Teaching Mom to Drive

For twenty-two years, Uriel's father had driven the family everywhere, and his mother had sat in the passenger seat with her handbag on her knees. When he died last spring, the old blue car stayed in the garage, and Rocío took two buses to work. In January she finally said it: "I want to learn. Will you teach me?" Uriel was eighteen. He had had his license for exactly five months.

They chose Monday nights, when the parking lot of the football stadium was empty. The first night, Rocío sat behind the wheel for ten minutes before she turned the key. When the car jumped forward and stopped, she took her hands off the wheel as if it were hot. "This is a mistake," she said. "I'm too old. Your father should be doing this."

Uriel almost agreed with her. Then he remembered his own lessons, in the same car, with his father in the passenger seat. His father had been a good man but an impatient teacher. Whenever Uriel turned to ask a question, his father would say, sharply, "Don't look at me. I'm not the road." Uriel had hated that sentence.

So he tried to do it differently. "You should start in first gear and let the clutch up slowly," he said. "If the car stops, it's not a problem. We've got the whole parking lot and the whole night." On the second Monday, she drove in a circle. On the third, she drove in a figure eight and laughed for the first time. By the fifth Monday, she was parking between the white lines without touching them.

On the sixth Monday, Rocío didn't stop at the exit of the parking lot. She signaled, looked left and right, and turned onto the real street. Uriel said nothing. He watched her check the mirror, slow down for a red light and change gear as if she had been doing it for years. Ten minutes later, she parked outside their house.

Uriel was still staring at her, smiling so widely that his face hurt. Rocío turned off the engine, kept her eyes straight ahead and patted his knee. "Don't look at me," she said softly. "I'm not the road."