Driving With the Top Down (3 page)

“Fine. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to do the dishes and stop ignoring the very few things I actually ask of you.”

“Fine.” He emphasized the
n
. “Jeez, you don’t need to go off about every little thing. You could get the same point across by being calm instead of yelling, you know.”

This was something he had said before, and something that bugged her every time. Not because it was true, exactly, but because it wasn’t the typical fourteen-year-old line that the script called for. She wished it
were
true. She wished he really would listen when she spoke calmly, but he didn’t.

“Apparently not.” This was far from the first time she’d called him up to do something that actually would have been a lot easier for her to do herself. But she kept thinking that if she were consistent, he’d get so tired of always having to come back and do the thing he hadn’t done, he’d just do it right to begin with.

So far, that strategy hadn’t worked at all.

He turned on the sink and lamely rinsed absolutely nothing out of the bowl—the crud was going to need physical labor as well—before putting it into the dishwasher.

“Oh my God, Jay, do you see what’s wrong with that picture?”

He actually looked at the walls, confused. “Huh?”

She pointed at the bowl, her words coming out with exasperated breath. “That. What do you think is going to happen to that in the dishwasher? Do you think there are tiny elves with trash bags in there who are going to go chisel that stuff off the bowl and carry it out to the trash so that bowl comes out sparkling clean?”

“That would be cool.”

She sighed.

Of course it would be cool. But eventually the dishwasher elves would probably just end up sitting around, eating cookies, getting crumbs everywhere, and she’d be in charge of them too.

If she’d had another child—perhaps the daughter she’d hoped for after Jay until she’d finally faced the fact that she wasn’t able to have more children—might she have had more support in the house? Could that longed-for child have made the difference that kept Colleen feeling like herself rather than a bland working machine that everyone took for granted?

“I want clean dishes to come out of the dishwasher,” she said. “Not clean food.”

“Okay, okay.” He gingerly poked at the glued-on mess with a plastic straw he’d left in one of his drinking glasses (another of her pet peeves—it was like when her dad used to put his after-dinner cigarettes out on the plate, leaving it for the wimmin-folk to deal with). The straw bent feebly against the dried piece of Life cereal he was attempting to dislodge.

And suddenly it felt to her like this scene was never going to end. She just couldn’t afford to stand here all night instructing him, moment by moment, on how to be a civilized human being.

“Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,” Kevin would say. Unfairly.

Because what that amounted to was everyone perceiving her as a henpecker. Why was it so hard for them to comprehend her objection to their creating extra work for her? She’d work to clean the kitchen, just so she could get it out of the way and go on to do her own thing; then she’d come back and find this unsanitary mess. No one with a civilized bone in their body could have just left it there (one would think). So she then had to address it, one way or the other.

She watched for a few minutes as he limply rinsed the caked-on food, dislodging nothing, and stuck the dishes into the dishwasher, one after the other. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore—the impulse to just push him aside and say
Forget it, I’ll do it myself!
was too great—so instead she turned and walked out of the room, onto the back porch, and into the cool June air.

Breathe.

Breathe.

It doesn’t matter that much.

In a hundred years, none of this will matter.

Breathe.

What was going to become of her son if he couldn’t clean dishes and pass high school? Was he just going to be one of those creepy loser guys with a ponytail pulled back into a thin snake down his back, bald on top, and willing to argue to the death about
Doctor Who
theories while rats crept through the kitchen, wiping bubonic plague germs all over torn bags of Doritos and opened cheese gone hard and dark on the sides and edges?

It’s because of his mother,
people would say.
She couldn’t even teach him the basics.

This used to be one of her favorite times of day. The pale blue twilight in the early summer. Almost warm, but with a lingering cool breeze. She had so many memories of this time of day.

She remembered being young and playing outside until dinner when the sky looked like this and her parents and their friends would sit out on their front lawns and drink—she suspected now
heavily
spiked—coffees. Sometimes she and her neighborhood friends would be allowed up past their bedtime on these nights because the parents were having so much fun.

Playing football on the beach when she was seventeen on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Ocean City. It had been cool enough then for jeans shorts, bare feet, and sweatshirts. And once the sun was completely gone, the sweatshirted arm of her hunky but ultimately unimportant boyfriend. That was the summer before college, and the weekend she’d had beer for the very first time.

Then the memory of standing in front of Kevin almost fifteen years ago, giving him the News: She was pregnant. After a shell-shocked moment, he’d told her it would be all right, but there was tension in his voice, and she knew the truth. They both did, and for just a split second, their eyes met and she knew everything she needed to know.

He didn’t want this.

This was a
catastrophe
for him.

If she could go back, would she do it all the same way again?

CHAPTER TWO

Colleen

“Colleen?”

The voice came out of the darkness like a ghost.

Kevin. Appearing like magic just when she needed him most. It was almost annoying—did she ever do enough for
him
? Somehow she always missed her mark, was always just behind. Second place.

Always second place.

“Hey,” she said with false cheer. “I didn’t expect you until at least midnight. I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’ve been kickin’ ass, getting all this work finished up before Jay and I go to Cooperstown next week. Tonight I finished up most of it, but decided to take the rest of it home with me.”

“About Cooperstown—”

“Guys’ trip,” Kevin said, anticipating her question. This was a male-bonding thing, and she wasn’t invited. She wasn’t welcome. She was left out.

Colleen nodded. “You’ve mentioned that.” She tried to keep the self-pity out of her voice. “What I was going to ask,” she improvised, “was if you’ve checked the weather. Sometimes it’s quite a bit colder up there, and I want to make sure I pack properly for Jay.”

“You worry too much. He’ll be fine. Let him pack for himself, he’s a big guy now.”

Physically, yes, but he was still her baby, and someone who saw his tall build wouldn’t imagine how often she had to tell him things like,
You’ve worn that two days in a row, put it in the hamper. Good Lord, cut your nails—no wonder your shoes don’t fit! Flush the toilet.

No point in fighting over the packing; it was a fake question anyway. “Well, are you hungry? Maybe you can take a little break off from working right now and we can order a pizza and watch an episode of something with Jay.” She really sounded desperate at this point.

He cocked his head in what she knew was him gearing up to nix the plan. “I wish I could, but I really have to get started. If you order a pizza, I’ll have a couple pieces, though.”

“Okay.”

He came over to her and gave a quick kiss next to her lips, which she didn’t have time to respond to. “I’m sorry. babe. After this trip, I’ll have more time.”

She knew she had no foot to stomp with, to tell him to just
damn it all
and take a half hour off to be with them. You couldn’t do that while arguing with the sole breadwinner of the family.

“No, no, it’s fine, I understand. It’s okay, really.”

“Did you call up the cable company?”

Her stomach prickled with remembered annoyance. “I tried, but they disconnected me after I was on the phone forever. And I still have to call the dryer people and carpet cleaners tomorrow. Did you see the e-mail from Jay’s vice prinicpal?”

“Yeah, he CC’d both of us. Have you talked to him yet?”

“Yes, I tried—” She was so sick of hearing the word come out of her mouth. “He just … He doesn’t take me seriously.”

She didn’t know why that was. He took Kevin seriously, even though Kevin got to be the good guy. Wasn’t one parent usually the cool one, the “good cop,” while the other one had to be the enforcer? Why did Jay see Kevin as the enforcer
and
the good cop?

“I’ll talk to him,” said Kevin.

Again she nodded, knowing it would be a hundred times more effective than her conversation earlier. She shrank a little into herself, imagining that the question in his head was,
What do you do all day?

“Look, there’s something I need to talk to you about, so when you’re done here…”

Her stomach and throat clenched. Those words. The slight variation on “we have to talk.” She always feared it wasn’t just some work thing he wanted to discuss, or a suggestion to, say, tear up the basement carpet and put in hardwood. She was always afraid of something else.

The thing she’d been half-expecting with full dread for years.

“I’ll be in soon.” She met his eyes, trying to read them, and nodded once more. He turned and she watched him head into the house, whistling tunelessly.

And she stood in the dark evening air, not particularly motivated in any direction. She remembered a time when she and her best high school friend used to sit outside on nights like this and look at the stars and plan their glorious futures while the moon crossed the sky. She didn’t even realize at the time how precious those nights were or how sad it would be when they ended.

Somewhere along the way, they had ended, and a long time ago. Completely.

Now she stood in her suburban driveway, unsure which direction to take, whether to go to her workshop, which was almost painful to enter anymore, or to leave the comfortable shroud of night to go into the blaring lamplight of suburbia and, undoubtedly, a TV on too loud. Or worse, utter silence. A lifeless home.

She couldn’t move.

Then it hit her. Not a bolt from the blue, but more like a weight that had been on her shoulders until finally her knees were buckling.

Something had to change. That was it. Something, somewhere in her life had to change.

She went to the garage side door, reached under a loose slate in front of it, and picked up the key. The garage hadn’t housed a car for years. They decided not long after buying the house that it would be her workshop, where she’d work on the antiques she bought, repurposed, and sold at her Junk and Disorderly shop.

She flipped on the light switch and looked at her inventory. It was getting low. The best of farm auction season was over, and she’d barely gotten anything good this year. Most of what she had seen lately were things like chairs missing legs, shutters missing shutters, and trash cans from Target circa ’98. Nothing like the dusty but grand headboards and slightly bent but still beautiful candelabras she found at the best time of year. At this rate, her stall at the sale would be all but bare and she’d lose her following as a result. Her clientele had been limited enough last year, and now she feared losing it all. Once upon a time, she had been kind of a rock star in the area. Her name was starting to mean something. But then last year she came up short on inspiration, time, and inventory, and did not do half as well as she’d wanted to or usually did.

Every year she fantasized about taking a road trip down the coast to go to auctions, and staying in quaint little bed-and-breakfasts, no chain hotels. She saw herself flying down the highway in her red convertible with a hitch attached, driving through dinky southern towns, pulling a Shasta trailer full of treasures behind her.

Unfortunately, she’d never had the nerve to up and leave on her own. She had grown timid, full of what-ifs.

What if the car breaks down on the road and there’s no cell phone reception?

What if some weirdo watches me go into my motel room, then crashes through the window in the middle of the night?

What if I get sick and there’s no one around to help?

It was ironic that a woman who spent her life fixing things—repairing antiques, repurposing “another man’s trash,” kissing boo-boos and wiping fevered brows—had such a hard time taking care of herself. Or at least feeling the confidence and independence of one who could and did take care of so much.

So a trip like that, while it might be a pure blast for another person, made her more nervous than she cared to admit.

Now, though … Now she had an additional mission. Yes, she needed inventory—she always needed inventory—and she needed the change of scenery to mix things up a bit. But what she really needed, she’d needed for fifteen years, and it was time to finally go after it.

She needed peace of mind.

She needed to confront the biggest mistake of her life and somehow come to terms with it.

She went to the refrigerator, where she had always kept extra lunch box fillers for Jay when he was younger. Now he just walked to the 7-Eleven with his friends at lunchtime. Now the garage fridge housed only bottled water, a box of wine that had been there so long, it was stuck like glue to the glass shelf, and the beers they almost never drank except for when there was company, which there rarely was. She considered the wine, but even at its best, it was too crappy to cook with, so instead she took a beer out and carried it to the tool bench to knock the top off with the heel of her palm. A trick from college days.

She issued a somewhat satisfying curse at the pain now shooting through her hand. She looked at the bottle. At least the top had come off clean—she still had that.