Driving With the Top Down Read Free Page A

what needed to be done.
    Now Vice Principal Richards wanted to meet with her and Kevin (she already knew he’d be too busy at work to show) and all Jay’s teachers before the end of term, which was two weeks away.
    “Jay!” She yelled down from where she sat and just waited, too tired to get up and summon him for yet another Unpleasant Talk.
    Finally, “Yeah?”
    “Come here!”
    After a longer-than-necessary wait, the tall, lanky fourteen-year-old came sauntering in. “What’s up?”
    “Got an e-mail from Vice Principal Richards.” She gestured at the computer screen as if that would put the fear of God into him.
    He quirked a smile. “How is he?”
    “Not funny. You’ve got D’s in two classes and an F in one.”
    “A’s in the other three.”
    “You think that makes up for it?”
    “It averages out to a mid-C.”
    “Jay.” She put her head in her hands for a moment, then looked back at him soberly. “Now I have to go in and talk to every one of your teachers, your guidance counselor, and Mr. Richards.”
    “Just don’t go.”
    “I can’t just not go . That’s the attitude—that right there—that’s getting you in trouble. Do the work, Jay. Do. The. Work. It’s almost summer vacation, you’ve got, like, three days to turn this stuff in. Being a student is your only job—can you just get it done?”
    “Okay, okay. I’ll try.”
    “No. No trying— just do it. Or you won’t be going to Cooperstown with Dad.” Empty threat; they both knew it. There was no way in the world she could cancel that trip now.
    But they both pretended to believe it.
    “I’m forwarding this e-mail to you, it’s got your missed assignments on it. You can still pass without having to go to summer school. Go work on whatever isn’t done now.”
    “Fine.”
    He went back downstairs and she waited tensely for a few minutes, then heard exactly what she expected: the sound of the computer starting up again.
    So it wasn’t that she was just being a persnickety old Felix Unger when she went into the kitchen and saw the mess; it was that she had completely had it with feeling like she was constantly taking one step forward only to be shoved back fourteen.
    “Jay!” she yelled, eyeing the sink, the precarious pile of Fiestaware she’d gotten piece by piece off eBay and in antique and thrift stores, according to what she could afford at any given time. Some of the plates were chipped, one of the bowls had the mold-green remains of what was probably once Life cereal—and that was the one on top, so God only knew what the ones below looked like.
    She didn’t want to know.
    “Jay!” she yelled again, then went to the top of the basement door and added, “Get up here. Again.”
    Her son responded with something muffled and indistinguishable from down and behind the rec room door.
    “I can’t hear you, come here!” Usually she had to go to them when she couldn’t hear them, Jay or even Kevin. The onus was always on her to go hear, rather than on them to come be heard.
    She waited about thirty beats and was half ready to go stomping down when she heard the door creak and saw Jay coming into the kitchen.
    “What is it?” He blinked eyes reddened by what a more paranoid parent would have suspected was drug use, but which she knew were irritated because he’d just been sitting in front of the computer with the lights out.
    “The dishes.”
    “I brought them up.”
    Seemed like such a small thing. She knew it seemed like a small thing. Maybe to another person it would have been. Maybe to her it should have been. But she was weary. Couldn’t do his schoolwork, couldn’t do the dishes, couldn’t do laundry if someone offered to pay him, had no interest in playing organized sports or being in any other way organized. And all of it was a reflection, she feared, of her own laziness.
    Or, not laziness— exhaustion .
    “Okay, one, you have sworn to me for a week that you didn’t have any dishes down there, so I’m