Lesson Six
Episode 2 of 3 of Lesson Six by Nell Halloran
“Both hands on the wheel.”
“They are on the wheel.”
“One of them is on the wheel. The other one is in the general area.”
By the fourth Wednesday we were out of the lot and onto County Road 600, soybeans up to the ditch on both sides, nothing coming for a mile in either direction. He drove at thirty eight miles an hour and would not be moved off it. Every time a truck came the other way he steered a little toward the shoulder, and every time I said nothing, and by the end of the hour he had stopped doing it.
“You’re going to be fine,” I said.
“You say that to everybody.”
“I say it to the ones who signal in an empty county.”
I had him figured by then, sitting there with my coffee going cold in the cup holder. Somebody died in a car when he was a kid. A brother, maybe, or his mother, something that happened on a wet road when he was nine and put him in the back seat of his own life for thirty years. And a man did not fix that at forty one for himself. There was a woman somewhere with a November in her, a job or a ring or a kid, and he was learning to drive so he could show up to it.
I had been wrong about students before. Never by that much.
Lesson six was the first rain we got all month. He asked for the bypass ramp.
“You sure.”
“I want to do it before I think about it all week.”
So we took Ninth out past the elevator with the wipers going, and he got the merge at forty five, and it was ugly and it was correct, and I said so. He stayed in the right lane with both hands at nine and three and the rain coming off the semis in sheets, and for two miles he drove like a man who had been doing it his whole life.
Then he said, “Do you smell pennies.”
“What?”
“Wet pennies.” He was already signaling. “I’m going to pull over.”
He took the shoulder better than most of my sixteen year olds managed a driveway. Hazards on, wheels straight, gravel under us, the car settling. He put it in park. He set the brake.
Then he stopped being there.
His eyes were open and aimed out the windshield and there was nobody behind them. His jaw moved a little, like he was tasting something. His right hand came off the wheel and went to the seat belt strap and picked at it, over and over, the same two inches of it. I said his name. I said it again. Rain on the roof, a truck going by close enough to rock us, and Walt beside me working at that belt with his thumb.
I did not touch him. I looked at the clock on the dash and made myself watch the numbers instead of his face, and it lasted fifty seconds, and I had never counted anything slower.
Then he swallowed and his shoulders came down and he blinked at the windshield.
“Walt.”
“Yeah.” His voice had gone thick. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Do you know where you are?”
He looked out at the soybeans. It took him a long moment. “Going out to the bypass,” he said, which had been true twenty minutes back.
I got out into the rain and walked around and opened his door, and he let me move him like furniture. He was asleep before the second stoplight in town.
The house on Grant was small and white with a ramp built over half the porch steps, and a man sat out under the roof with a newspaper held three inches from his face and a lighted magnifier in his lap. He stood when he heard my tires. He did not look at the car. He looked a foot to the left of it.
“That’ll be Walter,” he said. “He does this. He’ll sleep four hours and then he’ll be sorry about it for a week, and I’ll tell you right now, it’s the sorry part that wears on a person, not the rest of it.”
I got Walt inside. His father made coffee I didn’t drink. At the table, with his hands around the cup, Walt told me he had been nineteen the first time, that there had been nothing for five years, that he had a letter from his neurologist dated in June and an appointment with the state in October.
“I thought there was a woman,” I said.
“There’s my father.” He turned the cup a quarter turn. “He fails the eye test at renewal. November. They put a needle in his eye in Fort Wayne every six weeks and somebody has to bring him home after.”
“And you were going to be somebody.”
“I was going to be somebody.” He set the cup down. “Six months clear before they’ll look at me. Starts today.”
He walked me out and stood in the rain with his hands at his sides.
“Don’t come next Wednesday.”