Driving Lesson
Ashley Halm
I’ve never been in a car accident. Maybe it’s because my dad, who was a police officer for almost thirty years, started teaching me how to drive in a pick up truck with a questionably loud braking system, right after my sixteenth birthday in the middle of winter. He still takes care to remind me that the statistics are against me: young, a woman, living only a few miles away from a stretch of highway known in the winter as “the slip-and-slide.” And yet, for all the snow storms and black ice and my youthful recklessness, either by skill or dumb luck, I had never had so much as a flat tire.
My father’s father taught him how to drive, but by then it had been years since Grandpa had raced a stock car on a track. When he was growing up in the 50s, stock racing was about the most exciting thing for a farm kid like Grandpa to do with his spare time. It’s never been a glamorous sport, and back then everything was makeshift: busted-up coupes were bought from the junkyard with pocket money, cobbled together with scrap parts, and tagged with last names and racing numbers with paint from the dumpster of the hardware store. Grandpa’s cars were always numbered thirty-one, and they were always named Samantha, the name splattered across any un-dented spot he could find. He and his brother Michael would drive their stocks thirty miles to the dirt track in Woodhull, and if they were lucky they would drive them home in the evening, or catch a ride from whoever still had an engine and four wheels.
I never heard any of this from Grandpa himself. I remember watching him slice apples so that Grandma and I could make pie, and giggling when he snuck me a piece while her back was turned. I remember riding his John Deere together through the hay fields in the summertime, marveling at how bright and impossibly green everything looked. But I don’t remember many spoken conversations, let alone stories about racing, if there were any. Instead I grew up inventing stories for myself about the junk cars discarded in the woods, their grills gaping open like shocked mouths. As I ran my fingertips over the moss-carpeted dashboards and the blunted shards of windshield glass, I imagined Grandpa was telling me about them: about the day he won first prize and posed for a picture next to a crumpled but intact Samantha in his muddied jeans and work boots; how he snatched the checker from the startled flagman, who stood in his stiff white collared shirt and spotless white shoes, waiting for his flag to be returned.
//
Once Grandpa had been in the nursing home for a few weeks, it seemed like he never wanted to stop talking. When we could still visit him at the home, he’d joke with me and my brother, try to embarrass Grandma in front of the other residents, and ask how his brothers were doing, all of whom he had outlived. When those visits turned into video calls, he asked Grandma how the cat was, asked Dad and my uncle about the hunting season in the middle of July. I made him an apple pie for his birthday, and the nurse who took it from me with cold, gloved hands promised that she would deliver it personally.
And the months passed peacefully that way: running errands for my grandma during the week and gathering around the kitchen table on Sunday mornings to talk to Grandpa through a tiny screen. There was always cheerful talk about my brother’s grades, the strawberry patch I had revived in the front yard, the young apple trees we planted in the orchard. But no one wanted to acknowledge why Grandpa was in the nursing home, or ask when he could come home. It was as if, by not talking about what was really happening, we could pretend that it wasn’t happening at all, like Grandpa was just on some vacation, and it was obvious that he would come home, so there was no point in discussing it; like dementia was a stupid, made-up dream, like we were just playing one long game of make-believe.
//
The phone call did not come out of nowhere, like people say it does. That morning I had been woken up an hour before my alarm by sharp pain like claws raking over my chest and around to my spine, and I laid there in my dorm room until it faded. Later when my dad called me to tell me Grandpa was gone, I could not even make myself cry, because I had felt it coming all day. Of course, it’s silly to think I felt him die, but the certificate says he was gone by 8 o’ clock in the morning.
//
The weekend I came home, the farm was struck by a false spring day. Bitter cold wind slapped my forehead, and thick gray mud clung to my car’s tires and the soles of my sneakers. If April is the cruellest month, then February upstate is no better. I opened the back door and was immediately greeted with a cup of coffee by my brother. Behind him were faces I had only seen through my phone screen for the past few months. Neighbors had already stopped by to drop off food, and the kitchen was overflowing with aunts and uncles and dogs and casseroles, a shock compared to the quiet mornings Grandma and I had gotten used to.
Once everyone had eaten, we cycled through the sitting room and kitchen, like synchronized dancers, as clothes were put into trash bags for donation, and keepsakes were claimed. I managed to steal away a huge fleece-lined work jacket, a tarnished one-dollar coin with a Native American on the face, and a black-and-white photo of Grandpa at Woodhull, all from the seventies. Through it all no one cried or talked, except to give directions or ask if a sweatshirt should be donated or thrown in a trash, as though we were handling some stranger’s belongings, as if the man who built the farmhouse we stood in might walk in the back door at any moment.
Finally, as we lounged around the empty living room and sipped at mugs of black coffee, avoiding eye contact, I asked no one particular why Grandpa’s cars had always been named Samantha, and why they were numbered thirty-one. No one could tell me for sure, though one of my aunts ventured a guess that Samantha had been a high school crush, and that the name had simply stuck. I sat stunned. Grandpa had never told anyone his racing stories, probably because Grandma thought stock racing was not a sensible hobby for a married man with children, and now I would never be able to ask him. The stories had never even been mine to begin with, but still I had a selfish feeling that more had been taken away from me in the loss of Grandpa’s stories than in the loss of his life.
//
The morning I was supposed to return to college, Dad and I drove to a diner in the next town over for breakfast. It was the kind of place with cracking red leather booths and linoleum tables scratched up by decades of fumbled butter knives; the kind where my brother and I used to make a game out of tallying up all the people who recognized Dad from his police chief years, and made big deals out of coming over to our booth to say hello and marvel and how pretty I’d grown up to be.
The meal passed as the past few days had, neither of us feeling brave enough to split the silence stretched thin between us. Between bites of pancakes and bacon, he would occasionally ask how my classes were going, and I tried my best to sound interesting, like I had Very Important Things to be doing besides wallowing around in the town I grew up in. Still, it was nice to play pretend with him, like I was in high school again, waiting impatiently to leave home.
After we had finished our pancakes and Dad paid the bill, we walked out of the diner into cold, squinting sunshine. We hopped up into his Jeep, Dad turned the key, and we waited for the engine to turn over. The engine sputtered. He turned the key again. The engine did not turn over. So we sat in the Jeep, listening to the wind wailing outside and waiting for my brother to drive over and give us a jump, and that itchy, uncomfortable quiet settled in again.
After a moment I asked Dad if he knew why Grandpa named his stocks Samantha. He said he didn’t know, honestly. Then I asked if he had any memories of his father’s racing days at all.
He took a deep breath, let it out, and told me that the only thing he could remember was that one day his mother had taken him and his sisters to a race at Woodhull. It was a scorchingly bright afternoon in July, perhaps the fourth, and Grandpa was nudging his car toward first place in the next to last lap, when he took a corner just a bit too hard, maybe hitting a hay bale or some other makeshift guard rail, and the car flipped over itself and landed in the grass at the center of the track, spinning and spinning. Dad said his mother had clutched his arm so tight she left bruises, as they waited for the car to stop spinning. Finally it did, and after a moment they saw Grandpa’s dusty black helmet pop out of the driver’s side window. Dad said he was grinning like a child, and his mother cursed under her breath at her husband for giving her a fright. That was the only moment he could remember vividly, Dad said. That dusty black helmet shining and sweating in the sunshine, and Grandpa grinning so wide with his crooked, gapped teeth that you could see him from the back row of the bleachers.
As he finished, I thought I heard his breath hitch a little, but I didn’t want to look over and see him crying, so I didn’t. We sat and waited, the silence now shattered by both of our spinning thoughts. Both of us barely noticed that my brother had arrived with jumper cables until he came over and knocked on my window.
//
So now I had a racing story. It wasn’t mine, wouldn’t ever be, but as I got on the endless strip of highway that would take me back to college, I turned that handed-down memory over and over in my head, imagining what it felt like, smelled like, sounded like, until I felt that I had been the one watching Grandpa spinning out of control in his car, so fast at one point that the thirty-one painted on the side reversed itself into a thirteen in my head. I imagined that Grandpa had been the one to teach me how to drive, in one of those busted-up stocks, smiling toothily as we jerked along an empty dirt track as I learned the difference between the gas and brake pedals; laughing and screaming with me if I took a corner too fast.
My father’s father taught him how to drive, but by then it had been years since Grandpa had raced a stock car on a track. When he was growing up in the 50s, stock racing was about the most exciting thing for a farm kid like Grandpa to do with his spare time. It’s never been a glamorous sport, and back then everything was makeshift: busted-up coupes were bought from the junkyard with pocket money, cobbled together with scrap parts, and tagged with last names and racing numbers with paint from the dumpster of the hardware store. Grandpa’s cars were always numbered thirty-one, and they were always named Samantha, the name splattered across any un-dented spot he could find. He and his brother Michael would drive their stocks thirty miles to the dirt track in Woodhull, and if they were lucky they would drive them home in the evening, or catch a ride from whoever still had an engine and four wheels.
I never heard any of this from Grandpa himself. I remember watching him slice apples so that Grandma and I could make pie, and giggling when he snuck me a piece while her back was turned. I remember riding his John Deere together through the hay fields in the summertime, marveling at how bright and impossibly green everything looked. But I don’t remember many spoken conversations, let alone stories about racing, if there were any. Instead I grew up inventing stories for myself about the junk cars discarded in the woods, their grills gaping open like shocked mouths. As I ran my fingertips over the moss-carpeted dashboards and the blunted shards of windshield glass, I imagined Grandpa was telling me about them: about the day he won first prize and posed for a picture next to a crumpled but intact Samantha in his muddied jeans and work boots; how he snatched the checker from the startled flagman, who stood in his stiff white collared shirt and spotless white shoes, waiting for his flag to be returned.
//
Once Grandpa had been in the nursing home for a few weeks, it seemed like he never wanted to stop talking. When we could still visit him at the home, he’d joke with me and my brother, try to embarrass Grandma in front of the other residents, and ask how his brothers were doing, all of whom he had outlived. When those visits turned into video calls, he asked Grandma how the cat was, asked Dad and my uncle about the hunting season in the middle of July. I made him an apple pie for his birthday, and the nurse who took it from me with cold, gloved hands promised that she would deliver it personally.
And the months passed peacefully that way: running errands for my grandma during the week and gathering around the kitchen table on Sunday mornings to talk to Grandpa through a tiny screen. There was always cheerful talk about my brother’s grades, the strawberry patch I had revived in the front yard, the young apple trees we planted in the orchard. But no one wanted to acknowledge why Grandpa was in the nursing home, or ask when he could come home. It was as if, by not talking about what was really happening, we could pretend that it wasn’t happening at all, like Grandpa was just on some vacation, and it was obvious that he would come home, so there was no point in discussing it; like dementia was a stupid, made-up dream, like we were just playing one long game of make-believe.
//
The phone call did not come out of nowhere, like people say it does. That morning I had been woken up an hour before my alarm by sharp pain like claws raking over my chest and around to my spine, and I laid there in my dorm room until it faded. Later when my dad called me to tell me Grandpa was gone, I could not even make myself cry, because I had felt it coming all day. Of course, it’s silly to think I felt him die, but the certificate says he was gone by 8 o’ clock in the morning.
//
The weekend I came home, the farm was struck by a false spring day. Bitter cold wind slapped my forehead, and thick gray mud clung to my car’s tires and the soles of my sneakers. If April is the cruellest month, then February upstate is no better. I opened the back door and was immediately greeted with a cup of coffee by my brother. Behind him were faces I had only seen through my phone screen for the past few months. Neighbors had already stopped by to drop off food, and the kitchen was overflowing with aunts and uncles and dogs and casseroles, a shock compared to the quiet mornings Grandma and I had gotten used to.
Once everyone had eaten, we cycled through the sitting room and kitchen, like synchronized dancers, as clothes were put into trash bags for donation, and keepsakes were claimed. I managed to steal away a huge fleece-lined work jacket, a tarnished one-dollar coin with a Native American on the face, and a black-and-white photo of Grandpa at Woodhull, all from the seventies. Through it all no one cried or talked, except to give directions or ask if a sweatshirt should be donated or thrown in a trash, as though we were handling some stranger’s belongings, as if the man who built the farmhouse we stood in might walk in the back door at any moment.
Finally, as we lounged around the empty living room and sipped at mugs of black coffee, avoiding eye contact, I asked no one particular why Grandpa’s cars had always been named Samantha, and why they were numbered thirty-one. No one could tell me for sure, though one of my aunts ventured a guess that Samantha had been a high school crush, and that the name had simply stuck. I sat stunned. Grandpa had never told anyone his racing stories, probably because Grandma thought stock racing was not a sensible hobby for a married man with children, and now I would never be able to ask him. The stories had never even been mine to begin with, but still I had a selfish feeling that more had been taken away from me in the loss of Grandpa’s stories than in the loss of his life.
//
The morning I was supposed to return to college, Dad and I drove to a diner in the next town over for breakfast. It was the kind of place with cracking red leather booths and linoleum tables scratched up by decades of fumbled butter knives; the kind where my brother and I used to make a game out of tallying up all the people who recognized Dad from his police chief years, and made big deals out of coming over to our booth to say hello and marvel and how pretty I’d grown up to be.
The meal passed as the past few days had, neither of us feeling brave enough to split the silence stretched thin between us. Between bites of pancakes and bacon, he would occasionally ask how my classes were going, and I tried my best to sound interesting, like I had Very Important Things to be doing besides wallowing around in the town I grew up in. Still, it was nice to play pretend with him, like I was in high school again, waiting impatiently to leave home.
After we had finished our pancakes and Dad paid the bill, we walked out of the diner into cold, squinting sunshine. We hopped up into his Jeep, Dad turned the key, and we waited for the engine to turn over. The engine sputtered. He turned the key again. The engine did not turn over. So we sat in the Jeep, listening to the wind wailing outside and waiting for my brother to drive over and give us a jump, and that itchy, uncomfortable quiet settled in again.
After a moment I asked Dad if he knew why Grandpa named his stocks Samantha. He said he didn’t know, honestly. Then I asked if he had any memories of his father’s racing days at all.
He took a deep breath, let it out, and told me that the only thing he could remember was that one day his mother had taken him and his sisters to a race at Woodhull. It was a scorchingly bright afternoon in July, perhaps the fourth, and Grandpa was nudging his car toward first place in the next to last lap, when he took a corner just a bit too hard, maybe hitting a hay bale or some other makeshift guard rail, and the car flipped over itself and landed in the grass at the center of the track, spinning and spinning. Dad said his mother had clutched his arm so tight she left bruises, as they waited for the car to stop spinning. Finally it did, and after a moment they saw Grandpa’s dusty black helmet pop out of the driver’s side window. Dad said he was grinning like a child, and his mother cursed under her breath at her husband for giving her a fright. That was the only moment he could remember vividly, Dad said. That dusty black helmet shining and sweating in the sunshine, and Grandpa grinning so wide with his crooked, gapped teeth that you could see him from the back row of the bleachers.
As he finished, I thought I heard his breath hitch a little, but I didn’t want to look over and see him crying, so I didn’t. We sat and waited, the silence now shattered by both of our spinning thoughts. Both of us barely noticed that my brother had arrived with jumper cables until he came over and knocked on my window.
//
So now I had a racing story. It wasn’t mine, wouldn’t ever be, but as I got on the endless strip of highway that would take me back to college, I turned that handed-down memory over and over in my head, imagining what it felt like, smelled like, sounded like, until I felt that I had been the one watching Grandpa spinning out of control in his car, so fast at one point that the thirty-one painted on the side reversed itself into a thirteen in my head. I imagined that Grandpa had been the one to teach me how to drive, in one of those busted-up stocks, smiling toothily as we jerked along an empty dirt track as I learned the difference between the gas and brake pedals; laughing and screaming with me if I took a corner too fast.