When Ben offered to teach his grandfather to use the car’s navigation screen, he expected a quick lesson. Granddad had driven for fifty-five years, but the dashboard was new and kept announcing turns he hadn’t requested.
Ben set their destination to the garden center. The voice said to turn right at the traffic lights. Granddad turned left.
“It’s recalculating,” Ben said.
“Good. It should learn the roads I like.”
At the next junction the voice suggested another right. Granddad drove straight ahead. Ben explained that navigation worked best if they followed its instructions. Granddad said that when he followed instructions from a stranger he preferred to meet the stranger first.
They pulled into a lay-by. Ben showed him how to turn off the voice, enlarge the map, and avoid motorways. Granddad asked whether the screen knew the bridge on Mill Lane was narrow. It did. Did it know the roadworks on Oak Street? The map showed them. Did it know Mrs. Harris lived beside the garden center and would insist they stay for tea if she saw the car? The map offered no answer.
Granddad took Mill Lane. He waved to a cyclist, slowed for a tractor, and pointed out the bakery where Ben’s mother had worked as a teenager. Ben kept watching the arrival time creep later. At the garden center they were eleven minutes behind the screen’s estimate. Granddad declared that a victory; he had remembered two old friends on the way.
Ben carried bags of soil while Granddad chose tomato plants. At the till, Granddad couldn’t find his loyalty card. He emptied his pockets: keys, a folded shopping list, two peppermints, and a handwritten set of directions to the garden center. Ben held it up. Every turn was wrong for the route they’d just taken.
“Whose directions are these?”
“Your grandmother’s. She wants me to take the long way home.”
“Why?”
“Because she ordered a birthday cake for me and doesn’t want me arriving before it.”
Ben checked his phone. His grandmother had sent a message: “Keep him out until three. The baker is late.” It was only two fifteen. He bought Granddad a coffee and suggested looking at the roses. Granddad looked pleased.
“I thought you hadn’t guessed,” he said.
“You knew about the cake?”
Granddad asked Ben to mark the best route on the phone for next time. Ben did so, including the bakery, and the app warned it would add fourteen minutes. Granddad said to save it as the family route. Ben renamed it without telling him: ‘The scenic excuse.’
At the garden center Granddad also wanted a bag of compost, but the last one had split. Ben suggested ordering online. Granddad asked whether a website would help carry it to the car. A staff member found a new bag in the storeroom and remembered Granddad from the previous spring. They chatted about the tomatoes that had survived a late frost. Ben’s phone announced a faster route home. Granddad muted it, saying the staff member had just saved him a ruined crop with better advice than any screen could offer.
“Of course. She used the same bakery every year.”
“Then why bring the directions?”
“Your grandmother thinks she can fool me with a new road. I think I can fool her by pretending to get lost.”
They reached home at three five. Grandma opened the door with a cake and a room full of family. She asked whether the navigation had helped.
Granddad smiled. “It was the first time it ever told me to take my time.”