The Buick My Granddaughter Drove Home

Hadley’s mother left when Hadley was four. She lives in Colorado now and calls on birthdays.

Pete raised Hadley mostly alone, with me filling in, until he met Trina at a wedding dance in Chappell and married her the next spring.

I wanted to like Trina. I did like her, some.

She keeps a clean house and she cooks a decent roast, and she came to my husband’s funeral and stood beside me at the graveside the whole hour without being asked.

But she came with a girl of her own, and she came with a way of keeping score that I recognized from the bank.

Some people count every dollar that goes out of their account and never the ones that come in.

There was one car in that house besides Pete’s rig, a gray sedan that Pete made the payments on. Trina did not work outside the home.

She drove her girl to school, to volleyball, to piano, and to friends’ houses on the far side of town.

Hadley rode her bike to the grocery store, a mile and a half, or she got a ride from a girl she worked with.

When it rained or snowed, she walked. She never once asked me for a ride, because she did not want to be trouble.

I think I understood Trina’s reason, even sitting there angry.

As long as Hadley could not drive, the car stayed with Trina, and every ride in that house went to her own girl first. Wanting your own child looked after is not a sin.

But doing it on Hadley’s back was. That girl had worked all summer. She had saved her money in a coffee can.

She wanted to drive herself to the store so she could take the early weekend shifts, which paid the same and left her afternoons for homework.

I could have called Trina that night. I thought about it, with the phone in my hand.

Then I put it down, because I knew exactly how it would go. She would be sweet as pie and sorry as could be, and there would be a reason.

There had been a reason in August and a reason in September. If I asked a third time, I would only be buying a third reason.

I did not need Trina’s permission to drive my own granddaughter somewhere in my own car.

I did think about Pete. A man should know what is going on in his own house.

So that night I called him, at a truck stop outside Amarillo, Texas, where he had pulled in for his ten hours off.

“Mom,” he said, and I could hear the reefer units humming around him. “Everything okay?” I told him Hadley had canceled her test again, and why. There was a long quiet on the line.

“Trina told me about the dentist,” he said finally. “She didn’t say anything about this one.” He let out a breath.

“The car’s fine, Mom. I had the oil changed and the tires rotated before I left. There’s no noise.”

“I didn’t think there was,” I said. Pete is not a fool, and I would never write him as one.