A red, hot wave of embarrassment might have washed over her had it not been for the patience woven into his gentle tone. It calmed her nerves.
Calm. The last thing she should’ve been.
“Press down on the brake and, at the same time, maneuver the gear shift from park to drive.”
Though she knew next to nothing about driving, she didn’t need him to explain that the gears were abbreviated by initial. She managed to shift to ‘D’ without killing them and kept her foot cemented on the brake, awaiting further instruction.
“Let your foot off the brake.”
Dayton gave her a pointed look as she refused to remove her leaden foot. She was terrified about what would happen with things in motion, worried over everything that could go wrong, least of all making a fool of herself.
“You aren’t going to hit anyone. In case you haven’t noticed, this is an abandoned lot. If you manage to make it all the way to those trees,” he pointed into the distance, “then we might have a problem on our hands.”
Kenna did not laugh nor remove her foot.
“Where are we?”
“About half a mile from Owens-Adair.”
Maybe he hadn’t taken her there to teach her to drive but rather to take care of her—she knew too much—and maybe whatever government agency spied on its own people would overhear the location and come to her aid before it was too late. He’d said himself that he had not taken her there to kill her but what if the brash statement was simply meant to throw her off?
Dayton quickly shattered her paranoid, violence-inspired fantasies. “I guess I didn’t mention it because I thought it might conjure some memories.”
“Good or bad?”
The question was fragile. Paper-thin glass.
“That’s for you to decide.”
And then he was back to business, as if the brief but intensely intimate tangent of conversation in which they had relived a part of their past had not taken place. His mastery of compartmentalization gave Kenna whiplash.
“Ease off the brake and switch to the gas pedal. Be gentle with it. Light pressure.”
The car rolled along the pavement like a giant, mechanized snail and she watched the miles per hour steadily increase in time with the pressure she applied to the pedal, infused with an incredible surge of power as her gentle action propelled the vehicle. 10.15. 20.
Dayton did not intervene until she clocked 40.
“Let’s keep it at 25.”
She rolled her eyes but obeyed, slacking off her speed. “I assume the turning is self-explanatory?”
Though he assured her there was no wrong way to turn, after she had completed one from either direction he proceeded to tell her that if she turned like that on the open road, she’d be the source of a pileup and despite the horror of that supposition, laughter erupted from her lungs; because, suddenly, he was the one afraid of being in the car with her.
9
JUST A WAIVER
The following week went by without incident. They stayed out of each other’s way and Kenna did all that was asked of her. Running to the office supply store across the way when they ran out of printer paper. Cleaning the patient bathroom with a pair of blue nitrile gloves and no hazmat training. She even stayed late one afternoon and helped Dayton brainstorm a new filing system and had been shocked that he kept the whole affair platonic.
Another week passed.
He ducked out early for a cardiology appointment and showed Kenna an ounce of trust when he left her the keys to the practice and told her to lock up.
Their dynamic at the new office was leaps and bounds from what it had been on campus. He didn’t offer a greeting upon her arrival or departure. Despite the fact that they had recently opened a second location along their street, there were no surprise lattes from Bigleaf Coffee Company. They no longer shared conjectures about patients because it was his independent practice as a licensed psychiatrist, not an institution of higher learning.
It wasn’t that she expected these things.
She missed them. She missed his forced, while trying to be cordial, inclusion of her.