Drives Like a Dream by Porter Shreve Read Free Book Online Page A

Cy's second wedding that she might as well have a ceremonial meal—French toast, of course—at their old rendezvous, the Brown Jug.
    On a certain level, Lydia wondered if she had ever given Cy a chance. In her mind she had married her adolescent sweetheart, not the person he had become. He had worked his way through college as an errand runner and a handyman, and in Evanston, while Lydia took a degree at Northwestern in Urban and Regional Planning, they lived rent-free in the building where Cy was superintendent. He knew how to field a complaint, smooth things over, keep the engines running for a while. It seemed he could learn to do anything, and though Lydia admired his flexibility, his openness, his willingness to adapt, these same characteristics confounded her. For him a job was a job, and a passion was something else entirely. Try as he might, he could never bring the two together. So he pursued his shifting passions with a fervor that left Lydia feeling isolated. And somewhere in those many years, she stopped believing that Cy's protean nature and her own desire for permanence could ever make an ideal complement.
    Funny, how in the Marriage and Family scenario that had started her infatuation at school, she would have been the other woman. The idea of Lydia in such an arrangement was ridiculous, of course. But what did it matter? Lydia had been playing make-believe, when Cy, even now, was marrying a real-life other woman.

    She parked in front of the Brown Jug, dug into her purse, and fed the meter two quarters.
    The restaurant's door was locked. Taped to it was a message:
The Brown Jug, family-owned and operated since 1938, is closed for renovations. Please accept our apologies and check back with us in the fall.
    â€”The Management
    Lydia peered into the darkened space. The booths were piled up like firewood, the checkered floor covered in dust. All of the pictures had been removed from the walls, exposing the bright yellow paint that lay beneath the layers of bacon grease and cigarette smoke.
    She got back into the car and sat there, her hands on the wheel, not knowing what to make of this. Was she on the wrong end of some elaborate joke?
    She started up the car, the engine sputtering for a moment before it settled into a steady whir. She turned around on South University and drove back in the direction she'd come from—past the stacks and the Union, the co-op on Hill Street, and Davy's old house.
    Just beyond a garden store on the road out of Ann Arbor, the steering wheel of the Ford Escort began to tighten up. She pressed the gas pedal, but the car wouldn't accelerate. Coasting through a yellow light, she put on her hazards, and wrenched the car into the nearby Uncle Ed's Oil Shoppe, where it came to a stop a few feet short of the garage.
    Lydia watched as the needle on the battery gauge went from normal to dead in a matter of seconds. She turned the ignition. Nothing. She pumped the gas and tried again. Still, the engine would not turn over.
    She pounded the steering wheel. "Goddammit!" she yelled.
    She cursed the car, the restaurant, everything that seemed to be closing down on her today. Jessica had always said that something like this would happen: her mother abandoned in the old car, far from home.

4
    J ESSICA FELT responsible for the Spiveys, but Casper hardly needed another backseat driver. He couldn't go a block without M.J.'s scolding him for driving too fast, too slow, too carelessly, too cautiously. "Keep your eyes on the road" was her refrain now echoing in Jessica's head as Casper parked the car. But the trip had gone without incident, and now the three of them stepped out of the Lincoln in the back lot of the Kirk in the Hills, a Scottish Presbyterian church. Davy parked his father's Infiniti and came over to lend a hand. Casper leaned on the side of the car. "Gotta stretch the legs. Ellen warned me it's going to be a long service."
    "I wouldn't worry too much," Davy assured him. "My