The Title With Her Name First
Kaylee took a breath and said, “Austin. Will you ride with me?”
I didn’t say anything for a second. I couldn’t.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, kiddo. Let me get the bow off so you can see.”
She laughed, a wet laugh. The kids started clapping for real then, the whole yard, and a couple of the boys whistled.
Somebody turned the music back up. It was a country song I didn’t know, which is how I know I’m getting old.
I untied the bow from the hood and laid it in the grass. Kaylee walked around the car twice, touching it, the way you’d walk around a horse you weren’t sure of yet.
Then she got in the driver’s seat and moved it forward so far her knees nearly hit the wheel.
“Back an inch,” I said. “You want your wrists to rest on top of the wheel with your arms straight.”
“Austin.”
“Back an inch.”
She moved it back an inch. She adjusted the rearview mirror, then both side mirrors, the way the booklet said. She put her seatbelt on and checked that mine was on. Her hands were shaking.
Before she started the engine, I looked through the windshield at the porch. Crystal was still standing there. She was watching us. She did not wave and she did not go inside.
I almost got out. I almost walked up those steps and said something.
But the girl in the driver’s seat had asked me, and I was not going to make that night about her mother and me.
“Okay,” Kaylee said. “Okay. Foot on the brake. Push the button. No, wait, it’s a key. It’s an actual key.”
“It’s a 2013,” I said. “Turn it.”
She turned it. The engine caught on the first try, quiet as you please. Mr. Hendricks had changed the oil every four thousand miles for eleven years. Kaylee laughed out loud.
We backed down the driveway at about one mile an hour while the teenagers lined the yard and cheered like it was a football game.
She stopped at the end of the driveway for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep.
“There’s nobody coming,” I said.
“I’m making sure.”
“You’re making very sure.”
She pulled out onto our street and drove to the stop sign at the end like she was carrying eggs.
It was almost full dark by then, and she remembered her headlights on her own, which I was proud of.
“Where to?” I said.
She didn’t even think about it. “Sonic.”
Of course. When she was six and seven, and Crystal worked late Fridays, I used to take her to the Sonic out on the bypass in Danville in my old work truck.
We’d sit in the stall and she’d get a cherry limeade and tater tots and explain her whole week to me.