The Buick My Granddaughter Drove Home

“I had to cancel again, Grandma.” Hadley said it low, while she slid my can of coffee across the scanner, so the man behind me in line would not hear it.

She was wearing her red grocery polo with her name tag pinned crooked, and her dark blond ponytail was coming loose the way it does by the end of a shift. She did not look up when she said it.

I had come in for coffee and cat food and a sack of apples.

It was a Tuesday afternoon in early September, bright and dry, the kind of day in western Nebraska when the wind finally lies down and you can hear the trains.

“Cancel what, honey?” I asked, though I already had a feeling.

There was only one thing in her life she had been counting down to all summer, and she had told me the date twice.

“My driving test,” she said. “The car’s making a noise. Trina says it isn’t safe to take it out on the road until somebody looks at it.”

She bagged my apples very carefully, one at a time.

“This was Thursday’s test,” I said. “The second one.” She nodded.

Behind me the man shifted his basket to his other arm, and I paid and took my bags and told her I would see her Sunday.

I sat in my car in the lot for a long while after that.

I am sixty-nine years old and I spent thirty-four years behind a teller window at the bank on the square. I know when somebody is not telling me the whole story.

The first test had been in August. Hadley had booked it herself, online, on her phone, the morning after she logged her fiftieth hour of practice driving.

She had held her permit a full year by then.

Two days before that test, Trina told her the car was needed.

Trina’s own girl, who is twelve, had a dentist appointment in Scottsbluff that morning, an hour away, and it was the only opening the dentist had.

Hadley did not fuss. She never fusses. She canceled online and waited three weeks for the next opening at our office in Sidney, and she took the one that came, a Thursday morning in September.

And now the car was making a noise. I happened to know where that car had been the past Saturday, because my neighbor saw it at a gas station in Ogallala.

Trina had driven to her sister’s and back, an hour and more each way, noise and all.

I am not a woman who goes looking for trouble. I like my coffee hot, my church on Sunday, and my bills paid on the first of the month.

But I sat in that grocery lot and I was not calm, and I said so out loud to nobody.

My son Pete married Trina last year. Pete is forty-one and he drives truck, over the road, gone two and three weeks at a stretch and home four or five days.

It is good money and hard living, and he does it for his girl.