Dementia learns she isn’t fit to drive a car - Kristina T. Saccone

This is baffling. She spent decades shuttling four children to and fro, here and there. Pretty much everywhere they wanted to be. High school carpool or jazz band practice or swim team. Apparently a doctor ordered this driving test. She doesn’t believe it. But still, Dementia gives it her best effort.

Dementia first learned to drive near Rayners Lane where she was born. Stick shift, left side of the road. The States spoiled her with automatic transmission, unleaded fuel, right-side driving. Still, she never forgot the rules of the motorway back home. Driving a rental between Heathrow and the house where she was born, she orated to the backseat, recounting epic European car vacations she took as a kid. Sometimes they’d drive on the right side of the road, take pit stops that were just a hole in the ground. No! Not even a toilet! Vistas memorialized in silver photos, now boxed away.

Dementia remembers her father drove on those trips. It’s funny what she remembers and what she forgets. Her mother never learned to drive in the first place. Post-war, she made a home, a family. Why get a license? He shuttled her everywhere in their VW bug. After Parkinsons took him, minicabs brought her to Waitrose.

It’s different for Dementia. The kids grew up and the car became her escape: power under the pedal, the dream of speeding away in a cloud of dust, away from all the cooking, the

cleaning, the husband screaming, the ironing, even his underwear. She remembers that: following in her mother’s footsteps.

Unlike her mother, she eventually divorced. Proved that she could live on her own. Bought herself new cars whenever it felt right. Like a new, hybrid Honda CRV. Lily white with big GBR and Union Jack bumper stickers that said she owned this thing. Her children had disliked the car, the new grand piano, the diamond earrings. But couldn’t Dementia treat herself every now and then, just live her life goddamn it?

Her last ride behind the wheel happens in the driving school’s car, with a chaperone. The instructor is poised to hit the brakes when things go wrong. And it all goes wrong. She misses traffic signals, road markings, pedestrians. “It’s so distressing,” she says when she fails. She wants to go to the store the next day and wonders who took the CRV from the garage.

Almost daily, Dementia emails her children with the subject line “Memories.” One click from social media shares pictures from before Dementia took over. In the photos, she hugs the grandkids who she once buckled into child seats, whose hands she held while crossing the street, whose names she sometimes forgets now. She smiles at the camera, memorializing another time, unknowing of everything she will one day forget.

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Kristina T. Saccone (she/her) writes short fiction and nonfiction. Her work appears in Fractured Lit, Cease, Cows, Gone Lawn, Flash Flood, Twin Pies Literary, LEON Literary Review, Emerge Literary Journal, and others. She edits a limited-run online literary journal with stories about caring for our aging parents, called One Wild Ride, and she’s querying an anthology on the same topic. Kristina is also a Randoph College MFA candidate. Find her on Twitter at @kristinasaccone and @one_wild_ride.