The Driving Lesson Read online

  That caught me by surprise. Put the drill back? I thought about it, then said: Door wont be unlocked now

  Cld leave it on back porch

  Might get caught

  We’d b careful

  Not we, u

  U wont go?

  No

  Plz go w me

  U stole it u return it

  I need a lookout

  Good luck

  Y r u being such a jerk

  Was I? Maybe I was. Regardless, I was tired of stringing him along. And he deserved to know what was really going on, since he was my best friend. So I said:

  Think my g’father is dying

  Later, I found Mom in the living room, folding sheets and watching Pat Robertson, and she acted as if everything was fine. When I asked why we hadn’t gone to church, she said Dad hadn’t been feeling well when he woke up, so she let him sleep late. Then she asked if I was hungry, and before I could even answer, she said, “Of course you are,” and went into the kitchen to make me some breakfast.

  She seemed awfully cheerful. Maybe I was wrong about Opa. That’s what we called him, because of his mother’s German ancestry. Maybe I’d misheard what Mom had said last night, or maybe they’d been talking about someone else.

  I was even more convinced of that when, a couple hours later, Dad finally emerged from his bedroom — fully dressed, apparently feeling much better — and said, “Grab the keys, Charlie!”

  “Huh?”

  “Time for another driving lesson!”

  “Parallel parking,” Dad said very seriously, “is the most important part of the test.”

  He was bending down to look at me through the passenger window. It was a long way down for him, because he’s six foot four. I get my size from his side of the family.

  Dad continued, saying, “When I was your age, it counted for a full thirty points. So if you screwed it up, the best you could get was a seventy, which meant you were just one point — one measly point — from a failing grade.” His voice was rising with mock outrage. He was kidding around because he has a weird sense of humor. I think he got it from Opa, who is even more of a goofball. Dad went on. “It didn’t matter if you drove with the precision of Richard Petty and the skill of Dale Earnhardt, if you couldn’t parallel park like you’d been doing it all your life, you didn’t get your license. Personally, I don’t think that’s very reasonable, but that’s the way it was. What’re you gonna do? Bunch of bureaucrats.”

  I couldn’t help grinning at him. “That’s what happened to you, huh, Dad?”

  “Is it that obvious? Yeah, well, my instructor was a hard-ass.”

  He used words like that sometimes when Mom wasn’t around. It was understood that this was a guy thing, only between us.

  “Okay, you ready to give it a try?” he asked.

  We were in the huge parking lot of the exposition center on the east side of town. This is where they held the rodeo, dog shows, tractor pulls, and various concerts, but no events were taking place today, so it was a ghost town.

  The parking lot was basically a wide-open expanse of pavement, with the occasional curbed island of concrete here and there to divide the big lot into smaller sections. We’d come here for previous lessons, and Dad had taught me the basics — shifting gears smoothly, braking hard without locking up the tires, backing up for a long distance — all the things that would be on the driving test.

  Today, Dad had placed a pair of orange traffic cones exactly twenty-five feet apart, with each cone about six feet out from a long, straight section of curb. It was my job to parallel park our Toyota between those two cones.

  I didn’t know why he was making such a big deal out of it. It looked simple enough. He had already demonstrated for me a couple of times. As you back up, he said, you whip the wheel this way, then, at just the right moment, you whip it the other way, and presto, you slide right into the slot. Take it slow. Keep an eye on the cones.

  Piece of cake, I thought. No problem. It’s not trigonometry.

  On my first try, I totally crushed the cone in front.

  Dad was ready with some sound effects. He screamed like I’d just run over a pedestrian. “Aaah! Oh, my God, help me! My leg! You crushed my leg!”

  Yeah, okay, I’ll admit I laughed. Then I pulled out, he stood the cone up again, and I gave it another shot. I whipped it too late and rolled over the rear cone. Another pedestrian. It was like I was playing Grand Theft Auto.

  Dad said, “For the love of God, somebody stop this maniac! An ambulance! I need an ambulance!”

  Right about then, I was grateful there wasn’t another soul within a mile of us. It was embarrassing.

  The third time, with some verbal coaching from Dad, I did a little better. Didn’t hit a cone, but wound up parked about three feet from the curb. You’re supposed to be eighteen inches or closer.

  But I got better with each try. After about a dozen attempts, I finally nailed it.

  “There you go! Now you’ve got it!”

  Three more times in a row, I managed to park without sending any imaginary pedestrians to the hospital or the morgue. It felt good.

  Dad climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door. “You know what? I’m thinking you should drive us home today.”

  “Really?” That would be cool. I hadn’t driven on any real streets yet, just this parking lot.

  “Yeah, we’ll take the back streets. No highways. Think you can handle that?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “I do, too. You’re getting the hang of it. I’m proud of you. But first, why don’t you cut the engine for minute. We need to talk about something.”

  I knew immediately what was coming.

  The word “grandpa” might bring to mind a certain image for some people: a little white-haired guy with arthritis and poor hearing. My grandfather wasn’t like that at all. Not even close.

  Yeah, he was sixty-three years old — getting up there — but he was very active, always running around doing something. Like he was a big-time swimmer. Went to a public pool in his neighborhood four or five mornings a week. He played the guitar and wrote his own songs. He attended political rallies and book signings and all kinds of fundraisers.

  He dated a lot, too. He and my grandmother had gotten a divorce before I was even born, and Opa had never remarried. Instead, he had what my mother called “lady friends.”

  He traveled with some of these friends to other states and even other countries. Just last summer, he went to Ireland with a redheaded woman named Linda. A couple years before that, he went to Africa with a woman whose name I can’t remember. For a while after that trip, he wore a shirt called a dashiki. It had all these wild colors, and I thought it looked pretty cool, but my mom always said he looked like some old nut. Other times, when she was being nicer, she used the word “eccentric.”

  My point is, he wasn’t some decrepit geezer ready for a nursing home. Heck, he had more energy than me and most of my friends. Or he used to.

  “You know that Opa hasn’t been feeling good.”

  I nodded.

  Dad said, “He...well, for a while, nobody could say what was wrong with him. The doctors didn’t know. He just didn’t feel right, so they ran various tests, and everything looked okay. They said he was probably fine, just getting old, and he shouldn’t worry too much about it. We told you about that. Remember right after Christmas?”

  My face was starting to feel very warm. I nodded again. I did remember. First they told me Opa might be sick, then they said maybe he wasn’t, then, just before spring break, they said it was a “wait and see” type of thing. We hadn’t really talked much about it since then.

  “In early April,” Dad said, “he went to a special hospital in Houston. It’s one of the best in the country. They ran even more tests, different tests, and this time they were able to figure out what the problem is.” He paused for a second. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news. He has a type of bone cancer that is very aggressive.
It’s already in the advanced stages.”

  Does it make me a pussy to admit my eyes were starting to fill with tears? A real tough guy, right? Big football player. Macho and all that. But cancer is scary. Everybody knows that.

  I was looking down at my lap. My dad had his arm on the driver’s headrest behind me. Now he placed his hand on my neck, rubbing it, trying to make me feel better, but I was this close to bawling like a baby. Some snot dripped from my nose and landed on my jeans.

  Dad said, “It gets a little more complicated, because Opa has some wild ideas about what he should do next. He isn’t thinking straight. Maybe it’s his age, or maybe he’s just scared, but he’s decided that he doesn’t want to undergo the treatment plan the doctors are recommending.”

  Now I looked up. “Why not?”

  “Well, it can be pretty rough on the patient. And the chances that it would be successful are pretty slim. It comes down to what they call ‘quality of life.’”

  I knew the answer, but I asked the question anyway. “Is he going to die?”

  I don’t know whether my dad had decided hours ago to be completely honest with me, or if he made the decision right then and there. But when I think back on this moment, as painful as it was, I’m glad he didn’t sugarcoat it or give me any false hope.

  He simply said, “Yeah, he is.”

  Now the tears really began to flow.

  He said, “I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m really sorry. Even with the treatment, he...that would only delay it, or maybe it wouldn’t even do that.”

  Now he was getting emotional, too, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I looked down at my lap again, and we just sat there for another minute or two, neither of us saying anything.

  Then, when I thought I could talk without blubbering, I said, “How soon?”

  3

  I know this sounds strange, but before my dad and I left that parking lot, we were laughing hysterically. That’s because, after he answered that question and several others, and after we both cried quite a bit, we started talking about Opa — remembering some of the things he’d said or done over the years.

  Like the time he was showing us all a yoga move he’d learned and he ripped an enormous fart. Opa wasn’t embarrassed by it at all — he said it was perfectly natural — but Mom got grossed out and left the room.

  Or the time Opa decided to return a shirt he’d gotten as a gift. The sales clerk at the department store started to say they couldn’t take the shirt, so Opa interrupted and gave a big speech about how consumers are more important than big corporations, and how the clerk’s failure to accept the shirt symbolized the problem with excessive greed in this country, and that’s when the clerk interrupted and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but that shirt isn’t from this store.”

  Funny things like that.

  Dad said we’d always have those memories, and I know I’m only fourteen — almost fifteen — but that didn’t sound like much, really. I didn’t want memories, I wanted Opa, in the flesh, right here for a long time to come.

  Then, as I was driving home (which sort of reminded me of sneaking into the empty house yesterday, because it was exciting, but I was also a little worried about getting caught by a cop), Dad said, “Uh, maybe you should pull over a block or two before we get home and let me drive the rest of the way.”

  I nodded. He didn’t want Mom to see that I was driving without a license. So that’s what we did — switched seats when we were almost home.

  It’s a good thing, too. Because there’s an excellent chance I would’ve freaked out and wrecked when I saw the SUV that was parked at the curb in front of our house. It was a green Ford Explorer. Just like the one I’d seen last night.

  And there, on the front porch, was the real-estate lady, having a conversation with my mom.

  Dad parked in the driveway.

  Was I panicking? Oh, absolutely. Palms beginning to sweat. Heart pounding. About to crap my underwear. I wanted to hunker down in the passenger seat and not get out, but that would’ve been the same as admitting my guilt. For all I knew, the real-estate lady was asking my mom if we wanted to sell our home. Yeah, right. I didn’t believe that for a second.

  Dad got out of the car, so I did too, and I followed behind him on the sidewalk to the porch, hoping I was all but invisible.

  My hands were trembling.

  Mom and the lady were talking, and as we got closer, Mom said, “Here’s my husband. Honey, this is Cathy...”

  “Abbott,” the lady said.

  Dad shook her hand. “Glen Dunbar.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Cathy Abbott said. She pointed vaguely with her right hand. “I live on the other side of the neighborhood.”

  Dad said, “Yeah, you’re the realtor, right? I’ve seen your name on the signs.”

  “That’s me,” she said, smiling. She was wearing the same sort of outfit as last night: a skirt and a colorful blouse. Up close, I could tell she was probably a little younger than my parents. She was actually very pretty, in an overdone kind of way. Lots of makeup and jewelry.

  Dad turned a little sideways, toward me, and said, “This is our son, Charlie.”

  She looked at me. I looked at her. Her smile remained in place, but something changed. She was studying me, I think.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you, Charlie.”

  I looked away, but I could feel Cathy Abbott’s eyes lingering on me. I noticed that Mom was looking at Dad with an expression on her face that basically said, Did everything go okay? She was wondering how our conversation about Opa went.

  There was an awkward silence, until Cathy Abbott said to my dad, “I was telling Sarah about a little, oh, incident we had yesterday. A minor crime wave, you might call it. You know that home under construction on the corner of LaSalle and Miller’s Loop?”

  Dad nodded. “That red brick house.”

  “Right. Well, I have that listing, and I stopped there last night at about eight. Just before dark. The front door was unlocked, and just as I stepped inside, I heard the back door close. At first I thought one of the construction workers was still there, but then I saw two people — teenage boys, I think — through one of the windows in the kitchen. They went through a gate and took off. There wasn’t any damage to the house, but this morning I found out that a couple of things were stolen.”

  A couple of things? What was she talking about? It was only one thing.

  She looked at me again. Actually, I think she was checking out my hair. See, I have extremely blond hair, almost white, and it’s very curly and thick. A big mop. Fairly unmistakable. If she saw me through a window, even for just a second, the thing she’d most likely remember is my hair. I was really wishing I’d worn a hat today. Instead, I did my best to look like any other innocent teenager, but I don’t think I did a very good job. My face felt like it was turning bright red.

  Dad said, “Did you call the police?”

  Cathy Abbott said, “No, not yet. I’m just going door to door, hoping maybe I can figure it out without getting the authorities involved. I don’t want to get some kids in major trouble. I’m pretty sure burglary is a felony. Or breaking and entering. I’m not sure what the charge would be.”

  Dad said, “Why don’t you give us your card, and if we hear anything — ”

  But Mom interrupted and said, “What did these boys look like?”

  Time sort of froze for a second. I wanted to run away. Seriously, just take off down the street and never come back. Cathy Abbott didn’t seem to know who to answer first. She opened her mouth, started to say something, then changed her mind and said, “They were both in shorts and T-shirts. One of the boys was pretty tall, maybe six feet. He had very blond hair. Curly hair.”

  Crap, crap, crap!

  Cathy Abbott looked at me again.

  Mom turned and looked at me.

  Dad, however, did not. I’m sure he thought about it. I mean, if it was possible, I would’ve turned and looked at me. It w
as that obvious, that Cathy Abbott was implying that it might’ve been me in the empty house last night. But, no, Dad didn’t budge. He said, “Cathy, the truth is, we’re in the middle of a family crisis at the moment — my father is very sick — so if you’ll leave us your card — ”

  And once again, my mother interrupted.

  “Charlie, do you know anything about this?”

  Remember when I said I’m a wimp when it comes to the possibility of getting in trouble? Part of the reason for that is my mom’s tone. When she wants to know something, her voice becomes like this needle of anger and disappointment that she inserts deep into my skin, jabbing me, prodding me, making it clear that the situation will not go away until the truth is known. She demands the truth. Especially when she thinks she already knows the answer, as she plainly did here.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  Dad said, “Seriously, this isn’t a good time for this.”

  Mom said, “Charlie, were you in that house? You and Matt?”

  I have to hand it to Cathy Abbott. By this point, she actually appeared to feel sorry for me. She even made a small move toward the porch steps, as if to leave, and she said, “Maybe I should just — ”

  “Charlie?” Mom said. Her voice was getting louder. She wanted an answer, right this minute. “Were you in that house or not?”

  This was it. The moment of truth.

  You know how I finally responded? This totally blew me away. I said, “No, ma’am. Absolutely not. You and Dad raised me better than that.”

  You have to understand — in our house, there are very few offenses held in more contempt than lying. Now, of course, I’m not including things like murder and armed robbery. But as far as teenager type of behavior, bearing false witness was perhaps the greatest sin. If you skip a class, that’s bad. If you lie about it, that’s even worse. Lying brings more shame on your head than smoking a cigarette or cussing or even whacking off.