The Buick My Granddaughter Drove Home

“And she came to a full stop at every stop sign. You’d be surprised how few do.” Hadley’s face went pink to the hairline.

“Her granddad would be proud,” I said, and then I had to stop talking for a minute. Lorna patted my arm.

She said the real card would come in the mail in about two weeks, and the paper was good until then.

They took Hadley inside for her picture. She came out with her temporary license in a plastic sleeve, just like the permit had been.

Then she stood on the sidewalk and looked at me, and then she looked at the driver’s seat of the Buick.

“Sit, Grandma,” she said.

I did not argue. I sat down behind my own wheel like a fool, and Hadley climbed in on the passenger side with that paper held up beside her face, grinning so wide I could see her back teeth.

Lorna took our picture through the open window on Hadley’s phone, and I laughed out loud.

Then we traded places, and Hadley got behind the wheel and buckled up. She rolled every window down. All four. The wind came through the car and lifted my hair, and it was a sunny September afternoon, and I laughed out loud like a girl of sixteen myself. I could not help it.

“Don’t you tell your father I laughed,” I said. “Tell him I was dignified.”

She said she would tell him I was very dignified, and she put the car in reverse and backed out with her arm over the seat, looking over her shoulder like a pro.

She drove us forty miles home at the speed limit exactly. Not a mile over. Both hands on the wheel, at nine and three, the way they teach it now.

A pickup came up behind us near Dix and passed us, and she did not even flinch.

“Grandma,” she said, somewhere past Potter, “why did you do this?” I thought about how to answer. The wind was loud through the windows and I had to raise my voice a little.

“Because you did everything right,” I said, “and it wasn’t fair. And because your granddad would have done it a month ago, and I’m slower than he was.”

She smiled at the road. She did not take her eyes off it once.

“I didn’t want to make trouble,” she said. “With Dad gone so much. I didn’t want him to have to pick.”

I told her that was a grown-up worry and it belonged to grown-ups, and that I was the grown-up today.

“Trina isn’t bad,” Hadley said after a while. “She just loves her more.” She said it plain, not bitter, like reading a weather report.

I looked out at the stubble going by and did not answer, because she was right, and it still was not fair.

At the edge of Sidney, where the highway comes in past the grain elevator, I expected her to turn toward my house.

My house is on the east side, six blocks from the grocery store. I had thought she would drop me and take the car to work.