I remember only the vaguest of details about the episode. My older sister, Janet, who keeps threatening to write a memoir revealing our family secrets tells it at nearly every family occasion. My brother, Carl, the baby of our family, swears the whole thing never happened. None of it; not a minute. 

It is generally agreed that parents and their children recount their family time together as differently as those blind men pawing over that elephant in the child’s tale. The stories that siblings bring back from their childhoods may reflect more about who they are as adults than what happened in their childhoods. Sometimes, it feels like we didn’t share much of our childhood together at all. Instead, we were more like boarders in a house with little interest in the other occupants. 

This episode supposedly happened two years before our father died in a fatal car crash. Janet uses this undisputable fact to shore up her accounting of this day.  We were on our Sunday drive in a rundown twenty-year-old Studebaker which my father maintained with his minimal mechanical skills. Bald tires. Engine burning motor oil. Failed emergency brake. Body rot. Unsafe for him to drive, but dangerous especially for my mother, a new driver, usually with a carful of kids.

We children were in the back seat on our way home after a long summer day at a public beach. My father was driving, with one hand on the steering wheel and his other arm stretched across the back of the front seat. My father’s family organized these gatherings and with plenty of cousins and lots of food we were dazed from the sun and sand, eager to get home and out of our swimsuits. The adults were full of booze, especially my Dad and his brothers. Janet says they were feeling “no pain.”  

As she tells the story, Carl and I slouched over each other ready to fall asleep. It was getting dark and the traffic was crawling along the state highway.  She was sitting at the edge of the back seat, pretending to read her book but was really hoping to hear what my parents were talking about.  To her it sounded like they were having an argument. Mom was asking him if he was OK to drive. 

Daddy said, ‘Of course, I am.’” He smiled and reminded her that he was a great driver.  Janet says that that my father was in a very good mood on that drive home. And she added “because he’d been drinking.” 

This kind of thing drives my brother and me crazy.  His drinking infects all her stories about him, even the ones about a very happy Christmas morning when he was awake earlier than usual, making us special Santa-shaped pancakes.  He was even more excited than we were about opening presents. That lovely childhood enthusiasm about him made him a great playmate and sometimes an unreliable parent but not on this magical morning. He was completely ours to enjoy. She insists he was up early drinking. That is why he was so much fun; Carl and I tell she’s crazy. This story always makes my brother storm out of the room, no matter how often she tells it and how often he pleaded, Please, not again. 

According to her, on that Sunday afternoon, there was an accident just ahead and the rescue crews were arriving. My father grew impatient and as quickly as he could, he swerved the car over to a back road. She reminds us of how much he hated traffic. I remembered that he knew every major highway, side street, and gravel road in the state. His job as an appliance repair man required him to know how to navigate anywhere; he also seemed to have magical sense of direction, the way some people do. So, on these Sunday drives, we could find ourselves in places he’d discovered during the week — abandoned mines, old houses he could fix up, farms he wanted to buy – all adventures and dreams.  This backroad would likely be a shortcut that took us a longer time to get home but it didn’t matter, he just hated traffic. 

Janet says that once we turned down backroad, things got serious. My father started driving faster; my mother sat up straight in her seat. Janet says my mother tried to catch my father’s attention by staring at him, by throwing one of her “stop it now” looks but it didn’t work. My father was smiling, enjoying the drive, one hand on the steering wheel and the other now on the shift.  She put her hand on his to get his attention and he smiled. 

Our mother asked him to slow down because he was driving too fast.

Janet says, he just smiled and sped up a little. The back road was not well paved so the car was bumping along. I do seem to remember that part of the story, being jostled out of sleep for a minute.

Janet says, “She asked him to slow down again, ‘Please, John. You’re scaring me’.” 

Daddy said, “Nothing to worry about, honey. We need to get these kids home.” Smiling again. 

Janet says, “I must have gasped or something because Mommy and Daddy heard me and noticed I was listening in to their conversation. I felt like I was in the middle of one of their arguments but I didn’t want to be. So, I leaned back in my seat. I just wanted Daddy to stop driving so crazy.”

She says that she settled in between my brother and me. Soon, the car started weaving.  Janet says, “Daddy was jerking the wheel back and forth and the car is rocking, speeding down the road. He’s driving like he’s a stupid teenager.”

 “Mommy screamed and she said to Daddy, ‘John, you’re going to kill us all’.  And she looks back at me, and says, ‘You’re scaring Janet.’  Mom took her hand away from his and put them on the front of the glove compartment, bracing herself in the case the car crashed.

“Daddy looked in the rearview mirror and motioned me to come forward. I leaned into his side of the car and put my hands on the back seat. I was almost crying but I tried not to. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.” 

“Daddy asked me, ‘You’re not scared are you, Janet? We’re just having a little bit of fun. Mommy just don’t understand’. I looked at him and I could feel myself biting my lip, scared but maybe thinking he knew what he was doing. Maybe, we were all really OK. But then I looked at Mommy and knew that she was right. He was driving crazy. I was scared.”

Janet always slows down her story at this point to look hard at my brother.

“And I told Daddy, ‘I am scared. At least at little bit. I think you might be scaring Baby Carl, too. I think he’s crying.’  She adds, as if she is sharing inside information “That was a lie. I said you were crying because you were always his favorite, Carl. Maybe, that would make him stop but really were both fast asleep. I had to do something.”

“Daddy just nodded his head and slowed down and straightened out the car.  Mommy put her hand back on his and I sat back and tried to relax. Some Sunday drive! We could have died that day. I was so happy to finally get home. Daddy carried you both in the house and put you to bed. I grabbed a Coke and went to my room.” 

Soon after this event, Janet stopped coming on Sunday outings. She played the teenager card — too busy with friends, had homework, got a boyfriend, blah blah blah. So, our little family continued our Sunday drives, exploring the backroads and looking at houses we couldn’t afford, schools we couldn’t attend and visiting dangerous neighborhoods we had no business being in. Until he died. 

I have listen to Janet repeat this short story over and over again. I suppose I should thank her for saving our lives and maybe I would if I remembered more about that afternoon. But maybe not. I only remember being in that car on a hot summer afternoon asleep with Carl’s feel stretched over my lap. That is it.  In my mind, I don’t want these stories messing with the memory of my father. 

I wish Janet could gain some wisdom and grace in her retelling of her stories about him. There could be a space for our father not as a severely damaged man but instead as a someone with a serious problem caught up in a post-war culture that celebrated men’s drinking. He was a wonderful father I can’t excuse his drinking but I’ll never forgive her these stories.