Sixty Dollars an Hour
Episode 1 of 3 of Lesson Six by Nell Halloran
“I’ve never had one,” he said. “Not a permit. Nothing.”
“You never let it lapse?”
“I never had it to lapse.”
He sat in my passenger seat with his hands flat on his knees, like a man in a dentist’s waiting room. Forty one years old. Ivey, Walter, according to the form on my clipboard. Address on Grant Street. Emergency contact left blank.
“Then we start at the start,” I said.
The lot behind the old Kmart was mine every Wednesday, four to five. The store had been closed since I was in high school and the town never got around to knocking it down, so there were nine acres of cracked asphalt out there, light poles in a grid, one cart corral nobody ever hauled off. Corliss, Indiana. Grain elevator, Dairy Whip, four stoplights, a bypass that took the traffic away in 1998 and never brought it back.
Half the licensed drivers in this county learned to turn left in that lot. My father taught most of them. His name was still on the insurance because I had never made myself change it.
Sixty dollars an hour, or three twenty five for six if you paid up front. Walt paid up front, cash, in a bakery envelope with flour worked into the creases.
“Switch with me,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“Mr. Ivey.”
“Walt.”
“Walt. The engine is off. The keys are in my pocket. I need you in the other seat.”
He got out and walked around the front of the car instead of the back, which took him longer, and I let it take him longer. Then he sat down where I had been sitting and put his hands on his knees again.
We spent nine minutes on the seat. He ran it back, then forward, then back to where it started. The lever was stiff and he was a big man folded into a space built for somebody else, and he apologized four times, and then he apologized for apologizing.
“Mirrors,” I said.
He got the rearview on the second try. The side mirrors took longer, because he kept setting them so he could see the whole side of the car, which was the most common mistake there was and the only one that told you something true about a person.
“You want less of the car in it,” I said. “The car isn’t going anywhere.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
He worked nights, he told me, when I asked what he did. Dutch Mill Bakery, on Grant. He walked over at three in the morning and walked home at eleven, and he had been doing it for nineteen years.
“In February too?”
“It’s eleven minutes.”
His hands were cracked across the knuckles from the ovens and there was flour in the seams of them, and when he set them on the wheel at ten and two they covered a lot more of it than a teenager’s hands did. He did not turn the wheel. He held it.
“There are two of everything on my side,” I said. “Brake, mirror, and me. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong on my license, not yours.”
“And if I can’t do it at all.”
“Then you can’t, and you will have paid me three hundred and twenty five dollars to sit in a parking lot behind a dead Kmart.” I checked my watch. “People have spent worse.”
He almost smiled. It went away fast.
I had sat in that seat eleven years and I knew what fear looked like at sixteen. It was loud. It giggled, it dared itself, it took the wheel too hard and bragged about it after. At forty one it was quiet and it kept its hands still, and it was so much worse to sit next to.
At thirty eight minutes I held the key out over the console.
“Take it.”
He didn’t.
“You don’t have to start it. Just hold it.”
He took the key. He held it in his fist a while, and then he reached over and put it in, and I watched his shoulder come up around his ear before he turned it. The engine caught. The blower came on because I had left the fan up, and both of us jumped, and neither of us said anything about jumping.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
We sat there with it running. I did not ask him to put it in gear and he did not ask what came next, and the light went long and orange across the lot the way it did in September. Eleven minutes. I let the hour run out.
I had never once let a lesson go past the hour.
“Same time next week,” I said, and he nodded, and then he said the thing he had come to say.
“I need a license by November. After that it’s too late.”