He’d lived in Highland Park his entire life, so he could be excused if he thought of the stop sign at Bryant—installed over a decade ago—as new, but in truth, that afternoon he never registered it. He was still picking at the knot of Emily’s unhappiness when he realized a school bus was pulling out in front of him, tall as a boxcar, and that he’d ram it broadside if he didn’t stop. Too late, the driver saw him and honked, and at the last second Henry jammed on the brakes. The tires screeched and the nose of the Olds dove. The box flew off the seat, smacked the dash and bounced around the floor.
He was short by a couple of feet. He was lucky the road was dry.
“Damn it,” he said, because he was at fault. The sign was behind him. He hadn’t even seen it.
The driver threw up his hands and glared.
“Sorry,” Henry said, and held up his own as if he meant no harm. Above him, children who might have been first graders peered down from the windows, pointing and making faces, bouncing on their seats like trampolines. He was the excitement. It was on the local news every night, the old fart who hit the gas instead of the brake and ended up inside the dry cleaners.
Henry expected the driver to jump out and yell at him, but the bus eased forward, clearing the intersection, and kept going. The car behind it waited for Henry to take his turn.
He nodded. “Thank you.”
He wanted to protest that he was a careful driver, not like Emily, who couldn’t see at night and four-wheeled over curbs, and the rest of the way to the post office and then coming home he concentrated, lips pinched, eyes darting to cars peeking from side streets. It was one slip, but all it took was one, and he worried that it might have happened before, he just hadn’t noticed. Near the tail end of his life, his father couldn’t see well. When they visited him, all four corners of his bumpers were smudged with different-colored paint. He refused to give up his license, even after being stopped repeatedly by the police for driving too slowly. After he died, Henry rolled up the garage door of his condo and discovered the whole front of his Cutlass was pushed in, as if he’d hit a wall.
His father had taught him to drive in the park, on the winding road that circled the reservoir. “The more room between you and the other fellow the better,” his father said. “You don’t know what he’ll do. All you can do is stay as far away from him as possible.” Henry had tried to pass along this wisdom to his own children, but they thought they knew everything from taking driver’s ed. As a teenager, Kenny totaled their station wagon on black ice one New Year’s Eve, breaking Tim Pickering’s leg, while Margaret, coming home late from a party, took down a section of the Prentices’ fence that Henry made her pay for. He’d hoped their accidents might teach them a lesson. He wasn’t sure they had.
This time at Bryant he stopped at the sign. When he got home, he three-pointed the Olds at the end of the drive and backed it into the garage perfectly straight, waiting for the rear tires to kiss the two-by-four he’d rigged.
Emily was at the kitchen sink, peeling carrots.
“How was the post office?” she asked.
“Uneventful.”
It was only as he was hanging up his keys that he remembered the wipers.