Christine - Stephen King [95]
Arnie shrugged, promising nothing either way.
'You'll be taking your car to school, that is if it's still running - '
'It'll be running.'
' - and if it's a school that allows freshmen to have cars on campus.'
Arnie turned toward his father, surprised out of his smouldering anger - surprised and uneasy. This was a possibility he had never considered.
'I won't go to a school that says I can't have my wheels,' he said. His tone was one of patient instruction, the sort of voice an instructor with a class of mentally retarded children might use.
'You see?' Michael asked. 'She's right. Basing your choice of a college on the school's policy concerning freshmen and cars is totally irrational. You've gotten obsessed with this car.'
'I wouldn't expect you to understand.'
Michael pressed his lips together for a moment.
'Anyway, what's running out to the airport on the bus to pick up your car, if you want to take Leigh out? It's an inconvenience, granted, but not really a major one. It means you won't use it unless you have to, for one thing, and you'll save gas money. Your mother can have her little victory, she won't have to look at it.' Michael paused and then smiled his sad grin again. 'She doesn't see it as money flying away, both of us know that. She sees it as your first decisive step away from her from us, I guess she oh, shit, I don't know.'
He stopped, looking at his son. Arnie looked back thoughtfully,
'Take it to college with you; even if you choose a campus that doesn't allow freshmen to have cars on campus, there are ways to get around - '
'Like parking it at the airport?'
'Yes. Like that. When you come home for weekends, Regina will be so glad to see you she'll never mention the car. Hell, she'll probably get out there in the driveway and help you wash it and Turtlewax it just so she can find out what you're doing. Ten months. Then it'll be over. We can have peace in the family again. Go on, Arnie. Drive.'
Arnie pulled out of the dry cleaner's and back into traffic.
'Is this thing insured?' Michael asked abruptly.
Arnie laughed. 'Are you kidding? If you don't have' liability insurance in this state and you get in an accident, the cops kill you. Without liability, it'd be your fault even if the other car fell out of the sky and landed on top of you. It's one of the ways the shitters keep kids off the roads in Pennsylvania.'
Michael thought of telling Arnie that a disproportionate number of fatal accidents in Pennsylvania - 41 per cent - involved teenage drivers (Regina had read the statistic to him as part of a Sunday supplement article, rolling that figure out in slow, apocalyptic tones: 'For-ty one per cent! shortly after Arnie bought his car), and decided it wasn't anything Arnie would want to hear not in his present mood.
'Just liability?'
They were passing under a reflecting sign which read LEFT LANE FOR AIRPORT. Arnie put on his blinker and changed lanes. Michael seemed to relax a little.
'You can't get collision insurance until you're twenty-one. I mean that; those shitting insurance companies are all as rich as Croesus, but they won't cover you unless the odds are stacked outrageously in their favour.' There was a bitter, somehow weakly peevish note in Arnie's voice that Michael had never heard there before, and although he said nothing, he was startled and a little dismayed by his son's choice of words - he had assumed Arnie used that sort of language with his peers (or so he later told Dennis Guilder, apparently totally unaware of the fact that, up until his senior year, Arnie had really had no peers except for Guilder), but he had never used it in front of Regina and himself.
'Your driving record and whether or not you had driver ed don't have anything to do with it,' Arnie went on. 'The reason you can't get collision is because their fucking actuarial tables say you can't get collision. You can get it at twenty-one only if you're