The Driving Lesson

by Ben Rehder

  The fourth message, at five-fifteen: Charlie...your dad and I are worried sick. He’s driving around looking for you right now. You need to call back and let us know where you are. If you’re mad about the talk we had in your room last night, I apologize, okay? If you say you weren’t in that house, then I believe you. But you need to call me so I know you’re okay.

  Now I really felt like a major-league scumbag. I was about to listen to the fifth message, wondering how much worse it would get, when Opa came out of the store with a bulging plastic sack hanging from his left hand.

  He spotted me, came over to the car, and climbed into the passenger seat. He seemed out of breath. “Hope you like Gatorade,” he said, pulling a bottle out of the bag, followed by a bottle of water, a can of mixed nuts, several energy bars, and a can of green spray paint. Weird.

  “What’s the paint for?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.” He opened the can of nuts, grabbed a handful, and then passed them to me. “Just a snack now. We’ll stop somewhere and get a decent dinner. You hungry?”

  “Yeah, but we’d better call Mom first. I think she’s going crazy.”

  He didn’t seem real concerned about that.

  I probably haven’t made this clear yet, but Mom and Opa weren’t the best of friends. Dad once explained it by saying they had “philosophical differences,” whatever that means. As far as I could tell, most of it seemed to come down to Opa voting for politicians Mom didn’t like, and probably because he never went to church. Not just our church, but any church.

  Whenever we all got together, they spoke to each other more like acquaintances than family members. Polite and courteous, like when you see a neighbor at the grocery store. They seemed to put up with each other, for the sake of everyone else. When they’d hug — and Opa was a big hugger — there didn’t seem to be any real warmth to it.

  So it didn’t surprise me at all when Opa called Dad instead of Mom. I only heard one side of the conversation, of course, and it went like this:

  “Glen...No, I’m in my car...Yeah, I know...Because he’s with me...Yes, right here...He’s helping me run some errands...That’s my fault. I should’ve called you earlier.”

  Then Opa listened for a very long time — maybe a full minute. Then he said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, that’s absolutely ridiculous and you both know it...Ask me anything. Give me a math problem, or how about I tell you what I had for lunch yesterday? Think I can remember that far back? How about I quiz you instead and we’ll see how well you do? What color was the tie you wore on Tuesday?”

  What on earth were they talking about?

  After another long wait, Opa said, “He’s going to be fine. I just wanted to spend some time with him, that’s all...No, you just need to relax...I’ll have him home by ten o’clock...His phone is dead. The battery...No, ten o’clock. There’s nothing to worry about....Okay, we’ll see you then.”

  Then he hung up and let out a long sigh, the same kind of sigh dad lets out when he’s getting tired of explaining something to me. Must run in the family.

  We were still sitting in the parking lot at the convenience store, and I figured that was as far as we were going to get. No road trip to Seattle. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed. The big adventure was aborted before we’d even left the state.

  Or so I thought.

  Opa turned to me and said, “Let me ask you something, Bud. Are you concerned about my mental faculties?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do I seem senile to you? You know — losing my marbles? Be honest.”

  I thought about it. Yeah, this whole situation was unusual, but it seemed to me that Opa knew exactly what he was doing. So I said, “No more than usual.”

  I didn’t intend it to be funny, but Opa laughed for a good, long time about that. Then he said, “Okay, then. Let’s grab a burger somewhere then get back on the highway. We want to find Interstate 27 and go north.”

  5

  It was amazing how quickly I’d become comfortable behind the wheel. I was starting to feel like an old pro. Driving really wasn’t that difficult. Just stay in your lane. When you have to switch lanes, use your turn signal, and don’t forget to check your blind spot. Don’t tailgate. Don’t drive too fast. Check your mirrors. Watch out for idiots. Those were the basics.

  Even as the sun went down to our left and it began to get dark, it didn’t bother me. It was fun driving by the headlights — or it was, until Opa said, “If a deer runs out in front of us, do not swerve, okay? And don’t stomp the brakes. Just apply them firmly. Better to hit the deer than to lose control of the car.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have to think about these things ahead of time and already know how you’re going to react. I swerved to miss a deer once and damn near killed myself. Hit a guard rail and tore up my car pretty good.”

  “What, this car?”

  “No, it was a little Alfa Romeo I had a long time ago. I wasn’t much older than you. In my early twenties. I loved that car. You’ve never seen any pictures?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It was a red convertible. Man, what a car. I wish I still had it today.”

  I drove in silence for a few minutes, keeping the speedometer under sixty-five, which was the nighttime speed limit. Traffic was light, but occasionally a car would zoom past me going much faster than I was. A sign said that Amarillo was ninety-seven miles away.

  “What happened to it?” I asked. “Your car.”

  He laughed. “You want the long version or the short version?” Before I could answer, he said, “I married your grandmother when I was twenty, right before I was sent to Vietnam. While I was gone, she loaned the Alfa to her brother, William. You never met him. He died in, what, 1977, I think. Anyway, he was driving the Alfa for a while, then he sold it. Wasn’t his to sell, but he had a problem with gambling, so he sold it anyway. Irene didn’t tell me any of this until I got back.”

  Irene was my grandmother. She lived in Maine and we didn’t see her much. Once every few years.

  “I bet you were pretty mad,” I said.

  “Well, yeah, a little. But mostly I was just glad to be alive.”

  I’d known that Opa had been to Vietnam, but I didn’t know any of the details. He’d earned a medal of some kind, and he had some friends — other soldiers — that he met with every year or so.

  Sometimes my dad would tell me that the world wasn’t invented when I was born, meaning that a lot had happened before I came along. He would say he was young once, and so was Opa, and so on. But, honestly, it was hard to picture: Opa driving around in a sporty little convertible, then getting married so young, then fighting in a war in a country that I probably couldn’t find right away on a map. It almost seemed like made-up stuff you’d see in an old movie, but I knew it was real.

  “I blame it all on Joe Namath,” Opa said, and I could tell from the tone of his voice that there was a grin on his face. “Super Bowl number three. Poor old William picked the Colts. Boy, that guy was the lousiest gambler. Had a talent for picking losers like you’ve never seen.”

  On the outskirts of Amarillo, Opa had me exit the highway and pull into the parking lot of a Motel 6. I found a spot in front of the office, and Opa climbed out of the car — slowly, using his cane for support — and went inside. I could see a young guy in there behind the counter.

  I checked my phone and saw that it was nine-fifteen. Mom and Dad were expecting me to be home by ten o’clock. We wouldn’t show, and my parents would start worrying again. I sure hoped Opa was going to call and tell them exactly what was happening.

  A few minutes later, Opa came out of the office with a key and directed me to the rear of the building — the quiet side, he said, because it didn’t face the highway. I grabbed his suitcase from the back of the car while he unlocked the door. The room was pretty basic: two queen beds, a TV, a small table, and a bathroom. Nothing fancy, but it was clean and functional.

  “First
thing tomorrow,” Opa said, “we’ll go shopping somewhere and get you some clothes, a toothbrush, things like that. Maybe buy an ice chest and fill it with some decent food, so we don’t have to eat at restaurants three times a day.”

  “That sounds good.”

  He was still standing near the doorway. He glanced at his watch and said, “Listen, I guess I’d better call your dad and let him know what’s going on. So I’m going to step outside for a few minutes. We’ll have a little talk when I get back, okay?”

  The “little talk” would turn out to be a conversation I’d remember almost word for word for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know that at the time.

  Here’s something else I didn’t know: Just as Opa was stepping out of the motel room, back home in Abilene, Matt was sneaking out of his house, carrying the stolen cordless drill in a brown grocery sack. He told me the whole story later, and it was a wild one.

  See, Matt had what he thought was a great idea, but like many of his ideas, “great” turned out to be a really inaccurate description. What happened was, he had come up with a “strategic plan” to return the drill — but not to the house under construction. No, he figured that would be too risky, and I’ll admit he was probably right.

  After all, if the realtor, Cathy Abbott, had called the cops as my mother had urged her to do, there was a chance a patrol unit would be cruising past the empty house from time to time. There was also the possibility that the guy in charge of building the house — the contractor — had taken a few security precautions of his own. Maybe he’d installed motion-triggered security lights, or maybe he’d paid somebody to spend the night in the house, just to prevent anybody else from coming in.

  So then Matt thought, Well, if I don’t return it to the house, how can I return it? And he thought of Cathy Abbott. Matt figured it didn’t matter where he returned it, as long as he returned it. And Cathy Abbott lived right in the neighborhood. So he decided to take it over to her house and quietly leave it on the front porch. She’d find it the next morning.

  This is where I would’ve offered him a better option, if I’d been involved. I would’ve said, Walk right up to her house with the evidence in your hand? Bad idea, dude. Instead, why couldn’t he just hide the drill somewhere near her house, then mail an anonymous note telling her where to find it?

  But I wasn’t there, so Matt formed his own plan, and just as he tiptoed onto Cathy Abbott’s front porch, a car pulled into her driveway, and the headlights swept across Matt like he was an escapee in a prison yard. Matt dropped the brown grocery bag and ran, which, of course, made him look guilty of something.

  The guy in the car, who turned out to be Cathy Abbott’s large, fast, extremely strong boyfriend, sprang out of his vintage Firebird, gave chase, and tackled Matt before he’d even reached the end of the block. Did I mention that this guy had also been a state wrestling champion? He put Matt in a headlock and sort of half dragged and half carried him back to Cathy Abbott’s house.

  They quickly found the drill in the bag, and Matt had no choice but to tell them everything — everything except the fact that I’d been with him when he stole the drill. Even though it was kind of obvious I was his partner in crime — because, as we already know, Cathy Abbott had seen my big blond head through the kitchen window — Matt kept his mouth shut about that part. What he did say was that he regretted the whole thing, which was why he was returning the drill, and he was really sorry, and he wouldn’t do it again, and that’s when the boyfriend said, “I’m gonna call the cops.”

  They were in the living room and the boyfriend turned for the phone.

  “Wait a second, Frank,” said Cathy Abbott. “Just hold on. I mean, he did bring it back.”

  “Yeah, but he stole it first, and that was after they broke into the place.”

  Matt said, “We didn’t break — ”

  “You shut up,” Frank said, pointing a menacing finger. He was apparently a pretty wound-up guy. And he looked like he worked out with weights. Every day. For a couple of hours.

  Matt shut up.

  “Besides,” Frank continued, “how do we know he was really returning it? For all we know, he was out there peeping through the windows, like a little pervert.”

  “Frank!” Cathy Abbott said. “For God’s sake, if that was the case, why would he bring the drill with him?”

  “Hell if I know. Maybe that way, if he got caught, he’d have an excuse. He could say, ‘Hey, all I was doing was returning the drill.’”

  It didn’t help that Cathy Abbott was in a bathrobe and her hair was wet, apparently fresh out of the shower. Matt was shaking his head no, but he was too scared to speak up.

  “That could be the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” Cathy Abbott said.

  “But we don’t know what he was doing out there,” Frank said. “I think we should call the cops.”

  “Come on, Frank,” Cathy Abbott said. “Remember when you were his age? Think about some of the things you did. We all make mistakes. I know I did, and you did, too. Let’s not make a big deal out of this.”

  It sounded perfectly reasonable.

  The jerk called the cops anyway.

  I kissed a girl for the first time last summer, just a couple of weeks before my freshman year in high school. Matt and I were riding bikes one evening — not really going anywhere, just cruising the neighborhood — when we spotted Ashley, a girl from school, hanging out in the park with another girl we didn’t recognize.

  But man was she cute. Totally hot.

  Matt, of course, had no problem riding right over and starting a conversation. He’s always been confident like that, whereas I’m a little bit shy.

  This other girl was named Tina, and she was Ashley’s cousin from Dallas, just visiting for a week while her parents were on a cruise to Bermuda or the Bahamas or somewhere.

  The girls invited us to follow them to the convenience store, where we bought some Cokes, and then we went back to Ashley’s house and went for a swim in her pool. It was dark in the backyard, so Ashley’s mom would occasionally stick her head out and check on us, but for the most part we had some privacy.

  At first, the four of us talked as a group, but then we sort of broke into pairs, and Tina and I ended up on the other side of the pool, having our own conversation. Okay, not just a conversation. There was definitely some flirting going on, no doubt about it. She liked me, I could tell, and you can bet I liked her. She had a great sense of humor, and even though she was a cheerleader, she wasn’t all snotty or stuck-up about it.

  Still, even though things were going well, it took a long time for me to work up the courage to kiss her. I mean, it probably got to the point where she was thinking, Jeez, what is this guy waiting for?

  But I finally did it. Just leaned right over, trying to be smooth, and kissed her. I’m not going to get all personal with the details, and what kind of kiss it was, and how many more times we kissed after that, but I will say that, the next day, I couldn’t stop grinning. So much so that Dad finally nailed me. He said something like, “Any smile that big has to be about a girl.”

  I admitted that, yeah, I’d met someone. He didn’t tease me too much, but he did get sort of philosophical or whatever and say that now, when I was young, through high school and college, I would have experiences that would stand out from all the others, and that I would come away with memories so strong and solid I could almost carry them in my pocket.

  Corny, huh?

  Turned out he was right.

  I never saw Tina again, but even now, I can clearly remember the tone of her voice, the smell of her perfume, the exact green shade of her eyes. I remember that I had my arms around her waist and she whispered, “You’re a pretty cool guy, Charlie,” right before Ashley’s mom came out and announced it was time for the girls to come inside.

  What my dad hadn’t mentioned was that it worked both ways. Some of those experiences and the memories they created wouldn’t necessarily be good. Others would be downrigh
t painful.

  6

  After fifteen very long minutes, Opa came back into the motel room looking kind of shaken up or upset. I was sprawled out on one of the beds, channel surfing, and he sat on the edge of the other bed.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said.

  I sat up. “What? What’s going on?”

  He shook his head. “This was a bad idea from the start. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

  “What did Dad say?”

  Opa didn’t answer right away, and when he did, it was a little hard to follow. He said, “I had no right to include you in this. Sometimes I forget that you’re only fourteen. You’re so smart, Bud, and you have a good mind, and I have no doubt you’ll grow into a thoughtful, reasonable adult. But this is too much. Tomorrow, we’ll go back home.”

  We sat there in silence for a long time.

  The sports guy on the news was talking about the Longhorns baseball team, and how they could wrap up the conference title this weekend in the series against the Missouri Tigers. The coach, Augie Garrido, said, “It’s ours to lose.”

  Weird, the things that stick in your head, even when you’re not really paying attention. Even when you’re wondering why everyone is talking in circles around you, without just coming right out and giving you the straight facts. Frankly, I was getting a little sick of it.

  I was thinking about my parents, and how long it took them to tell me Opa was dying. According to what Dad told me in the car, they’d known since early April that Opa had cancer. But Dad hadn’t told me until yesterday morning, almost two months later, when things had gotten so bad that he’d had no choice but to tell me. That didn’t seem fair. Now I was wondering if Opa was doing the same thing.

  “I deserve to know what this is about,” I said, trying not to sound like I was whining or complaining. “You brought me all the way out here, saying we’re going to see some doctor, but that’s not the full story, I can see that. I’m not an idiot. You can say I’m too young to understand or whatever, but I think that’s pretty lame. You’ve never treated me that way before. Everyone knows what’s going on except me. Mom and Dad know. You know. I should know, too. I’m part of this family.”