After sleeping the sleep of the dead, which technically includes shift workers, stumbling downstairs to the kitchen, and rooting through the refrigerator to scrounge a quick meal that would charge up my drained batteries, I was standing in the living room in my robe, eating a bowl of peaches when Sean walked past me to the telephone.
“Gotta call school,” he said. Sean almost always thinks out loud as he’s preparing to do things. He didn’t expect a reply, so I stood there, dumbly shoving peaches into my hungry face as he chatted with somebody he apparently knew in the school office. I was still pretty groggy from sleep, but from what I overheard of the conversation, I could put together that he wanted to get into the school before it closed up so that he could get a book out of his locker. To judge from the sucking sound he made through his teeth, it didn’t seem very likely.
He put down the phone at the end of his conversation and shouted, “Dad!” even though I was less than three feet from him. “Sean!” I shouted back, around a mouthful of peaches.
“Could you please drive me to school?” he asked. “I’ve got to get a book from my locker, and it closes in two minutes!”
“Great scott!” I exclaimed, my unfinished bowl of peaches falling to the floor as I shed my robe, revealing iridescent superhero tights and a cape. “To the O-Mobile!” And we dashed out the door, dived through the windows of the car into our seats, fired up the atomic generators, and sped down the street in a cloud of dust and burning rubber, after carefully belting ourselves in, of course.
Or that’s what he wished had happened. When I in fact froze with a fresh spoonful of peaches in my mouth, wearing a blank expression on my face reminiscent of an addled cow, his face suggested to me just a bit of impatience. I glanced down at my bare feet, my robe, my unfinished bowl of peaches, and, at the thought of firing up the rickety engine on our 89 Mitsubishi Delica and rolling, lumpy-lumpy-lumpy down the road on its lame tire with a teenager sitting, tight as a drumhead with tension, in the left seat, I gently declined.