The Road Trip That Changed My Life

On an epic drive from California to New York, Lauren Oster and her husband learned how to manage an unreliable car—and embrace an unpredictable life.

ON A GRAY MORNING ONE SPRING, a text message from my husband, Joe, bloomed on my smartphone: Hey, could you call me when you have a minute? A moment later: Don’t worry.

Don’t worry: Has a phrase ever defeated its purpose so neatly? Neither of us is fond of chatting on the phone, a device Joe and I reserve for life-changing news and requests of dire urgency. I promptly assumed the worst (and weirdest). When I got him on the line, he assured me he wasn’t dying, leaving me, or calling from a holding cell in a foreign prison. He was, however, pretty sure that he needed to quit his job, and that we needed to tap into our retirement savings and go on a cross-country vision quest. “We’ve just got to hit the road,” he said, his voice uneven with excitement, the way it had sounded when we’d decided to get engaged on the spur of the moment in college. That had been 16 years earlier, mind you, when being together was as simple as stealing the cushions from his roommates’ dingy sofa so we could both sleep on his mattress on the floor. Now we had careers, commitments, and, you know, cats. What about our cats?

“Can you trust me on this?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “OK.”