The Buick My Granddaughter Drove Home

“So I made sure Hadley got left instead,” she said. “I know that. I knew it when I did it. I’m sorry.” I took the bread.

I told her to say it to Hadley, not to me, and she said she already had, on the back step, the night before.

I asked her what Hadley said. Trina laughed a little, not a happy laugh but not a bitter one.

“She said it was okay, and did I want her to drive my girl to piano on Tuesdays, too, because her shift doesn’t start till five on Tuesdays.”

I do not hold a grudge well. My husband used to say I could not hold one for more than a day before I had to take it out and look at it and put it down.

I asked Trina in for coffee. She came in. We did not talk about it any more after that.

The next Wednesday I had my eye appointment, the yearly one, where they put the drops in and your pupils go big as dimes and you cannot drive for four or five hours.

For years my husband drove me. Since he passed, I have had to beg rides.

Usually I ask a woman from church, or I take the senior van, which comes when it comes. This year I did not ask anybody.

Hadley asked me. She said, “Your eye doctor is Wednesday at eight, right? I don’t have school till eleven, it’s a late start day.”

So she drove me in my own Buick, in the morning, with the early sun on the grain elevator.

She came into the waiting room and sat with me and read a magazine about boats, which she has never been in, and asked me questions about every picture.

When the drops went in and I came back out squinting and half blind, she took my elbow. She did not ask if I needed help.

She just took my elbow, the way you would take an old woman’s elbow if you had been raised right.

She had bought me a pair of those roll-up dark sunglasses from the counter, the cheap ones, and she put them on my face herself, and fixed them behind my ears.

“There,” she said. “Now you look like a movie star.”

I could not see much of anything on the way home. Just the shapes of things, and a lot of light.

But I could hear her driving, the blinker clicking, the careful stops, and I could hear her humming under her breath.

It was an old hymn. I had not known she knew it.

It was the one my husband used to whistle in the driveway, changing the oil on that very car, on a sheet of cardboard, on Saturday mornings. “Where did you learn that?” I asked her.

“You,” she said. “You sing it when you do dishes. You’ve been singing it my whole life.” I had not known that either.

I put my head back on the seat with those silly glasses on, and I let my granddaughter drive me home.