The Rollover

Anxiety punched Jason’s stomach right down through the seat of his pants, leaving him hollow while he watched, eyes wide, as the SUV tipped over the median and rolled onto its hood. The sounds of tires screeching over the slick asphalt was deafening, even from his position a car behind the one currently swerving to avoid the wreck.

This—this whole thing— wasn’t anything Jason had time to deal with and he couldn’t help the uneasy rictus his lips twisted into as he hastily applied the brakes, coming to a far easier stop than the car before. He had been chasing a new position at his firm for the past year now, getting closer to the people who could make it happen while simultaneously struggling to avoid the pitfalls that others who climbed ahead of him sunk into. Cheating and scamming people out of their money just to boost their own personal sales figures?

The very idea caused Jason to blanch.

So he watched and bore witness to several others streak past him on the leadership chart, others who didn’t hold the company’s integrity in their hearts like he did, who had their pockets lined with the ill-gotten gains of unsuspecting prospects. Painful didn’t even begin to describe it, watching the corrupt ascend while he toiled away, forgotten, making sure things were fair on both ends….

Now, he clenched the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white, and he only remained where he was for another second or two before he flipped on his hazard lights, flung open the door, and sprinted out toward the accident. The incessant pounding of his heart drowned out his footfalls, drowned out the gentle sound of a light drizzle and the surprised cries of others just now climbing out of their vehicles to get a better look—

Jason didn’t know what in the world he was doing, or even what he could do, but his thoughts were racing too fast to make sense of anything; he just knew that he was able to, and that was good enough. He felt the cool outer metal of the vehicle under his hand as he approached the passenger side and dropped to one knee. He could hear himself yelling:

“HEY! IT’S OKAY—WE’RE GONNA GET YOU OUTTA THERE!”

But how? The door was wedged shut and he couldn’t make out through the cracked glass if the inhabitants were alive or—

“Grab right there!” he yelled to another man who had caught up, and Jason motioned to a warped piece of the door. “Grab that piece and on three we pull! Ready? THREE!”

What was he doing? Really, what was he doing? Shouting out orders, putting in all this effort, straining his muscles to the limit… and for what? His suit was drenched, both with rain and sweat, but he and man continued to pull their souls out while a couple others communicated with the SUV’s occupants, telling them to keep calm.

“C’MON PULL!” Jason roared.

He wasn’t going to make the meeting at his job today, the one that would decide if he had done enough to earn a promotion, or a raise, just something to honor him for his good work, to show him that, yes, doing the right thing was its own reward.

If it hadn’t been for this accident, if it hadn’t been for whatever stupid little impulse existed in his brain that forced him to act without thinking, then he might have had a chance at making it.

The fourth tug caused the metal frame to bend against the ground, then the window gave out in a shower of glittering shards and Jason lost his balance when the door swung back, the motion sending him sprawling backwards against the unforgiving ground. He knew agony in his hip, a pain that raced up his side with stinging force, but he didn’t stay down for long and was back on his feet before he could fully register the discomfort.

There were two inhabitants, an older man and a younger woman who may have been his granddaughter; Jason took the older mans hand, helping him out with aid from the others, before reaching back in for the woman, guiding her out as well. From what he could see after a quick glance, neither of them had suffered any egregious injuries aside from trembling head to toe. He could feel the wetness soaking through the back of his blazer, from the mud he had fell into earlier, and grimaced through the mans sporadic thanks.

“Th-thank you so much!” the man was gushing, shaking the hands of the four who had helped him with his glasses hanging askew. “This—this car just came out of nowhere, swerved right into our lane—no blinkers or anything—so I tried to avoid it and I hit the curb and then—” The man broke off, choosing to finish his explanation by miming it out with his arms.

“Hey, uh… the, uh, the car’s smoking? Is that… it’s not going to explode or anything is it?” one of the helpers, a middle-aged woman, asked.

In that particular moment, for just a split second, Jason almost wished it would, that the whole SUV would explode in a ball of fiery wrath and consume him in its ire. That would be preferable over dealing with whatever else the day had planned for him.

“No, it’s fine,” was what Jason recalled saying as he took off toward his car, tie fluttering in the rain. Several voices rang out for him to come back, even the man he had helped, but Jason didn’t turn around; he jumped in his car, mud and all, turned the engine over, and sped off.

That man and the woman were fine now, he had to get to work.

By the time Jason pulled into his reserved parking spot, it was well past the time for his meeting. That didn’t stop him from streaking into the building and into the elevator, ignoring the estranged looks his fellow coworkers gave him. He knew he had to look like he had come off on the worse end of a fight with a pitbull—his hair was tussled, clothes soiled, he could feel bits of dried mud clinging to his cheeks—but that didn’t matter, he just had to get there so he could at least explain himself, maybe beg for a reschedule.

Before the elevator doors could open all the way, Jason was already squeezing his way out, struggling to straighten out his drenched tie as he strode down the hall. Everything would be fine, he forcibly told himself, all of this was absolutely fixable, especially after everything he had done in the past few weeks. His work load alone, in his mind, should have earned him some leeway.

“We’re terribly sorry, Mr, um… Foley, was it? Yes, well… promotions and raises and the sort are typically reserved for those who can be on time,” his overseer, this impossibly old crone wrapped in sagging human flesh, croaked out in definitive tones as he peered out over those glinting, half-spectacle glasses. “You’ve been with this company for going on twenty years next month, Mr. Foley, you’re one of our most senior employees year-wise, so you above all others should know how pertinent a timely showing is. And, of course, the consequences of the exact opposite. But there is a silver lining for you, Mr Foley. In lieu of your, ah… heroic actions, you may take the rest of the day off. Looking at your current state, I daresay you need it. Probably for the best our partners weren’t able to see you like this… can you imagine the rumors? No, consider it a blessing you missed our meeting. We’ll revisit the notion of your upward mobility with the company in due time, perhaps after you’ve shown us a little more dedication in your work, yes?”

By the time Jason got back to his car, whatever little bit of hopeful spirit residing within was crushed beyond repair. The drive home was suffocatingly silent; his car radio was broken and had been that way for months. He had been hoping for a replacement with this raise, among several other things that desperately needed fixing.

Shambling through the front door of his small apartment, and without turning on a single light, Jason had only sank into his beat-up yet comfy armchair when the doorbell rang. He didn’t move immediately, choosing instead to let the darkness comfort his gnawing depression and heartache. But then the bell rang again, almost impatiently, and he dragged himself to his feet, then to the door.

“Hello?”

He sounded like death warmed over, could hardly muster the strength to keep his eyes open, but even still, he saw no one. His porch was empty… except for a small, blank envelope intentionally left over his worn welcome mat.

“…what?”

Part of him wanted to just close the door and ignore it, whatever prank it happened to be, but a bigger part commanded that he pick it up, and so he did with a reluctant sigh.

Closing the door and throwing his back against it, Jason tore the envelope open and pulled out a letter. Something square fluttered out in the process of unfolding it—

“Okay, really, what is this?” he questioned aloud, a little agitated.

—but it was the single handwritten paragraph that took his breath away and left him clutching at his chest. He read it once, then twice… and then his gaze slowly dropped down to what had slipped out, that now lie at his feet. Then tears suddenly sprang to his eyes before he could stop them and a couple dripped down his cheeks in the process of pulling a little black book from his back pocket.

He flipped it open with trembling hands, passing page after page of self-defeatist thoughts, of mental meanderings from a dark and desolate place, pages that were filled with the all-consuming woe and anguish that life had beaten into him.

Jason didn’t realize he had been sliding down the door until his bottom thudded against the unyielding floorboards. He had lapsed into shuddering sobs, detaching a mechanical pencil from the notebooks’ side and giving it a couple clicks to free some lead.

And then he scribbled a positive remark for what felt like the first time in months.

And not soon after, he brought his knees up, wrapped his arms around them, buried his face, and began to openly cry.

The slip of paper at his feet was a check, a check for $20,000.

And the paragraph on that letter that came bundled in that mysterious envelope, it was from the man he had helped earlier, the man who possessed a fair amount of money, enough to repay him and the others who had helped to the tune of a figure in the thousands.

The sound of Jason crying persisted through the house until sleep eventually whisked him away and left him slumped against the wall, still clutching the little black book he had originally bought for self-motivational quotes to get him through the day but, somewhere along the way, had transformed into a painful scrapbook of missed opportunities and bad luck.

But now, a positive quote had been written down, one to overtake all the previous despair:

The Right Thing Is It’s Own Reward