The Drive Home — Summary

The calendar on the kitchen wall is from the bank, and today’s square has one word in it. Doctor. It has been there for three weeks.

Eileen Kovar, seventy-four, retired after twenty-nine years at John McIntire Elementary, is up at ten to seven. The house says the appointment at eight, at ten, and at twenty past ten, once each, unhurried, and goes back to the radio station Frank liked. The car takes Maple Avenue. She rides with her purse on her lap and both hands on the purse.

The neurologist is younger than her son. He is kind, and he is not vague, and afterward she cannot repeat one whole sentence he said, only the word. It arrives at about twenty minutes to eleven, and the room goes on without any pause around it. The screen is already putting the follow-up in November. The pharmacy has the prescription before she has her coat back on. At the desk there is nothing to carry, nothing to sign; the visit has already gone wherever visits go.

The car is at the door when she comes out. It has known since twenty to eleven, the same way the kitchen knows and the pharmacy knows and November knows. It says nothing about any of it.

On Maple Avenue she says, out loud, alone, the first thing since the doctor’s office: What does it mean. And the thing that heard the word when she heard it answers her, plainly, in the voice it uses for her. It tells her what stays and for how long, roughly, and that roughly is the honest word. It names a few of the first things, and two of them she recognizes, because they have already been in the kitchen with her for a year, small, and she had a different explanation for each of them. It does not tell her she is strong. It does not say the word journey. When she stops asking, it stops answering, and the radio does not come back on.

Denise calls at half past one, as she does most days, and the call runs its nine minutes about Sunday and the chicken. At minute seven Denise says you sound tired, and the moment stands open like a door, and Eileen says she was up in the night, and the door closes. She is not keeping a secret. She is keeping a day, one more, in which the thing is only hers.

The afternoon does what her afternoons do. At nine the house asks about November on the stairs, and she says mornings are fine, and the fourteenth is the last thing anyone says out loud in the house tonight. Down in the kitchen the calendar hangs in the dark with its one word in today’s square, in the famous hand, and in the morning the square will be yesterday.