That summer before Andrew left home for college, he tried to teach me to drive, his old VW Bug jerking in the empty plaza parking lot. Gears ground as my feet did a graceless two-step between clutch, gas and brake. “Calm down,” he told me. “Breathe.” I tried to visualize the points of the stick as an H like he had told me to, tried to shift out of neutral and into drive--ease up on the clutch, step down on the gas--but the coordination it required remained beyond me. The car bucked and shuddered to a stop. The late-summer morning gleamed brightly through the dusty windshield, the stores not yet open for their Sunday shift from noon to six. I studied their plate glass windows full of farm equipment and lawn furniture, clothing and crafts, and tried to bolster my courage. Sweat sluiced down my back, making me stick the vinyl seat. I took a second shot, trying not to think about how I had twice failed the West Virginia state driving exam so far that summer. But the gears ground so bad I scared us both. From out of the corner of my eye, I saw Andrew wince. I swallowed hard, half expecting smoke to rise from wherever the engine was tucked away in my brother’s little jellybean car. I called it the Purple Turtle, because that’s exactly what my brother’s second- hand VW looked like. But Andrew wasn’t into any silliness that hot morning.
“Easy,” he coaxed, his patience wearing thin. All summer he had pestered me about how hopeless I was, nearly a junior in high school and still without a license. In the car now he asked, as he had done before, how I could’ve passed Driver’s Ed last year without ever actually learning to drive. Usually I shrugged and blew him off. But that morning I told him how we had been four to a car because the board of education had no money, how I had gotten A’s on all the written tests but when it came time to drive I had stayed in the back seat watching while the boys took all the turns.
Andrew shook his head and sighed, knowing he had his work cut out for himself. Summer had been hard on him so far, all his back and forth fighting with Momma about going to college in Philadelphia come fall. Temple University had accepted him, even given him a partial scholarship due to good grades. But thanks to Momma confiscating his mail, he’d missed the deadline for sending a drawing portfolio into their college of art—a separate hoop to jump through. So I knew from their arguing how he was at the prospect of attending main campus for a year, taking general requirements in the core curriculum, waiting until the next deadline to apply to the university’s Tyler School of Art and officially declaring his major. It all sounded so complicated. I’d seen the thick catalog he got in the mail, hidden beneath his bed so Momma wouldn’t spot it and throw it away. I snuck a peak at its map, showing Tyler and the main campus miles away from each other, and wondered if Andrew knew all he was in for. Still, he’d do anything to get out from under Momma’s thumb. His resolve was firm. And for the last few weeks he had been hammering me about my license, telling me he wanted to make sure I could fend for myself once he was gone. But already I was starting to feel abandoned. I wondered if he wasn’t simply tired of having to drive me everywhere, to
the plaza when I needed to shop, to Hardlee’s Fastfood when I worked my shift or picked up extra ones from the other high school girls when they had dates with boyfriends. In the car, I looked at Andrew in the seat beside me--sunburned nose freckled and peeling, blond hair spiked in a summery cut--and noticed a hint of worry in his eyes. But was he worried about me or that I might screw up his getaway?
I tried again. The car lurched forward, shimmying over the faded yellow lines of the parking lot’s pocked asphalt. Then, with a rasp, the engine expired.
“Enough,” Andrew declared. He got out, walked around the car and opened my door. Ashamed of myself, I unbuckled my seatbelt and climbed out. My lesson over.
* * *
By the time we got back, Momma was home from church, her Aspen in the driveway with Elizabeth playing alongside. In the kitchen, Momma threw a fit about a dish of food I’d forgotten to put in the fridge. I told her I was sorry; I had been excited to go practice driving.
“Well, I sure hope that fruit salad didn’t go rancid,” she said, “sitting there on the counter with flies buzzing around. Food doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”
If I started correcting her right then, I knew I’d never stop.
“You have to cooperate better,” she continued. “I can’t afford to be making another trip to the store tomorrow. I have to help your grandmother get her medical forms in order this week. You all need to learn to fend for yourselves.”
Nothing new about that, I wanted to tell her. But I held my tongue. Momma was worried; last week Grandma Rose had finally taken to sleeping in the hospital bed Momma had gotten for her, and she had barely been out of it since. I knew Momma was frantic trying to juggle doctor bills between Medicare and the additional insurance plan Grandma Rose had bought off TV, which was now dragging its heels about covering anything.
Momma lit a cigarette, asked me when I planned to try again for my license. “Soon,” I told her. “Maybe next Tuesday when they give the tests again.”
“Well, I hope you pass,” Momma said. “But I don’t want you driving before then, not unless there is a licensed driver in the car with you. I don’t need my premiums skyrocketing.” Insurance worries were eating away at Momma’s brain.
I watched her blow out a long stream of smoke. “But you’re a smart girl,” she said. “You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. If prodded enough.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I knew Momma wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of sharing her Aspen. But she shouldn’t have worried. I had no idea who the hell I would visit if I did get my license, if I did ask to borrow her car.
Luckily, Andrew didn’t give up on me. The next evening, he argued with Momma when she got home from Grandma’s, wearing her down until finally she relinquished her Aspen, an automatic. While I cleaned up supper, Andrew gassed up Momma’s car, then returned home to pick me up. We headed back to town, back to the plaza, the shops closed now, just a few cars slowly sharking past the movie theater and its neighboring arcade.
We staked out the low end of the lot, still wet from an afternoon shower. Andrew got out and I got out, and we both circled the car until we reached opposite sides. We climbed in and I turned on the ignition.
“Don’t worry,” Andrew said: “It’s easier without the stick. Trust me.”
I took a deep breath, shifted into drive and pressed the gas. The car lurched forward. Slowly I steered us up and down the parking lot aisles, imagining them as streets, listening to Andrew’s words of encouragement. After a while, he called out scenarios to test my reflexes: Red light at this corner. Yellow diamond sign. Blind man crossing the road. He told me I was doing fine; if I kept this up I’d be ready to take my test at the state police barracks in no time. For an hour or more we wheeled around the parking lot. The sky turned purple then plum, the sun finally growing level with my eyes so that I had to pull down my visor. As I circled through our makeshift streets, Andrew turned the lesson into a game, growing
increasingly outrageous with the scenarios he called out: Police barricades! Overturned tractor-trailer! A formaldehyde baby in the middle of the road! I laughed so hard I careened right through the last one.
Andrew glanced out the back window. “My God, what a sight,” he said with mock gravity. “You creamed the poor formaldehyde baby.”
“It’s thalidomide,” I told him.
“Whatever,” Andrew said. “Now it’s nothing but blood and pulp and a few twitching limbs.” “You’re disgusting.”
Andrew laughed and told me to stop the car. He got out and take two orange cones from the trunk, placing them about twelve feet apart just off to the side of the car. In my side-view mirror, Andrew looked farther away than he really was. I studied the rangy sight of him. He wore his typical outfit for that summer, a black T-shirt and cut-off jeans rolled above the knee, work boots and a chunky silver crucifix he insisted on wearing despite the fact that he hadn’t attended church since Easter. He must have had half a dozen of those T-shirts. I had asked him once about his new look, and he had told me it was what the art students wore in the various catalogs he had sent for. He called it hip, cool--something Madonna might wear on MTV.
Andrew walk up to my window. “Do you think you can get between those?”
I nodded. He walked back around and slid in beside me. “Where’d you get the cones?” I asked. “Stole ‘em,” Andrew confessed. “From the construction they’re doing in front of the Y.” I drew in a breath, sharp enough the air whistled through my nose.
“Very thoughtful.” I knew he considered me a goody-goody, but I couldn’t help it. I started the car, circled around to the cones, eased my foot down on the brake once I had them in sight. “God, I hate parallel parking.”
“Just drive up till your rear bumper’s even with the front cone, then back up. Start to cut the wheel when you’re halfway back and you’ll slip in fine.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got your tiny Purple Turtle.” I bit my lip. “Should I get out and show you how?”
“No--”
“Maybe I should put eggs on both cones, like when Marcia and Greg competed in that driving contest on The Brady Bunch.”
I laughed, and the knot of tension in my stomach dissolved. Andrew’s voice stiffened into a state trooper’s gruff tone. “Time to get serious, young lady. This is a driving test, not goof-off time.”
I laughed again as I navigated the car between the cones, as smooth as a duck parting water. Alone in the car together, we didn’t talk about Andrew’s plans to leave for college in Philadelphia in a few short weeks. We didn’t mention what it would be like for Momma and Elizabeth and me without him. We didn’t speak about how forsaken I felt at the prospect of losing him. And we certainly didn’t discuss Grandma Rose being ill, though more than once over that summer Andrew had tried to reassure me that our grandmother was too stubborn to die from something as mundane as cancer--just another of his stories, I knew, unlikely to prove true despite how many times he repeated it. No, because we didn’t want our rare laughter to end, we spoke of none of these things, for a moment almost fooling ourselves that they were not there.
But soon the sun slunk down behind the mountains altogether, and the parking lot lamps flickered on. The fiberglass letters that spelled out PLAZA TWIN CINEMA blazed to life in a burst of red-orange/ More cars began to straggle in for the nine o’clock show. Andrew said it was time to go.
* * *
That Thursday, after I got off my afternoon shift at Hardlee’s, I had to walk uptown to pick up Elizabeth at the Y. “You’re late,” she told me when I found her by the side door being used as a temporary entrance. Construction workers had left big wounds in the sidewalk from where they were laying down pipes for the center’s new addition. Building materials and concrete rubble were everywhere.
“Everybody’s gone,” Elizabeth complained, clenching her wet beach towel around her neck like a cape. Fierceness burned inside her moss green eyes. Almost six years old, she was no one’s baby anymore, not Momma’s, not mine. Though I’d fed her, changed her, nursed her through chickenpox, I suspected it was Andrew who was her favorite now. Love worked like that.
“I’m tired,” Elizabeth said. “I been swimming all day and I’m ‘xausted.” She gazed longingly at the candy machine inside the Y’s propped open door. “Buy me somethin’ to eat.”
I dug into the pants pocket of my uniform, searching for quarters. All I found was my EpiPen. “Crap!”
“What’s wrong?” Elizabeth asked, her green eyes growing big.
“I left my purse at the house, with all my money. My keys, too. We’re locked out.”
“I’m starving!” Elizabeth cried. “I’m gonna pass out!” She swooned against the arched entrance of the Y. “I wish Andrew was here,” she said, as if I could wiggle my nose and bewitch him here.
“He’s still in Harmon,” I explained. “Teaching arts and crafts at that summer playground.” Glorified babysitter, Andrew called it. “You can wish all you want, but he won’t be home till five or six.”
Elizabeth started to bawl then, oily tears slipping from her pinched eyes. A woman driving by in a truck shot me a look. I grabbed Elizabeth’s hand and dragged her down the street.
A few blocks down Robert. E. Lee Avenue, we passed the fast food joint where I worked, and Elizabeth’s bottom lip quivered as she strained against my hand, wanting to go in. “Make them give us something to eat!”
I looked up at the orange and brown fiberglass sign that hung above the parking lot. There was no way I was stepping foot through Hardlee’s door one minute before my next shift. I pulled Elizabeth past. Only when we reached Parker’s Hill down by the train tracks did she settle down enough that I could let go.
“Why don’t you call Momma?” she begged. “It’s no use. She can’t leave Grandma by herself.” “Where are we going?”
“This hill’s a shortcut I know. Our house is just a ways over the ridge.” “That’s a mountain.”
“It’s not as big as it looks. In fact, Grandma used to bring me down this way to a pond back when you were just a baby.” I pointed with my chin to a copse of trees in the distance, fenced off now behind hurricane wire and a weathered sign proclaiming a new industrial park that had never come to pass. “In fact, Andrew used to play by the river the next holler over this hill. He even took me there once in a while.” This news perked her up, made her follow me into the tall grass that rose upwards.
“My legs’re getting’ scratchy,” Elizabeth complained, grasping a handful of weeds for support as she climbed behind me.
“Wrap your towel around your waist.” Once she did, I took her hand. No resistance this time. Elizabeth grew silent as we climbed--a small miracle. We were winded and our hair was stuck to the backs of our necks by the time we hit the ridge and the breezy respite it offered. I steered us down toward the river, searching for the spot where Andrew and I used to play. I hadn’t been there in ages and I hoped it hadn’t changed.
“Can Andrew make a sign for my club?” Elizabeth asked as she pulled into stride beside me. “What club is that?”
“Mine and Elsie Denmark’s. It’s a Dolphin Club. You have to swim to be in it
Already Elizabeth, with her blond hair and silly clubs, was more popular than Andrew and I ever were. I couldn’t help but wonder if I were her age whether or not she’d ask me to join.
“I’m pretty sure Andrew will help you. He’s good at drawing. Dolphins, monsters. You name it.” Elizabeth danced ahead, suddenly happy. I pointed her onto a trail that declined as a light wind leapt up to lick our faces. I smelled honeysuckle.
“Water!” cried Elizabeth. Its sound came rushing to our ears. “That’s the river.”
“This would be a good place for a clubhouse,” Elizabeth said, bolting toward the line of trees that edged the river.
“It has been,” I said, but she didn’t hear me.
I looked up at the trees, their vaulted branches, as safe and strong as arms. I tried to take comfort in them as I followed Elizabeth to the river’s edge and the mix of maples, tall pines and scraggly magnolias that sheltered it. I was expecting the sight of Cheat River to be a comfort. But I shouldn’t really have been surprised by what I saw instead. The afternoon sunlight that lapped the slow-moving water also gleamed