The Buick My Granddaughter Drove Home

Trina did not look at me for a while. She put her keys in her pocket. “She passed in Kimball?” she asked.

I said she had. “You drove her,” she said. It was not a question, so I did not answer it.

“Pete knew?” she asked. I said he had signed her out of school. Trina nodded slowly, like she was adding a column.

I waited for her to get angry. I was ready for it. She didn’t. She looked tired, the way Pete had sounded on the phone.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt her,” she said. I told her I believed she hadn’t been trying to. But she had, all the same.

I said it as gently as I have ever said anything, and then I said goodbye and walked home.

I did not tell anybody at church. I did not tell my sister on the phone. I did not post anything on the computer.

I went home and fed the cat and made a pot of coffee, and I sat at the kitchen table and cried a little, the good kind.

Hadley called me at six thirty, on her break. “Grandma,” she said, “I asked Gus for the Saturday and Sunday opening shift. The six o’clock. He said yes.”

Gus has managed that grocery store for nineteen years. He is not a man who says yes quickly.

“What did he say exactly?” I asked. “He said, ‘You’re the one who’s never been late once without a car, so I guess you won’t be late with one,'” Hadley said.

“And he put me on the board right then, in marker.”

The opening shift on weekends starts at six in the morning and ends at noon.

It pays the same, but Hadley wanted it because it left her afternoons for homework and her Sunday afternoons for church and for me. That was her reason, and she had never once said it out loud.

Pete came home on the twentieth, like he said. I don’t know everything that was said in that house.

I know he and Trina sat on the back step a long time on a Sunday afternoon, because Hadley told me, and she said nobody raised their voice.

I know that on the Monday after, Pete went down to the car lot on the highway and came home with a used pickup for himself to drive when he was home, so the gray sedan could be Trina’s and the Buick, when I lent it, could be Hadley’s.

And I know that Trina came by my house the next Saturday morning, by herself, with a loaf of zucchini bread wrapped in foil.

She stood on my front step and did not come in, and she held the bread out with both hands.

“I’m not good at this,” she said. I told her nobody is.

She said, “My mother had five of us and I was the one who always got left at the church after choir. I didn’t want my girl to be the one who got left.” She looked at the bread.