The Buick My Granddaughter Drove Home

My car is a 2004 Buick LeSabre, champagne colored, with a 3800 engine and a hundred and forty-one thousand miles on it.

My husband bought it new the year he retired, after forty years with the railroad, and he took care of it like it was a horse.

He changed the oil himself every three thousand miles, in the driveway, on a sheet of cardboard.

He kept a logbook in the glove box with every oil change and every tire written down in his square handwriting. I still keep that logbook going.

He has been gone four years in October. He would have liked Hadley driving his car.

He taught Pete to drive in a pickup in the cemetery road loop, because there was nobody there to hit, he said, and nobody to complain.

On Thursday I picked Hadley up at the end of Pete’s driveway at noon.

Pete had called the school from a truck stop in Oklahoma, on his way north, and signed her out. Trina’s car was gone. She was at her girl’s piano lesson.

Hadley came down the driveway with her permit in a plastic sleeve and her red polo already on, because her shift started at four.

“If I pass, I can drive myself in,” she said, and then, “If I don’t, I’ll be late.”

“You won’t be late,” I said. I was wearing my pink windbreaker, the light one, because it was sunny but there was a little wind, and I had my pocketbook and two bottles of water and a sack of peanut butter crackers.

I drove us out. I wanted her to sit and breathe and look out the window instead of white-knuckling the wheel for forty miles before the test even started.

She held that permit in both hands the whole way, like a hymnal.

We went out Highway 30, the old road, past Potter and Dix.

The wheat was cut and the stubble was gold, and the sky was that hard, high blue we get in September. Hadley went over the hand signals under her breath.

“Left turn, arm straight out. Right turn, arm up. Stop, arm down.” She knew them. She had known them for a year.

I let her say them anyway, because saying them was something to do with her hands and her mouth.

“What if I hit a cone?” she asked near Dix. I told her there were no cones in Nebraska driving tests anymore that I knew of, just real streets.

She said, “What if I hit a real street?” and we both laughed, and that helped.

The license office in Kimball is a little brick building near the courthouse, with a bench out front and a flagpole and a juniper bush that somebody trims very square.

We were twenty minutes early. I made her eat two crackers.

Inside, a woman at the counter checked Hadley’s permit, her log sheet, and my registration and proof of insurance.

She looked over the top of her glasses at my insurance card and said, “Buick. Good. Those are easy to see out of.”