by Laura Hankin
“Hey,” she said to Beth, as they turned into Grandma Stella’s winding driveway, “I’m totally happy to do some of the driving next time. I mean, I know I’m kind of horrendous at it, but I would do my very best not to kill us.”
“Oh, it’s okay. I like it,” Beth said, a smile obscuring her face like a mask. Beth’s assurance did nothing to alleviate the guilt coursing through Ally’s body, though she knew she was probably overreacting. After all, she reminded herself, Beth seemed to enjoy driving. She’d always carted the two of them around in high school. It happened that way somewhat out of necessity—Ally didn’t get her license until midway through senior year.
Beth’s parents had taken her down to the DMV on her sixteenth birthday, a Saturday that year, after surprising her with breakfast in bed. When Ally heard that Beth had spent two hours waiting in line and filling out forms, she’d been incredulous. “That sucks! You had to take a test about different traffic sign shapes on your birthday?” She’d shuddered. “I’m sorry your parents made you do that.”
“No, no, I wanted to. I want to get my license as soon as I can. It’s such a pain in the butt for my parents, that they have to drive me everywhere.”
So Beth earned her license right on schedule, getting a perfect score on both her written test and the driving itself. (And, Beth’s dad had bragged to Ally, holding Beth’s mom’s hand at the unofficial celebratory “Beth Can Drive” dinner the four of them had shared post-test, she had 20/20 vision too! Beth was smiling down at her plate while her father talked, a blush creeping up her neck. When she saw Ally looking, she rolled her eyes in the most pleasant way possible, as if to say, My dad is so embarrassing. But yes, I know I’m lucky to have him around.)
Ally had waited to learn because her mom kept promising to take her out. “We’ll go to the big parking lot behind the middle school. That’s a good place to start,” Marsha said verbatim on multiple occasions. But somehow, she never got around to giving lessons. Besides, Ally and Beth had normally been going to the same place anyway, and Beth had always been willing to go five minutes out of her way to pick Ally up.
One day, though, when they had been driving aimlessly with the radio on, trying to figure out what to do with a free weekend afternoon, Ally had suddenly felt the need to apologize.
“Hey, I’m really sorry I haven’t gotten my license yet. My mom is such a bitch sometimes.” Here, she’d paused and waited to see if Beth would agree. She often thought that she wanted Beth to join in on the Marsha-bashing. Yet on the rare occasions Beth actually did say something disparaging about Marsha, Ally always had to restrain herself from screaming.
Like that one time, a year before, when Ally had been telling Beth what she and her mother had done that weekend (they’d taken a day trip to a nearby mountain and climbed to the top without stopping to rest, then gone to the movies together, with Marsha keeping up a running, whispered commentary in Ally’s ear), and Beth had said absently, “It’s like she’s a cat.”
“What?”
“You know, like you’re a ball of yarn, and she wants to play with you until she gets her fill, and then she wants to go away.”
Ally hadn’t spoken to Beth for three days, and evidently, Beth had learned her lesson. At Ally’s latest baiting, she stayed silent.
“Anyway, I think I’m just going to sign up for driver’s ed or something,” Ally finished. She expected Beth to accept the apology right away, or affirm her new plan of action, so she was startled by a moment of silence that felt interminable. She finally looked over at her friend, who seemed to be working something out in her mind.
“I think,” Beth said, “I know what we can do with our afternoon.”
Eight minutes later, they pulled into the parking lot behind the middle school. “This is where my parents taught me,” Beth said. “It was sort of a nightmare. My mom was whimpering in the backseat, and my dad kept pushing down on an invisible brake on the passenger side. And I was only going ten miles an hour. Okay. Let’s switch sides.”
Ally settled into the driver’s seat, pulling it up toward the steering wheel. She didn’t have long, beautiful legs like Beth’s. On her good days, she told herself that her legs were athletic, that her shorter stature was cute. On bad days, she couldn’t get past the word stumpy. She looked at her legs now, tan against the worn brown carpet of the car floor. She realized with a burst of frustration that she’d forgotten to shave her kneecap again. But mostly, she liked the way her legs looked on the driver’s side of the car. She decided this was a good day.
“Wait,” Beth said. “I just realized—is this legal? I think you might have to be eighteen to teach someone to drive.”
“I’m not sure,” Ally answered, hesitantly. She knew Beth scrupulously stayed on the right side of the law. Beth hardly even drank at parties, on the somewhat rare occasions they decided to go to them, usually using Ally as her excuse. “Designated driver!” she’d say brightly, clenching her mouth into a smile at whoever was holding out the beer. With that clenched smile, Beth appeared so far away and far above everyone else that “Beth Superior” became Ally’s secret nickname for her. Now, sitting in the car behind the steering wheel, Ally felt an almost painful itch to learn to drive. It threatened to override the concern she felt for her friend, threatened even her resolve never to incur the “Beth Superior” look. She turned her big brown eyes on Beth. “Do you want to go home?”
Beth took a deep breath. “Just try not to wreck my car? And please don’t run over any children.”
“Betharoo!” Ally shrieked, heaving her body awkwardly over the gearshift to hug her friend, “I love you, I love you, I love you! You are a teaching goddess, a magical fairy of knowledge transmission! I will name the first car I buy after you! And it will be a bright red Ferrari in honor of your hair, and it will be beautiful, but never as beautiful as you!”
Beth laughed, relaxing, her smile natural. “Okay,” she said. “I’m holding you to that.”
Of course, Beth was a good teacher, filled with patience and lacking any of her parents’ nervous tics. Ally ended up passing her test. Still, she could never escape the feeling afterward that Beth was the adult in the car. Beth remained the default driver, the expert, the one you’d want behind the wheel when navigating a city or pushing through a snowstorm. Reconnecting for the trip to Grandma Stella’s, both of them had known immediately who’d take the wheel.
Now, motoring over the last few feet of gravel in Grandma Stella’s driveway, Ally tried to swallow away the mingled tastes of sleep and old meat that had taken up residence in her mouth. Her gleefully devoured Big Mac sat like a stone in her stomach. She told her guilt to go away and her excitement to arrive but her emotions didn’t want to listen.
“Look at the window!” Beth said. And when Ally did, the excitement kicked in at last. Because at the window, Ally saw a skinny arm pushing aside a lace curtain, and then Grandma Stella’s face emerged, topped with a carefully curled mop of bottle-blond hair. Her lipsticked mouth moved frantically, shouting greetings that the girls couldn’t hear through the glass. The enthusiasm with which she smiled, combined with her wrinkles, practically caused her eyes to disappear in the folds of her face. She knocked on the inside of the window and pointed in the direction of the door, then gave them a thumbs-up and disappeared.
“I think she’s happy to see us,” Beth said.
“I think you’re right,” Ally replied. “Wow, she has not changed a bit.”
The front door of the house swung open violently, and Grandma Stella stood there in her full four feet and ten inches of glory. “Gorgeous girls!” she hollered, her legs in a wide stance like a cowboy preparing for a gunfight, her arms flung out into wings. “Get out of that car right now and give me hugs before I explode!”
Giddy, the girls climbed out of the car and obeyed. Grandma Stella had many talents, Ally knew, but foremost among them was her ability to give
a hug that conjured up the same sense of wholesome well-being as sitting in front of a lit fireplace on a winter night. Pressing her body into Grandma Stella’s after such a long absence felt right.
“Oh my goodness, pumpkin, you have gotten so skinny!” she heard Grandma Stella say to Beth, who had melted into a hug of her own once Ally vacated Stella’s arms. “You know, gentlemen like a little curve in your figure. If I don’t manage to fatten you up in the next week and a half, you can fire me.”
While Stella fussed over Beth, Ally looked around the wainscoted kitchen, which she immediately saw had been stocked with all the Britton Hills treats the girls loved: big, squashy, dark chocolate chunk cookies from the little grocery store on the town’s main street, practically more chocolate chunks than dough; downy peaches and plump blueberries from a farm stand down the road; and Ally’s personal favorite, the hearty wheat bread Grandma Stella baked herself, encrusted on the top with seeds and nuts, studded with raisins and figs in the middle.
Out the window, Grandma Stella’s front yard stretched out for over an acre. The towering leafy trees scattered around the property, under which Ally and Beth had spent many a summer day reading aloud to each other in the grass, looked as healthy and full as ever against the darkening sky, but the flowers the older woman planted and tended so carefully seemed less numerous this year. Ally looked away after noticing a patch of pansies that seemed particularly scraggly. She moved over to the cookies, tore a chocolate-chunk-laden bite off one, and popped it into her mouth.
“So you two get to help me memorialize this old house, before I give it all up for the luxuries of Sunny Acres: Retirement Home of Your Dreams,” Grandma Stella said. “I was thinking we could have a party right before I get out of here.”
“Wait, retirement home of your dreams?” Ally snorted. Finishing up her first cookie, she helped herself to a second. “Is that its official motto?”
“Nope.” Grandma Stella smiled. “But when I say it, I can temporarily convince myself that I’ll like living in a place that smells like canned peas. At Sunny Acres, playing bridge is a hot Saturday night. Although, to be fair, they do have some nice-looking men living there. I kept my eyes open for that on the tour.”
“Of course you did,” Beth said, laughing. “A party sounds nice. We can most definitely help you plan something. I’ll grab my highlighters!” She reached into the backpack at her feet and pulled out two highlighters, blue and yellow, along with a Moleskine notebook so well preserved that it looked brand-new, even though, as she flipped to an empty page, it became clear that she’d already filled up half of it.
“You are such a highlighter whore,” Ally said.
“Excuse me, no,” Beth replied. She uncapped the yellow one. “My highlighters and I are in a very loving, stable marriage.”
They chatted about the party, deciding on the date (next Friday night, two days before moving day), the number of people to invite (“As many as possible!” said Grandma Stella, who wanted to put up flyers all over downtown), and what they’d need to buy.
“Booze,” said Grandma Stella.
“Yes,” said Ally, seriously. “And also booze.”
“Good point,” said Grandma Stella. “And can we make sure we have enough alcohol?”
When party planning wound down, Grandma Stella switched to life planning, a favorite topic, Ally had found, of nearly everyone she talked to. Ally reiterated her desire to make a documentary, mentioning her idea about Britton Hills, and Grandma Stella oohed and aahed, fluffing up her hair and saying that she’d always thought she could be an excellent movie star. Then she lasered her focus on Beth.
“So your parents mentioned medical school? How exciting! No family is complete without a doctor, I think. Oh, you know, Harvard has an excellent medical school, and then you’d be so nice and close!”
“Well, Grandma, Harvard is pretty difficult to get into.”
“But you’re brilliant. They’d have to be idiots not to take you.”
Beth laughed, not the genuine laugh of hers that she’d been laughing just a few minutes ago, but a polite one. “Well, we’ll see. I still have to apply, and take some science classes I never took in college.”
“And what will you do in the meantime?”
“Oh, I guess I’ll live at home and catch up on prerequisites.”
“Well, that’s very practical of you.” Grandma Stella beamed at Beth. “You’re so sensible.” She put one of her hands on Beth’s shoulder and the other on Ally’s, looking back and forth between them. “I can’t believe you’re actually here!”
• • •
“I thought you would share the back bedroom, like always,” Grandma Stella said later in the evening, looking over her shoulder as she led them down the hardwood floors of her hallway. The house had three bedrooms. Grandma Stella slept in the first, which she’d carpeted with Persian rugs, wallpapered in paisley, and hung with heavy flowered curtains, as if daring the conflicting patterns to fight it out for her attention. The second bedroom, the one Beth’s parents always used, had a queen bed, rosy walls, and an intricately carved secretary desk with a computer still running Microsoft Word 2000 and dial-up Internet, where Beth and Ally had taken turns writing up their summer book reports.
But as far as Ally was concerned, the third bedroom blew the others out of the water. Farthest from the front door, it had a big bay window with a pillowed window seat, the perfect size to sit and watch the sun rise over the forest that bordered the back of the house. Ally always tried to wake up at dawn at least once over the course of her time in Britton Hills to see that sunrise. As the sun appeared in the sky, it toasted the room’s pale yellow walls until they turned the color of sunflowers. Ally couldn’t quite notice it as it was happening, how the pale walls turned sunny. Just all of a sudden, she’d realize that the change had occurred, even though she could never pinpoint the exact moment it flipped.
Grandma Stella had inherited the third bedroom’s bed from her mother—delicately wrought brass and iron, a color halfway between silver and copper. She’d added to the already beautiful frame the softest down comforter Ally had ever encountered in her twenty-three years on Earth, along with endless pillows cased in cerulean and white.
The first summer Beth and Ally had stayed in Britton Hills after Beth’s parents left, Grandma Stella had asked if they’d wanted to spread out more. So they’d toyed with the idea of splitting up, of one of them moving into the second bedroom. But ultimately, the lure of space hadn’t been able to outweigh the charms of the bedroom. Plus, they’d actually reveled in sharing a bed, so that after they’d turned out the lights, they could cuddle and talk until their sentences trailed off into sleep. Tradition had reigned in the intervening years and apparently for Grandma Stella, it reigned still. She opened the door to the bedroom and beamed, and only the slightest pause elapsed before the girls chorused their delight with the sleeping arrangements.
Later, in the bathroom, Beth sat on the side of the claw-foot bathtub and brushed her teeth as Ally washed her face. Rubbing soap into her skin, Ally whispered, “She looks good.”
“Grandma Stella?” Beth said through a mouthful of toothpaste.
“Yeah. I mean, she looks older, obviously. But not frail, like I thought maybe she would.”
Beth moved to the sink and spat her foam out as Ally toweled off her face. “Really? I think there’s a bigger change in her from last year to this year than I’ve ever seen before. And did you notice the garden? Compared to what it used to be, it’s . . . nothing.”
“Yeah, I saw. Maybe she didn’t want to plant as much ’cause she knew she’d only be here for part of the summer?”
“Maybe,” Beth said quietly.
Ally put her hand on Beth’s back and rubbed it. “She’s going to be okay,” she said. “She’s going to take over that retirement home. Within one week, she’ll be the most popular lady there. I
’m calling it right now.”
Beth smiled. “You’re right. All the men are going to fall in love with her. She’ll receive at least one marriage proposal per month.”
“All the women will come to her for advice, and she’ll memorize the names of every single one of their grandchildren.”
“None of the Sunny Acres employees will ever do any work again, because they’ll all be too busy telling her their life stories.” They laughed together. Ally squeezed Beth’s hand.
“We just really have to help her out,” Beth said, serious again. “Like, whatever she needs, even if it’s kind of a pain in the butt.”
“Yeah, of course,” Ally said. Was Beth lecturing her? Silently, they went back into the bedroom. Ally tossed her dirty clothes on the floor next to her suitcase and, crouching in only her underwear, rummaged through her bag for some PJs. Beth left her bra on while transferring shirts, then slipped it off under her pajamas.
In the dark that night, Ally lay in the fetal position, facing the wall. She couldn’t sleep. Since they’d flicked off the lights, she’d been trying not to toss around, not to disturb her bedmate. For what seemed like the thousandth time, she replayed the argument she’d been having in her mind since Beth first got back in touch, about whether to confront her. Continuing to pretend that nothing was wrong, they’d just keep awkwardly, painfully butting up against that invisible bulwark between them, denying all the while that it existed.
Quickly, before she could change her mind, she turned back to Beth, who lay flat and still on her back. “Hey,” she said. “You awake?”
“Mmm.” Beth’s voice sounded thick and crackly, the voice of a teacher who’d spent the whole day screaming to be heard. “Yup.”
“Can we talk for a bit?”
The moon outside the window lit up the room enough that Ally could see Beth’s eyes focus on her, but she couldn’t make out their expression. Trepidation or impatience?