“Grandma,” she said, when she pulled in my driveway. “You waited on a bench for me for twenty-two minutes. I can wait in a waiting room for you for an hour. That’s just how it works now.” I could not answer her. I patted her hand.
The real license came in the mail at the end of September, a little plastic card with her picture on it, grinning like she had been at the curb in Kimball.
She brought it over to show me before she showed anybody else. She showed Trina second.
That fall she drove herself to the six o’clock shift every Saturday and Sunday in my Buick, and brought it back to my driveway by half past twelve.
She topped off the gas every week, out of her own pay, without being asked.
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She drove her little stepsister to piano on Tuesdays and to volleyball on Thursdays.
The two of them started riding with the windows down even when it got cold, and Trina would stand in the driveway shaking her head and laughing.
Hadley kept the oil logbook in the glove box going, too.
She took the car to the shop on the highway for its oil change in October and wrote it down herself, in her round handwriting, right under her grandfather’s square handwriting.
When I saw that page, I had to sit down on the porch step for a minute. Two handwritings, four years apart, the same car.
I do not know why that is the thing that got me, out of all of it, but it was.
On Christmas morning, after church and before dinner, with the sun coming in hard off the snow through the kitchen window, I put the title of the Buick on the table, and a pen, and a cup of coffee for Pete.
Hadley was still sixteen, so Pete signed under me as her parent, at the place where the man at the county office told me he should.
Trina stood behind Pete’s chair with her hand on his shoulder. Her girl was licking frosting off a spoon.
Hadley did not understand at first what she was looking at. Then she did, and she put both her hands over her face.
I signed my name on the back of that title in my best bank-teller hand, the way I signed ten thousand cashier’s checks.
“It’s a 2004,” I told her. “It’s got a hundred and forty-four thousand miles on it now, and the passenger window sticks if you run it too fast. Your granddad would want it driven, not parked. So drive it.” She nodded into her hands.
Then she got up and hugged me so hard my reading glasses went crooked.
And over her shoulder I saw Trina, with her hand on Pete’s shoulder, wiping her eyes with the back of her other hand, quick, so nobody would see.
I saw. I did not say a word. Some things a person ought to be allowed to keep for herself, and that morning, at my kitchen table, with the coffee going cold and the snow shining, I had everything I wanted anyway.
I signed the Buick’s title over to my granddaughter at Christmas, and I have not had to ask anybody for a ride since.