“You are driving on the public street, dude,” I crowed. “Congratulations.”
“Don’t distract me,” he scolded. He lifted his foot entirely off the brake and coasted the car to a full stop at the end of our block.
“You’re doing better than I did at your age,” I applauded. “I never got a Corvair out of the parking lot.”
He never heard me, he was concentrating so hard. And now, the Driving Gods smiled on him; like the Red Sea for Moses, the heavy traffic on the main highway parted, allowing him to make an unhurried right turn. Mastering that challenge, he took a breath, whispered a few things to himself, stayed in the right lane, checked his mirrors regularly, and accelerated to half the speed limit as the world whooshed past us in the left lane. After a mile, he took a breath. He was relaxing, gaining confidence. He accelerated slightly.
And then he was screaming. “GET IT AWAY! GET IT AWAY!” he shrieked, stomping on the brake pedal with both feet, screeching the Corvair to a skidding stop and covering his face with his hands.
“What? What’s the matter?” I asked, trying to sound calm, but probably shouting, as I turned around and waved my arms frantically to signal the traffic behind us to go around. Thank God the top was down so they could see me.
“THERE’S A LIZARD! GET IT AWAY!”
“I don’t see a liz—”
“ON THE FLOOR! GET IT AWAY!”
“Benjy, you’ve got to move the car to the curb,” I said, hoping I still sounded calm. “We could get in a very bad accident here.” With a break in the traffic behind us, I wheeled around in my seat, and scanned the interior of the car, trying to spot the serpent.
“I CAN’T!” he wailed. “THERE’S A LIZARD ABOUT TO CRAWL ON ME!”
Even with no driveshaft hump on the Corvair’s floor, I could see no lizard.
“Pull the car over to the curb, Benjy,” I ordered. “We’ll deal with the lizard there.”
“I can’t,” he whimpered. “It’s down there.”
Suddenly, a pickup truck was behind us, closing too fast. It honked, then swerved to avoid us. “GET THAT PIECE OF SHIT OFF THE ROAD!” the speeding teenager yelled through the open passenger window, giving us a one-finger salute. “WHAT ARE YOU? RETARDED?”
“Take your feet off the brake,” I ordered Benjy, “and let the car coast. I’ll steer to the curb.”
But it was no use. Benjy was frozen. Then I saw it—a black blur with a blue stripe scurried under the brake pedal. It was possibly five inches long.
“Benjy, it’s just a skink. Like we have in our garden. It won’t hurt you. It’s scared of you!”
“I hate lizards! They’re not supposed to be in the car!” he said, trembling.
“Benjy, if you want to drive a car—if you want to live independently—I can’t always be there for you. You need to do this. You need to pull this car over before we get creamed!”
Finally, Benjy opened his eyes. The skink had disappeared, for the moment at least. He relaxed his taut legs just enough to ease the pressure on the brake pedal. Still trembling, he signaled a right turn, and I steered us to the curb. Then, rushing like it was a NASCAR pit stop, he yanked up the parking brake, put the Corvair in N, turned the engine off, hopped out of the car, slammed the door shut so the skink wouldn’t follow him, and raced around the front of the car to the safety of the sidewalk.
“You okay?” I asked, joining him.
“NO!”
He let me put my arm around him. “In all the years I’ve been driving,” I told him softly, “I have never before seen a lizard in a car. Why it happened today, your first time on the road, I have no idea. I’m sorry. The odds are it will not ever happen again. But if it does, you have to react safely. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, putting on his brave face. “I’m fine. I’m okay.” But he wasn’t okay, he was upset. I put my arm around him, and he didn’t pull away. “I’m not retarded,” he finally said. “And this car is not what he said it is.”
“Forget that guy. He’s just another bully. Forget him.”
“He was speeding. He was mean! He’s the one who shouldn’t have a driver’s license, not me!”
I squeezed Benjy’s shoulders to pull him closer. “There are lots of bad people in the world, and lots of bad drivers on the road,” I told him. “That’s part of life, unfortunately. Calm down. Don’t let it upset you.”
“Why can’t people be nice?”
“I don’t know.”
I left Benjy to go on a skink hunt, crawling on the Corvair’s carpet to peer behind the dash. I removed the rear seat, pulled up the carpet. Nothing.
“I can’t find it. Maybe it’s gone,” I said.
“We didn’t see it crawl out, so it must still be in there,” he said.
It turned out our car was partially blocking a driveway. Now a blocked driver wanted to back out, and we needed to move. “Do you want me to drive the car or can you?” I asked, signaling the other driver that we needed a moment.
“Dad, there is a lizard in that car! We can’t drive it! It could bite us. We should have it towed.”
There was no way I was calling that tow truck driver again.
“It’s a skink, Benjy. It’s harmless.”
“How do you know skinks are harmless? You are not an expert on skinks.”
“They aren’t harmful, and they don’t bite.”
“How do you know?!” he demanded. “How do you know it won’t bite?”
The driver in the driveway irritably raised his hands—an unmistakable social cue. “Look, Benjy,” I pleaded, “I’ll drive us to McDonald’s from here. But we’ve got to go. If it was dangerous, I wouldn’t get in that car, and I wouldn’t ask you to either. So are you going to get in or are you going to walk?”
He didn’t move. “You should call the tow truck,” he said.
“I will not call the tow truck!” I insisted. “I’m sick of tow trucks. Even if there’s a man-eating crocodile in there, I am not calling that tow truck.”
Benjy considered his options. “I want to go home,” he said. He opened the passenger door, stepped on the seat bottom, slowly maneuvered his rear end onto the seat, brought his knees up to his chest, and wrapped his arms around his legs. As I drove him home, his feet never touched the floor.
CHAPTER 16
“Some skinks are carnivores,” Benjy triumphantly reported to me after we returned home; he had marched straight to his computer from the Corvair, determined to get the skinny on skinks. “Carnivores eat meat. Humans are meat. Which means skinks could not only bite humans, but eat humans.”
“There are over eight hundred varieties of skinks,” I countered, having also marched straight to my own computer to become skink-savvy. “The ones you’re talking about are giant skinks from other continents. Here we have garden skinks. Tiny garden skinks. Without teeth. A five-inch skink in a car will not bite the driver.”
“You are not a scientific expert,” Benjy said in his usual flat tone. “You said Mom couldn’t die from the flu, and she did.”
I searched Benjy’s face for a sign that he wanted to talk or cry or vent, or somehow react to Annie’s death. He’d never really expressed his feelings about his mom’s passing and rarely mentioned it. Not that I’d expected him to; he rarely expressed personal emotions. But then, riding in the Corvair with Lydia, he’d volunteered that his mother had died. And now he’d raised it with me. Maybe something was happening here—a readiness to express his emotions, perhaps?
“Yes, I did say that,” I finally said, “because that’s what the doctors told me. It wasn’t fair that she died when the odds were so low, was it?”
“No,” he agreed. “Just as it wouldn’t be fair if a skink bit me while I was driving a Corvair. But it nearly happened. Just because the odds are low doesn’t mean it won’t happen. You should learn that.” He walked away, looking vindicated.
“Hey,” I called after him. He stopped at the stairs.
“You just walked away there, w
hile we were still talking, I thought. Talking about Mom. Do you want to say or ask anything, maybe?” I gently prodded.
“We were talking about being bitten by a skink, Dad,” he corrected, sounding annoyed. “You always tell me that, in a conversation, I should not change the subject to what I want to talk about, but that’s what you just did. You should learn that, too.” He bounded up the stairs, two at a time, looking even more vindicated.
“May I drive to McDonald’s for lunch?” Benjy asked the next day after he finished his math work. As if the carnivorous skink scare had never happened.
“Are you sure?” I pressed. “When you drive, people are counting on you. You can’t panic or get upset or distracted, whether it’s by a skink or NASCAR games or National Treasure.”
“I know,” he nodded. “I won’t.”
“So you’ve made peace with the possibility of a skink in the car?”
“I want to drive,” he shrugged. “Even though it is possible that they bite, at least a skink is not a snake or a crocodile.”
Outside, under Benjy’s watchful eye, I gave the Corvair another skink inspection. “My bet is it’s gone,” I said. We had left the Vair’s top down and windows open overnight to give the unwelcome intruder plenty of escape routes. “I dunno. Maybe there’s some kind of skink repellent we can use?”
“There are no proven skink repellents,” Benjy said. “I read that yesterday.”
“Maybe we can tune to a radio station that plays music skinks don’t like?”
“Dad, you’re being silly,” he said. This was no laughing matter to him, and I apologized. He stepped into the car as if the floor were on fire. Taking a big gulp of air, then letting it out like a slowly leaking tire, Benjy buckled his seat belt, whispered the preflight checklist to himself, and turned the key. Backing out of the driveway, he kept sneaking peeks down to the floor, searching for our serpent friend. I ordered him to keep his eyes on the road while I became the Skink Scout. “Okay,” he said. He added “I am not afraid of skinks” to his murmured checklist.
At the main road, he waited patiently for an opening in traffic while occasionally glancing at the floor. His face was beet red; his pulse must have been off the charts. “Breathe,” I insisted. “It’s gone.” As the traffic cleared, he slowly turned into the right lane.
After barely a block, a speeding driver was on our bumper. As Benjy anxiously checked the mirrors, I quietly advised, “Keep breathing. It’s okay. You’re doing everything right.” The driver pulled up beside us, down came the passenger window, and Benjy lurched toward me, as if bracing to be hit by something thrown from the other car. The speeding driver was no teen; he was closer to my age. Couldn’t he show some patience? Hadn’t he once driven a car for the first time?
The speeding driver tapped his horn to get our attention, then shouted “Great car!” Benjy refused to look over, instead focusing like a laser on the road ahead. I waved to the driver and gave him a thumbs-up. “My mother had one,” the driver yelled as he drove parallel to us. “First car I ever drove!” I gave him another thumbs-up and pointed to Benjy, trying to gesture that it was his first time. The driver returned my thumbs-up, then accelerated ahead of us.
“Stuff happens when you drive such a cool ride,” I murmured, smiling, trying to ease Benjy’s anxiety.
“Be quiet, Dad,” he replied, straightening up in his seat, taut as a piano wire, his gaze never veering from the road ahead. Finally, three cautious miles later, the Golden Arches came into view. He took a deep breath and relaxed.
At the drive-thru, Benjy deftly maneuvered into the lunchtime rush lineup and edged forward until we reached the ordering microphone. “Welcome to McDonald’s! May I take your order, please?” a boy’s voice squawked from the box. Disappointment descended over Benjy’s face—he’d hoped Lydia was working today. He unenthusiastically ordered his Chicken McNuggets, then unhappily inched the Corvair forward to the pick-up window.
“Benjy!” Lydia was at the window, her smile blinding. “You’re driving!” She pushed away the purple lock that dangled across her face.
“Yes,” said Benjy, suddenly animated. “Why weren’t you taking the orders?”
Lydia handed our drinks over to Benjy. “We split that up when it’s so busy,” she said, then anxiously turned to see if the manager had her under surveillance for Fraternizing With the Customers.
But Benjy didn’t pick up on her anxiety; words rushed out of him. “I only have my learner’s permit, but, if I pass the road test, then I’ll have my driver’s license. Then I won’t need to have him in the car.” He pointed at me. “Like I’m a kid. I’m not a kid anymore. Then I’m going to drive a Corvair in a race called the Grand Prix du Garbage. It’s in West Virginia. I made a friend named Kenny. He likes Corvairs, too. He fixed the wheels on this car so they won’t fall off ever again. So it’s safe to go for a ride.”
As Lydia passed Benjy his McNuggets, she replied sweetly, “Benjy, I really, really would like to talk to you, but I can’t now.”
“There was a skink in the car,” Benjy continued as if he hadn’t heard her, “but I think it’s gone now. And it was probably not carnivorous, although there’s no way to tell for sure unless we capture it. I’ve decided not to be afraid of it, and so should you, if you decide to go for a ride.”
“Benjy, I cannot talk now!” Lydia exclaimed. “You’ll get me fired!” She slammed her window shut and gestured urgently to Benjy to move on.
Benjy’s chin dropped to his chest. “We have to go, Benjy,” I told him. “She’s working.”
Suddenly, a familiar pickup truck screeched to a halt beside us. The driver stuck his head out the window to shout at Lydia, “Hey, Babe, what the hell’s the holdup? The line’s back to the street!” Benjy and I both recognized him as the bully who jeered at us the day before.
Lydia opened her window, shot another glance back to her manager, then gestured urgently to the pickup driver to go. “Go, Bobby! You’ll get me fired!”
“Before you go,” I told Bobby, “I think you owe my son an apology for the things you said yesterday when you passed us.”
“I didn’t say nothin’ to you,” he smirked. “Babe! Speed it up!” he ordered Lydia. “I’m hungry!”
“You were in that very truck and you certainly did say something very rude to us,” I insisted.
Lydia saw instantly that Bobby was lying. “What did you say?” she demanded, eyes ablaze.
“Nothin’, I told you. I don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.”
“You are lying,” Lydia cried. “You lie about everything! You apologize!”
Bobby waved his hand dismissively, spun his tires, and screeched off.
“You lied to me for the last time!” Lydia screamed after him. “JERK!”
A few frustrated drivers stuck in line behind us honked their horns.
“Is he your boyfriend?” Benjy asked. We’d only seen the back of his head while he was smooching Lydia at Senior Day.
“Not anymore!” Upset, she turned away from the window, right into the arms of the McDonald’s manager who had been drawn by the commotion. She pushed him aside and ran off, crying.
“Is there something I can help with?” the manager finally asked us, looking bewildered.
“May I have some barbeque sauce for my Chicken McNuggets, please?” Benjy asked.
“That’s a very nice car,” said the frazzled manager as he dumped a lifetime supply of sauce packets in Benjy’s lap. “Would you mind moving it, please?”
For Benjy’s third and absolutely final try at the math assessment, Katie greeted us at the door to James Monroe, full of encouragement. “The third time’s the charm!” she chirped as we headed to the Learning Center together.
“What does that mean?” Benjy asked, puzzled. “Is that on the test? It wasn’t on the tutorial.” His mood was not good. He resented having to be here.
“No, no,” Katie said, realizing her cliché had eluded Benjy. “Just a saying. Which I
said because I’m very confident you’re going to do well this time. I know you’ve been working very hard with your father.”
“I’m not working with him. He’s worse at math than I am,” Benjy reported. “He’s the one who should have to take math, not me. I passed all the state’s standardized tests in high school.”
“I know you did, and that’s why you’re going to do very well today. I can just feel it.” She was irrepressible. She looked at me with a big, inviting smile, then brushed her hair away with her left hand. There was no ring on her ring finger, I noticed. It was the first time since Annie died that I’d looked at a woman’s hand to see if she might be available.
“Can we just get this over with?” Benjy asked Katie as she opened up his private test-taking room. Then he unleashed a deafening yawn in which his uncovered mouth opened wide enough to swallow a cantaloupe. “I have to practice my parallel parking. The Corvair doesn’t have power steering. And I have to turn the steering wheel a lot to park it because it’s a slow-ratio steering gearbox. We don’t have the quick-ratio steering gearbox. A lot of Corvair owners like that better because it makes the wheels turn faster. I think I’d like it better. Ours takes a lot of muscles.” I now realized that Benjy had spent a lot of his scheduled math tutorial time on instead methodically working his way through Google’s 9,460,000 search results for the Corvair.
Katie nodded her head as if she knew exactly what Benjy was talking about—I’m glad one of us knew, because I had no clue. “Well, there’s your math all coming back!” she chirped. “You know your ratios! See, you really will do just fine!”
“Benjy,” I gently chided, “you need to focus on your math test now. You can save yourself a couple of years of math courses you don’t want to take, so this is the top priority. Right?”
“Sure, sure, sure,” he said, plopping down in front of the computer, as if awaiting his turn to have his head guillotined. “The test created by normals for normals that has nothing to do with me.” His calculator, pencils, and scratch paper were beside him. “Could you leave, please?” he ordered me. “You’re not allowed in here. You’d only give me the wrong answers anyway.”
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