Go Around Once More

The clock on the dash said 11:41 and my father took the left at the light, the one that turns a nine-minute ride into a thirty-minute one, and neither of us said anything about it.

I was fifteen. I'd spent the night at Dana's, a house with too many cars in the driveway and a boy named Eli who kept putting his hand on my back like he was testing how far the handle turned. I hadn't moved. I wish I'd moved, either direction. Instead I was in my father's car with the heater ticking and his cold coffee sweating in the cup holder, and we were going the wrong way home, on purpose, together.

He passed our street without slowing.

"You see the moon," he said. Not a question. The other kind of sentence, the kind that just sets something down in the car with you.

I looked. It hung low and orange behind the trees, not really trying.

"When you were small you thought it followed the car," he said. "You'd cry when a hill took it. You'd say, Dad, we lost it, we have to go back for it."

"I don't remember that."

"No. You wouldn't."

We drove out past the water tower where the road opens and the whole town does its small lit business under you, and I understood the way you understand things at fifteen: he was taking the long way because he knew something he hadn't decided yet whether to say, and the road was buying him time to decide.

It could have been anything. That was the thing about my father. Big news came out of him slow, like a truck easing into a driveway.

But he didn't say anything. We went past the water tower and the fairgrounds with the gates chained and the long dark field where they parked the rides all summer, and he turned up the heat when he saw me pull my sleeves over my hands, and that was the whole conversation.

We pulled into our driveway at 12:14.

He killed the engine. We sat there with the headlights off and the engine ticking as it cooled, the house dark except the porch light, which my mother always left on whether anyone was due home or not.

And then I said it. I didn't plan to. It came up out of me the way things did that year.

"Go around once more."

He looked at me a second. Then he started the car again and backed out and drove us down the block and around the cul-de-sac and past the Andersons' sleeping dog and the trash cans at the curb, and neither of us said anything, and the moon came back over the trees like it had been waiting.

We never talked about that night. There was nothing to say that the driving didn't already say. But for seven more years, every time he came to get me from somewhere late, he took the long way, and I let him.

And once, at the very end, when he was the one who needed the road, I put my hand on his and I said it.

Go around once more.