Florida FAST Practice Test 3

The Long Way to Hadley

¹The summer I turned fifteen, my grandfather decided I should learn to drive, and he decided it the way he decided most things: out loud, at dinner, as if the matter had already been settled by a higher court. "Tomorrow, six a.m.," he said, pointing his fork at me. "Before the road wakes up."

²My mother set down the salad tongs. "Dad, she doesn't have a permit."

³"She'll have one by September. We're only going to the back roads. Cows don't file complaints."

⁴I loved him for that, and I loved the plan, because it belonged to me and not to my mother, who had spent the year treating me like a vase balanced on the edge of a shelf. In my mind, the lessons were a secret club with two members and a truck.

⁵The truck was a 1979 pickup the color of weak tea. It had a manual transmission that groaned like a cello whenever I missed second gear, which in the first week was always. Grandpa Jasper never raised his voice. He would only say, "Again," and fold his hands on the dashboard like a man waiting out a sermon.

⁶By July I could take the hill on Larkin Road without stalling. By the end of the month I could merge onto the county highway, my hands at ten and two, my heart a sparrow trapped behind my ribs. Grandpa insisted on the same route every morning: east past the grain elevator, north along the river, and then all the way to the edge of Hadley, twenty-two miles, before turning back. "Why Hadley?" I asked once. "There's nothing there." "There's the long way," he said, which was not an answer, and he knew it.

⁷In retrospect, I should have noticed more. I should have noticed how he leaned toward the windshield when he took the wheel himself, how he read road signs aloud as if checking them against a list. I should have noticed that he had stopped driving at night, that he let me carry the groceries in while he waited in the cab, that he had begun to call the stop sign at the bottom of Elm Street "that new one," though it had stood there since before I was born.

⁸What I noticed instead was that I was good at something. I noticed the way Grandpa nodded once, curtly, when I took a turn smoothly, and how that nod was worth more than any grade I had brought home all year.

⁹The afternoon it ended, he was driving us home from the hardware store. We came down Elm Street, and he did not slow. I said his name. He did not slow. I said it again, louder, and he stamped on the brake so hard that the paint cans in the back slid and hit the cab like a fist. We sat in the middle of the intersection with the engine ticking. A woman on the corner stared at us, holding her little dog against her chest.

¹⁰"I didn't see it," he said. His voice was very quiet. "I looked right at it, Lena, and I didn't see it."

¹¹That night I heard him and my mother in the kitchen. I could not make out the words, only their shapes—hers rising and sharp, his low and steady, like a man laying bricks. When I came downstairs for water, they both stopped, and my mother looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her face: not worry, exactly, but something like apology.

¹²Grandpa explained it to me himself the next morning, sitting on the tailgate. The eye doctor in Hadley had told him in the spring. The condition was chronic and would get worse, slowly and then not slowly. He had known for months that he would have to give up his license. "Your mother would have driven me to my appointments," he said. "She'd have done it with a good heart. But I'd rather be driven by someone I taught." He rubbed his thumb along the rust on the tailgate. "That's vanity, I suppose. I've earned a little."

¹³I was angry for a whole day—at him for not telling me, at my mother for learning it before I did, at myself for thinking the summer had been about me. Then I went out to the truck and sat in the driver's seat for a long time without starting it. Every route, every "Again," every hill on Larkin Road rearranged itself into a different shape, the way a word you have repeated too many times suddenly turns strange and then, if you keep repeating it, becomes itself again.

¹⁴In September, two weeks after I got my permit, I drove him to Hadley. My mother rode in the back, which she had never once done in her life, and said nothing about my speed. Grandpa sat in the passenger seat with his hands folded on the dashboard. When I parked—cleanly, between the lines—outside the doctor's office, he lifted one hand an inch and let it fall, a small gesture that felt like a benediction.

¹⁵"The long way," he said.

¹⁶"The long way," I said, and turned off the engine.