The Night I Finally Drove Away

The drive back to my place in Ozark Ridge, the little town forty minutes south where I’d been renting a house since I finished the apprenticeship, was quiet except for the wipers scraping slush off the windshield every few seconds. My dash clock read 2:47 when I pulled out of their drive. Somewhere around the county line I started seeing that piggy bank every time I blinked. The hollow little rattle it made when I set it down on the coffee table. The dollar ninety nine sticker. My father’s face when Cleora held up those keys, the exact same face I’d spent thirty one years trying to earn.

Around six that morning my phone lit up. My mother.

I stared at the screen for a second, half expecting something like are you safe, or please come back, or we’re sorry, Burnell.

Instead the text read: Did you remember to bring in the extra propane tank before you left, it’s supposed to get down to single digits tonight and your father’s back is bothering him.

I laughed once, and there wasn’t a single bit of humor in it.

A grain truck blew past me on Highway 60 doing about ten over, throwing a sheet of gray slush across my windshield hard enough that for two full seconds I couldn’t see the road at all. I held the wheel steady and waited it out, breathing slow through my teeth, and when the road came back into view so did the rest of it. Every birthday. Every Christmas. Every time somebody told me I was too responsible to need help, like responsibility was a punishment I’d earned instead of a habit they’d forced on me because nobody was going to catch me if I fell.

By the time I got home the sun still hadn’t come up. I sat in my own driveway for a long minute before I went inside, in my own truck, paid off, titled to nobody but me, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, that felt like enough.

Three weeks went by. My father called four times. I let every one of them go to voicemail, mostly out of habit, not because I planned some grand statement about it. My mother texted a handful of times, always about something practical, never once about how I actually was. Cleora sent one message a few days after Christmas that read, quit being so sensitive, you’re ruining everything, which I read twice, deleted, and didn’t answer.