TSIA2 Practice Test 7

In this passage from a novel, the narrator recalls the summer her older brother taught her to drive.

(1) The summer I turned fifteen, my brother Theo decided I would learn to drive on the caliche road behind our uncle's pecan orchard, where the worst thing I could hit was a fence post. (2) He was nineteen and home from his first year at college, and he carried himself that summer with a new, slightly theatrical patience, as if he had read somewhere how older brothers ought to behave. (3) "Mirrors," he would say before I had even found the ignition. "Seat. Mirrors again." (4) I rolled my eyes so often that he started counting the rolls aloud and adding them to a running total he claimed he would one day present to our mother.

(5) The truck was older than both of us, a pale green Ford whose clutch caught so high that for the first week I stalled it nearly every time I tried to move. (6) Each stall threw us both forward against our belts, and each time Theo said nothing at all, which was worse than anything he could have said. (7) I began to suspect that his silence was a method rather than a mood. (8) On the eighth day, when the truck finally rolled forward smoothly and kept rolling past the third row of trees, he simply reached over and turned up the radio, and I understood that this was the only praise I was going to get. (9) It was enough; I drove the length of the orchard twice, grinning so hard my face ached.

(10) Years later, when Theo had moved to Oregon and our phone calls had shrunk to birthdays and holidays, I tried to teach my own daughter to drive in a parking lot outside San Antonio. (11) I talked the whole time. (12) I explained the clutch, the mirrors, the blind spots, the physics of a skid, until she pressed both palms against her ears and asked whether I would please, for once, just let her try. (13) I closed my mouth and sat back, and I heard, as clearly as if he were in the back seat, the click of the radio dial turning. (14) It occurred to me then that Theo had not been patient by nature that summer at all. (15) He had been holding his tongue, every afternoon, on purpose, so that whatever I learned would feel like mine.