The Long Way Back
Episode 3 of 3 of Lesson Six by Nell Halloran
“I told you not to come.”
“You told me not to come to a lesson.” I put the car in park. “This isn’t a lesson.”
“Then what is it.”
“It’s a ride.”
He stood in the driveway in a clean shirt with his keys to nothing in his hand. Three Wednesdays had gone by. I had spent them teaching Kaylee Ruzicka to parallel park between two orange cones, which she did beautifully, and then teaching her to do it between two actual cars, which she did not.
“He has a ride,” Walt said. “Dale from church takes him.”
“Dale from church is seventy nine.”
“Dale from church can see.”
The screen door banged and his father came out in a sport coat with his cane hooked over his wrist, aimed roughly at the sound of my engine.
“Now, I don’t know who this is,” Sol said, “but she’s early, and at my age early is the only good news there is, so whoever you are, somebody open me a door.”
Fort Wayne was seventy one miles. Sol talked for sixty of them, about the elevator fire in 1974 and about a dog named Pepper, and Walt sat up front with his elbow on the door and let him. In the waiting room I read a laminated card about retinal injections four times. They brought Sol out with a plastic shield taped over his left eye and his hand hooked in his son’s arm, and he was cheerful about it in a way that made the whole room quieter.
We got him home at seven. He went up the ramp by himself. He had done it enough times to do it in the dark.
I did not turn back toward Ninth. I went out past the elevator and took 600 instead, which added eleven miles and went nowhere, and Walt looked over at me once and then didn’t ask.
The dash lights came up green. Beans on both sides, black now, and the road going under us, and neither of us facing the other one.
“Every six weeks,” I said. “Until May. I’ll take him.”
“No.”
“It’s two hours out of a Wednesday I already gave you.”
“No.”
“You don’t get to say no to a thing that isn’t yours.”
“I’m not going to be somebody’s route.” He said it flat, the way he said everything. “Not yours.”
“Then tell me what you want instead of what you don’t.”
The wipers were off and there was nothing to look at and he looked at it anyway.
“My mother drove me to school until I was nineteen,” he said. “Then she drove me to the neurologist. Then my father did. There was a girl named Deanne for four years and she drove me to Indianapolis and back for a wedding, and the whole way home she was so nice about it. Everybody who ever loved me has had to take me somewhere.” He turned his hand over on his knee. “I wanted one time it went the other way. That’s all it ever was.”
I slowed down without deciding to. There was a stop sign out there where 600 met the old creamery road and nobody had come through it in years.
“Then in May,” I said, “you drive me.”
He didn’t answer. I put my hand back on the shifter and his came over it, and we sat at that stop sign with the engine idling and the fields doing nothing on either side of us, two people pointed the same direction in the dark.
He turned his head first.
It was not a long kiss. The car was still running and my foot was still on the brake and his hand was still over mine on the shifter, and when we came apart he sat back in his seat exactly as he had been sitting, facing forward, breathing like a man who had just finished carrying something up a flight of stairs.
“Okay,” he said.
I drove us home the long way anyway.
He passed on May fourteenth, on the second try. The first time he clipped a cone in the parallel park, and he came back to the car and told me the number he lost by like it was a diagnosis.
The Wednesday after, he drove me out on 600 at fifty five with the windows down and one hand on the wheel, because it turned out he had been a good driver the whole time and had only been waiting for his body to allow it. He took the curve by the creamery without slowing. He signaled for nobody.
My instructor’s brake sat on the floor in front of the passenger seat, six inches from where I kept my right foot, and I had used it eleven hundred times in eleven years.
I left my foot where it was.