of our camper.
I was standing ten feet away in the sun with a jug of water in each hand. It was a bright October afternoon at an RV park off Highway 17 outside Arcadia, the kind of place lined with tall palms and full of retired people from Ohio.
My father in law, Oren, had been backing his fifth wheel into the site next to ours. He was sixty nine, with the same white crew cut he had worn since the Army, and a green polo shirt he wore to every rally because my late mother in law had bought it for him.
The rear corner of his fifth wheel had swung wide on the turn and kept coming. By the time I dropped the water and yelled, it had pushed a dent into our side wall as long as my arm, low by the front window.
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The aluminum siding was crumpled like a fender.
Oren stopped. He sat behind the wheel of his truck with the engine still running and the window down. He did not get out. He leaned his elbow on the door and looked at me for a long second.
“Cassie,” he said, loud enough for the whole row. “You’re a foot over the line. I told you when you pulled in that you were crowding my site.”
He had not told me anything. He had not even been there when I pulled in. He had come in an hour behind us because he stopped for diesel in Wauchula.
I am thirty seven years old. I drive a school bus for Polk County, and before that I drove a box truck for a feed company for six years.
I hold a Class B license and I park a forty foot bus between two others every afternoon with about eight inches to spare on each side.
I knew where my tires were. I had put them there myself.
But a dozen people had come out of their campers by then. That is what happens at a rally. Somebody’s awning motor whines and four people come to look.
A crunch like that, and the whole row was out on the gravel with their coffee mugs.
Francine Ostrander, who has run our chapter’s sign up sheet for nine years, stood with her hand over her mouth. Her husband, Quinn, walked over and looked at the dent and then at the site post and then at me, and he did not say a word.
“She’s over,” Oren said again, to Quinn this time. “I backed this rig in four hundred times. I know where I’m going.”
I set the water jugs down by the step. I went into the back of Eric’s truck and got the tape measure out of the toolbox, the long one, the twenty five foot one.
Then I measured from the site post to my tires, slow, with everybody watching.