The Buick My Granddaughter Drove Home

The examiner came out a few minutes later. She was a woman near sixty, with short gray hair and a lanyard and a clipboard, and her name tag said Lorna.

She had the calmest voice I have ever heard outside of a hospital.

“You’re Hadley,” she said, and shook her hand. “Let’s go take a look at your car.”

She walked around the Buick with Hadley and had her work the turn signals, the brake lights, the horn and the wipers, and Hadley did every one right.

Then they got in, and Hadley adjusted the seat and both mirrors without being asked, and buckled, and checked over her shoulder, and pulled out of that lot so slowly and so carefully that I had to put my hand over my mouth.

I sat on the bench outside. There was nobody else around. A man came out of the courthouse with a paper sack and nodded to me.

The flag snapped once in the wind and lay back down. I looked at my watch.

I am not a woman who prays out loud in public. But I prayed on that bench, the plain kind of prayer, the kind you say for your own children in a hospital hallway.

I just asked that she be steady, and that it go the way it ought to.

I thought about the noise the car was supposedly making. I thought about the dentist in Scottsbluff.

I tried to think about Trina fairly, the way my mother taught me to think about people, by imagining what she was afraid of.

I decided she was afraid of being second. She had married a man who already had a daughter, and she had brought her own, and some part of her was keeping the score so her girl would never come up short. I could almost feel sorry for her.

Almost. Then I thought about Hadley riding her bike a mile and a half to work in August with her apron in her basket, and the feeling went away.

They were gone twenty-two minutes. I know because I counted every one.

When the Buick turned back into the lot, it came in slow, with the blinker on, and Hadley was not smiling. My heart dropped right into my shoes.

She parked it straight between the lines. She put it in park and set the brake and turned off the engine.

Then she sat there a second with both hands on the wheel, and I thought, well, there will be a third date and we will find it.

Then Lorna said something to her, and Hadley turned toward the window and held up a piece of paper.

It was white, with print on it, and Lorna’s signature at the bottom. It was her passing slip. She had not been smiling because she was concentrating.

I stood up off that bench faster than I have stood up from anything in ten years.

Lorna got out of the passenger side and came around and shook Hadley’s hand right there at the curb, through the open door.

“She checked her mirrors more than my last three drivers put together,” Lorna told me.