Driving With the Top Down Read Online Free PDF

you’re not failing at being an adult.”
    “I’m just not made for that—” She gestured at her phone, at the irritation of being stuck on hold earlier. “I’m just not made for that kind of thing. I’m creative. I have an art degree. And I’m not using it, and I think it’s driving me crazy.” She couldn’t bring up what was weighing more heavily on her mind lately—that she hadn’t been his first choice—she couldn’t even say why the issue had become so compelling and awful. Maybe because Jay had left childhood and was careening so rapidly toward becoming a man. Those halcyon days of being Mommy, of being indispensable, were undeniably passing.
    What did she have to offer Kevin, apart from parenting his child? What did she really have to offer that he couldn’t get elsewhere, perhaps even with other bonuses (financial, sexual, and so on) thrown in?
    Kevin sighed deeply. “Look. You know ordinarily I would absolutely be in support of this, my hesitation going no further than a few practical concerns. But there’s one more thing.”
    The thing he’d wanted to talk to her about.
    Nervousness hit her again. “Kevin, what is it?”
    He gave her a pained look that could have suggested she’d unknowingly been exposed to some disease and that for the next few weeks, she was legally required to go into quarantine. Or maybe that she’d committed some horrid crime while in an Ambien sleep haze, and now they were awaiting her lawyer and the police.
    But no. What he said was worse than either of those things. It began and ended with one word.
    “Tamara.”
    “Oh God…” Tamara was Kevin’s niece. Well, technically, Tamara was her niece too, but at age sixteen, the girl had already been in and out of the legal system so much that the cops in Frederick all knew her about as well as Colleen herself did: Tamara’s name. Her record. Her birthday. Her address. (And even Colleen wasn’t 100 percent on her birthday.)
    She had known Tamara for only three years, actually, since the girl’s mother died and Chris, Kevin’s brother, gained custody of a kid he’d never even admitted having.
    So what, she was afraid to ask, had happened to Tamara now?
    “Chris was called out West for work,” Kevin said. “He’s desperate. There’s no way he can leave her at home alone, obviously. You don’t have to watch her if you really don’t want to. Of course, I told him I would ask you.”
    “But … what does he usually do with her? When she’s not in juvie, I mean. He goes out of town all the time for work.”
    “The woman he usually hires declined.”
    “Great. Even she can’t deal with her.”
    “That’s about the size of it.”
    Colleen sighed. She already knew she was going to be stuck with this if she didn’t think of something—someone—fast. “He doesn’t have anyone else?”
    “He never would have asked us if he did.”
    She let out a deep breath. “Tamara hates me.”
    “She does not.”
    “Oh yes. Yes, she does. Ever since the Instagram Incident.” Why the girl had posted pictures of herself smoking weed right there for everyone to see—and then made public plans to meet her friends behind McDonald’s to do it again the next Friday night—was a mystery to Colleen still, but when she’d mentioned it to Kevin and he’d mentioned it to Chris, somehow Colleen’s anonymity as the source was lost in the shuffle and Tamara had never forgiven her.
    Even though it was possible that Colleen had averted an even worse disaster for her. A pretty girl messed up on drugs in some deserted field behind a fast-food restaurant off the highway was begging for all kinds of trouble.
    “Look, I know Tamara is a huge responsibility,” Kevin was saying. “You don’t have to do this. I can cancel the trip maybe or—”
    “No, no, no. I want you to go. Jay would be so disappointed. You’re going.”
    He shrugged. “Maybe she can go with us.”
    She blinked at him. “I’m sorry? Maybe you can introduce