The Night I Finally Drove Away

I threw myself into the new crew leader position instead. Ozark Valley Electric had me running four man crews through the worst ice storm we’d had in six years that January, restoring power to farms and trailer parks and one elderly widow’s place out on County Road 12 where she’d been running a kerosene heater for two days because nobody else had gotten to her yet. I liked that work. I liked that it was honest, that a downed line either got fixed or it didn’t, that nobody handed you a two dollar bank and called it fair.

On the last Sunday in January, I went to the pancake breakfast the VFW hall runs every winter to raise money for the food pantry, mostly because a buddy from the crew talked me into it, and I stood in line behind half the town, and for the first time in a month I felt like a person again instead of a math problem somebody in my family kept getting wrong on purpose.

Then, the first Tuesday in February, my father left a voicemail that changed the whole shape of things.

“Burnell Ray Birdsong,” it started, and I already knew from the way he used my middle name that this wasn’t going to be about the weather. “If you don’t bring that truck back here by tomorrow evening, I am going to call the sheriff’s department and report it stolen. I mean it.”

I sat on the edge of my bed and played it twice, because the first time through I was sure I’d misheard him.

My truck. The one with the title sitting in a folder in my filing cabinet, in my name only, paid off two years ago at First State Bank in Doe Run. The one I had been driving to work every day for three years while it sat parked in nobody’s driveway but my own.