The Night I Finally Drove Away

My parents and I haven’t spoken since that February phone call. I don’t know if we will again anytime soon, and for the first time in my life, I’ve made a kind of peace with that instead of chasing it. I still have my truck, title clean, paid off, mine. I still have my job, and this spring they’re putting me up for line superintendent, which would have been the kind of news I’d have driven forty five minutes through snow to share once, hoping somebody would finally look up.

I don’t drive through snow for that kind of hope anymore.

This past Christmas, my first one alone in my own house, I put up a small tree by myself, strung the lights crooked on purpose because nobody was there to tell me they weren’t straight, and I drove out to the VFW hall on Christmas Eve where half the linemen from the co-op and their families had potluck set up on folding tables under the flag. Somebody’s kid handed me a paper plate of casserole I hadn’t asked for and a grown man I barely knew clapped me on the shoulder and said Merry Christmas like he meant it, and I sat down at a table full of people who owed me nothing and gave me more of it than my own family had in thirty one years.

I still have that piggy bank, for what it’s worth. It sits on a shelf in my garage next to my toolbox, empty now, the two dollar bills spent on gas the night I drove away. I don’t keep it out of spite. I keep it because every time I look at it, I remember exactly what it cost to finally understand my own worth wasn’t something anybody else got to price for me, not with a sixty thousand dollar truck, and not with two crumpled dollar bills either.