The media display made controlling the truck relatively easy. I worked my way through the options to Truck Bed Operations, then lowered the tailgate and extended the built-in ramp. The directions were so easy even an adult could understand them. While most wheelchairs are stored by pushing up the middle of the seat, bringing the two sides together, because of its technology Mighty Chair had been designed to close up from the top down. “Cher,” I told her, “fold up.” Within seconds the backrest lowered over the seat and pistons lowered it. As this was taking place, Cher was doing a passable Margaret Hamilton, crying, “I’m melting. I’m melting.” And as it lowered to the ground, I could see the resemblance to the Wicked Witch’s melting. Thanks, Y.

Fully compressed, Mighty Chair resembled a rectangular ottoman about two and a half feet high. Laura grasped the handle and wheeled it up the ramp into the truck bed, secured it with crisscrossing bungee cords, and covered it with the canvas sheet she had requested. The entire process took about ten minutes. A couple of people coming in and out of the CVS had glanced in our direction but didn’t seem to be paying any undue attention. There was nothing we could do about it anyway. This was hardly a perfect plan.

As I raised the rear gate, Laura got into the cab’s passenger seat. It seemed like just a decade or so earlier she was climbing into Van’s passenger seat and introducing herself. She looked at me, sitting behind the wheel as if I was actually driving this thing, and forced a wan smile. “Can o’ corn,” I said.

She scrunched her face into a question mark. “What?”

“It’s okay, it’s a saying.”

“Oh. Okay.” She reached into the CVS bag one more time, this time pulling out some cover makeup. “Lean over here.” I followed instructions and she began covering the visible bruises as best she could. When she was done, she handed me a pair of oval reading glasses in a black plastic frame and a baseball cap bearing a cartoon image of Abbott and Costello above the words: “Slowly, I turned … Niagara Falls, New York.”

The glasses and cap completed my nerd look. “Here we go,” I said, running my hands over the console like a pilot figuring out how to get this 757 off the ground. I pressed and pushed and turned until the GPS appeared. I didn’t have any specific location in Canada to plug in, so I went to my usual fallback position. Assuming every city has a Main Street, I said distinctly, “One Main Street, Niagara Falls, Ontario.” Then I added, “Take the Peace Bridge.” A female voice accurately repeated the address.

After considerable thought I finally had picked the Peace Bridge essentially because why not? It was the closest and busiest crossing. With 160,000 vehicles crossing every day, agents had little time to make thorough inspections. It also was the obvious choice, so I hoped Homeland Security would assume I was too smart to use it and instead was heading for one of the less traveled bridges. Reverse reverse reverse psychology!