Drives Like a Dream by Porter Shreve Read Free Book Online

the diner she wondered if Cy could bring back the figure in the Porsche, his racing number 31 painted on the hood—if he could still be the person that she had romanticized. Or would he be like Donald Turnupseed, an ordinary student who drives on while the hero swerves into the firmament?
    In the booth at the Brown Jug she said, "Yes, I remember you." And though she hadn't meant to sound insulting, added, "You certainly look different."
    She had not expected to see him ever again. He had been an image in her mind for so long, and even now as she watched him pull at his beard, saying, "Oh, this thing; I only just started growing it"—she had a sinking feeling that between Cyrus and Cy, between her memory of that boy and what she saw of this man standing before her, between then and now, a light had gone out.
    "You look terrific," he said.
    Lydia could only smile.
    "Last I heard, you had moved to Bloomfield Hills."
    "Farmington Hills, actually. It wasn't my choice, believe me. My parents were tired of the city. But here we are, both at Michigan."
    "Off the waitlist for me."
    "What's your major?"
    "Haven't decided that yet." less took a few dollars from her purse, placed the money on the table and excused herself. "I should be getting back to the library," she said.
    Cy quickly replaced her in the booth, as if by tacit arrangement, and so began more than thirty years of Cy and Lydia sitting across a table from each other.

    Their shared history had gone beyond the youthful flirtation that Lydia had sanctified. Her father had worked for the great automobile designer Harley Earl and had scorned the unions. Cy's dad was a line foreman at Chrysler and an active member of the United Auto Workers. Lydia grew up in a five-bedroom Victorian on the nicest street in Indian Village. Cy lived alone with his father in a bungalow two blocks from the Jefferson assembly plant, where Kurt Modine worked his entire career. Still, the conversation in both households, particularly in the 1950s—the age of the dream machines—had always centered on cars. The look of them, their parts, wheelbase, and horsepower. How to improve on last year's model or keep workers on the line happy and efficient.
    And though Cy seemed to have lost his sureness, his luminescence somewhere along the way, he did still share those memories. Lydia believed in the past so strongly that later when she realized he wasn't really the same person that she had remembered, she convinced herself that the myth could sustain her. For Cy's part, he seemed only too happy to settle down, to ground himself in this one certainty. Lydia's mother had resisted the match. She didn't want her only child to commit to a man straight out of college, as she had done, tying herself down and giving up her own future. But Ginny Warren's resistance only added urgency to Lydia's desire to get married, and right away. It wasn't long before Ginny conceded; as soon as she got to know Cy, she fell for him, too. He and Lydia joked that at last they could make good on their long-standing promise of an extramarital affair. When Cy asked Lydia to marry him, in front of an abandoned lighthouse on St. Clair Flats, he said, "It's time to take the 'extra' out of our extramarital affair, don't you think?"
    She recalled how throughout their engagement they had lived apart at their parents' houses in metro Detroit. Lydia got a research job in the city's development
office
and Cy delivered sports cars for a custom builder whom his father knew. At their wedding, downtown in the ballroom of the old Book-Cadillac Hotel, she wore white gloves and a gown with a fifteen-foot train. Of the two hundred and fifty guests, only fifty were from the groom's side, a fact that did not bother Lydia until after the honeymoon when she was writing thank-you cards and the imbalance finally became clear. Cy shrugged it off, said it hardly mattered.
    Now, driving down South University in Ann Arbor, she decided on this day of