The Unexpected Everything

“Awesome,” I said, making myself smile, knowing I wasn’t reacting the way he wanted me to. I felt terrible about it but wasn’t sure I would be able to fake it. Because there was a bus with his face on it at the bottom of the driveway, reminding me of everything that was going to happen and how little I could do about it. When was he planning to teach me how to drive a stick shift if he was going to be not only working, but campaigning in the fall’s election? I looked at the car, pretty sure that it was going to sit there, undriven, for a very long time.

“Sorry,” my dad said, his excited energy ebbing away as he ran his hand over the back of his neck. “Maybe . . . this was probably the wrong day. But when they called and said it was ready, I just wanted you to have it.”

“No, it’s great,” I said, feeling even worse than I had a moment ago. “Really, Dad. Thank you.”

“Well,” my dad said, after an awkward silence had fallen, “I hope you like it, Andie.”

He turned to head inside, but before he’d reached the door, I blurted out, “You’re running again, aren’t you.” It didn’t sound like a question because it wasn’t one. All the proof I needed was sitting at the bottom of the driveway.

My dad turned back to me. “I told you, I haven’t decided anything.”

“You can at least tell me the truth.” I said, shaking my head, realizing that I should not be getting mad at him right after he’d given me a present, but knowing that it was happening anyway.

My dad raised his eyebrows. “I am,” he said. “I’m still weighing my options.”

“It’s just . . . this summer, having you around, it’s been really . . .”

“Alex!” Peter was standing on the bottom step of the bus, tapping at his watch in a hugely exaggerated manner, like we were involved in a game of long-distance charades. “We have to get going. Walt can’t make traffic miracles happen!” Peter stepped back inside the bus, and I looked back at my dad.

“I . . .” My dad looked down at me for a moment. “I won’t decide to run without talking to you first. Okay?”

I looked back to the bus, which was contradicting everything he was saying. “Right,” I said, nodding and looking away from him, my voice flat. There was no point in arguing if he was just going to leave anyway. “Sure.”

? ? ?

Ten minutes later I sat in my mother’s Mustang as the bus made a painfully slow three-point (in this case, more like an eighteen-point) turn before heading back down the road. I realized as it departed that TOWARD THE FUTURE was printed on the back of the bus as well, and the very slogan seemed to mock me for ever doubting that this was the choice my dad would make.

I’d gotten into the passenger side out of habit—I’d been years away from driving the last time I was in this car. I shut the door behind me and looked around. I had hoped, in some absurd way, that it would still somehow feel like my mom. That even after five years in storage, her perfume would be lingering or there would be the feeling I always had in this car with my mother—that adventure was somehow just around the corner, that any minute now, exciting things were going to happen.

I sat there for just a moment, looking through the motes of dust in the shafts of sunlight to the empty seat where my mother should have been sitting, the view I’d always had. When that got to be too much, I slid over to the driver’s side, pulling the seat forward and placing my hands on the steering wheel for the first time.

I flipped down the visor mirror, expecting the keys to drop down into my lap, because that’s where they always seemed to be in the movies. But there was nothing there, and a quick glance around the car didn’t show them to me either. I realized as I looked that I actually wasn’t sure how the car had gotten here—if it had been driven or towed.

I opened the glove compartment and starting flipping through the papers—mostly what appeared to be sale and insurance documents—and found them toward the back, the car keys on the key chain that I’d gotten her for Mother’s Day when I was nine, a bright-purple heart dangling from a chain. I smiled as I held it up now, the silver of the chain catching the light and reflecting it back at me. When I’d bought it from a mall kiosk eight years ago, I had been convinced that there had never been anything so beautiful. Now, though, I could see just how tacky it was—and how wonderful my mother had been, to carry it around for years after that anyway, just because I had given it to her.

I started to put the papers back inside the glove compartment when I saw my name. I started flipping through them more slowly, and there, almost at the end of the stack, I saw it—a plain white square envelope with my name written across the front of it—in my mother’s handwriting.

I just stared at it, holding it with both hands, not wanting to even breathe in case this somehow went away or disappeared. I looked at my name on the front of the envelope, in the handwriting I hadn’t seen in so long—the looping A, the circle over the i. I turned the card over, and what I saw there made me let out a short laugh with a sob mixed into it. Across the back flap she’d drawn the Mustang with a horse in sunglasses sitting in the driver’s seat, one elbow out the window. Lots of horsepower! she’d written below it, and I laughed, even though I could feel tears prickling the corners of my eyes. The drawing wasn’t as sharp as the ones she usually did—the lines were a little unsure and wavy, and I knew just by looking at it that this was one of the ones she’d made toward the end, before even picking up a pencil hurt her hands too much, before she lost all the energy she’d once used for things like drawing mustangs in Mustangs.