She's Up to No Good(6)

“How do you think? I carried them.”

“How?” I asked, heaving the second one into the trunk. “I can barely lift this.”

“Maybe I’m stronger than you.” I looked at her. She looked like a cartoon insect, smiling behind the sunglasses. “I packed them downstairs. I’m quite resourceful, darling.”

“Clearly.” I held out my hand. “Keys?”

“Don’t be silly. I’ll drive the first shift. In fact, I can drive the whole way. You can take a nap.”

“Grandma. You’re not driving the whole way. Why not just let me do it?”

“Because I’m not dead yet. My car, my rules. I’m driving. At least until the first stop.” I shrugged and went to the passenger seat.

My grandmother climbed gingerly into the driver’s side and buckled herself in with great effort. “They make these things so hard to do. My whole life we never needed these. Now they give you a ticket if you don’t wear it, but they make it so hard to hook.” I tried to make it look hard to buckle mine, but it clicked easily. “There we are,” she said finally, then backed rapidly out of the driveway, running over the curb and bouncing into the street with a loud thunk. “Did you say something, dear?”

I gripped the door handle, eyes wide as she peeled off down the street at nearly double the speed limit, weaving wildly. “Maybe I should drive. You can navigate.”

“Who needs to navigate? I know the way. Driven there a thousand times. Maybe more.”

“Yeah, but—that was a stop sign!”

“It’s a suggestion. They put it in a few years ago. No one stops there.”

“Do—do they make you take a test—at your age—when you renew your license?”

She waved her hand flippantly. “Oh, I don’t have one of those.”

“A license?”

“They took it when I had that mini-stroke thing a few years ago. So stupid. I’m fine.”

“You don’t have a license?”

“Why would I need a license? I know how to drive. And no one thinks I’m too young to drink.”

“Grandma, pull over.”

“Why? What’s the matter with you?”

“PULL OVER NOW!”

She pulled to an extremely crooked stop, the front end of the car a foot from the curb, the back end at least four feet. “Whatever is the matter? We haven’t even made it out of the neighborhood yet.”

“Out. I’m driving.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Grandma, if you don’t get out of this car and let me drive, I’m calling the police myself.”

“What are the police going to do? Put me in jail?”

“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. “And I’d rather not start our trip by bailing you out. So switch with me.”

“So dramatic.” She sighed, unbuckling her seatbelt and then fixing me with a withering look. “Don’t tell your mother about the license.”

What have I done? I thought, realizing that staying home with my parents might have been the better plan.





My grandmother gossiped about my cousins for the first half hour while we left the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, and merged onto I-95 North. I listened half-heartedly. I didn’t really want to hear about how happily married two of them were and how happily engaged the third was. Not when I was about to become the lone divorcee.

There was a lull as signs for Baltimore appeared, and I changed the subject. “So why are we actually going to Massachusetts?”

She scowled at me. “I told you. That’s my business.”

“Okay, but like—I won’t tell Mom. You can tell me.”

“Why are you really getting divorced?”

I looked over at her, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”

“You want to ask questions about things that aren’t your business? I’ll do the same. So don’t tell me it was because he found someone else. That’s the symptom that sends you to the doctor, not the diagnosis.”

I winced as I remembered Brad’s voice. We haven’t been happy. “Okay. We don’t have to talk about why we’re going.”

“You don’t get off that easy,” Grandma said, taking off her enormous sunglasses and peering at me. I kept my eyes deliberately on the road. “Was the sex not good?”

“Grandma!”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about that with you.”

“I don’t see why not. It’s how you got here, after all. And believe it or not, it’s how your mother got here too.”

“Please stop.”

“Your grandfather and I never had a problem in that area, thankfully. Not that I had a lot of experience before him. But I had some.”

I imagined unhooking my seatbelt, opening the car door, and rolling into traffic. “Can we please talk about literally anything else?”

She let out a cackle of laughter. “You asked why we’re going. You don’t want to know the answer?”

“If the answer is you’re going to find some guy who you slept with before Grandpa, I don’t want to know anymore.”

“I’m not going for Tony.”