Driving With the Top Down Read Free Page B

not going to have a parade because you brought them back as science projects; and two, I told you not to eat downstairs at all. We’re going to get bugs and maybe critters down there!”
    Jay gave a laugh, and even she knew she sounded like a cartoon mom. “There’s nothing down there.”
    “How would you know? You were okay ignoring this”—she gestured toward the sink—“atrocity for days!”
    “Calm down.”
    Never good advice for someone who is angry, by the way. No pissed-off person ever calmed down because the object of their rage told them to. “I don’t need to calm down—you need to listen and do what I say the first time. I shouldn’t have to tell you things twenty times.” Just talking about it again was starting to feel aerobic. “It’s not fair for you to pile extra work on me like this.”
    “Fine. What do you want me to do?”
    “I want you to do the dishes and stop ignoring the very few things I actually ask of you.”
    “Fine.” He emphasized the n . “Jeez, you don’t need to go off about every little thing. You could get the same point across by being calm instead of yelling, you know.”
    This was something he had said before, and something that bugged her every time. Not because it was true, exactly, but because it wasn’t the typical fourteen-year-old line that the script called for. She wished it were true. She wished he really would listen when she spoke calmly, but he didn’t.
    “Apparently not.” This was far from the first time she’d called him up to do something that actually would have been a lot easier for her to do herself. But she kept thinking that if she were consistent, he’d get so tired of always having to come back and do the thing he hadn’t done, he’d just do it right to begin with.
    So far, that strategy hadn’t worked at all.
    He turned on the sink and lamely rinsed absolutely nothing out of the bowl—the crud was going to need physical labor as well—before putting it into the dishwasher.
    “Oh my God, Jay, do you see what’s wrong with that picture?”
    He actually looked at the walls, confused. “Huh?”
    She pointed at the bowl, her words coming out with exasperated breath. “That. What do you think is going to happen to that in the dishwasher? Do you think there are tiny elves with trash bags in there who are going to go chisel that stuff off the bowl and carry it out to the trash so that bowl comes out sparkling clean?”
    “That would be cool.”
    She sighed.
    Of course it would be cool. But eventually the dishwasher elves would probably just end up sitting around, eating cookies, getting crumbs everywhere, and she’d be in charge of them too.
    If she’d had another child—perhaps the daughter she’d hoped for after Jay until she’d finally faced the fact that she wasn’t able to have more children—might she have had more support in the house? Could that longed-for child have made the difference that kept Colleen feeling like herself rather than a bland working machine that everyone took for granted?
    “I want clean dishes to come out of the dishwasher,” she said. “Not clean food.”
    “Okay, okay.” He gingerly poked at the glued-on mess with a plastic straw he’d left in one of his drinking glasses (another of her pet peeves—it was like when her dad used to put his after-dinner cigarettes out on the plate, leaving it for the wimmin-folk to deal with). The straw bent feebly against the dried piece of Life cereal he was attempting to dislodge.
    And suddenly it felt to her like this scene was never going to end. She just couldn’t afford to stand here all night instructing him, moment by moment, on how to be a civilized human being.
    “Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,” Kevin would say. Unfairly.
    Because what that amounted to was everyone perceiving her as a henpecker. Why was it so hard for them to comprehend her objection to their creating extra work for her? She’d work to clean the