The Night I Finally Drove Away

I called my mother first, since she usually made more sense than he did when he got worked up over something. She didn’t answer. I called Cleora next, and she picked up on the second ring, already talking before I could get a word out.

“You need to just bring it back, Burnell, you’re making this so much worse than it has to be.”

“Bring what back? I haven’t taken anything of theirs.”

There was a pause on her end that told me more than anything she said after it. “You know what,” she said finally, quieter now. “Dad said you’d understand once you thought about it.”

I didn’t understand, and I told her so, and she hung up on me instead of explaining.

That night I pulled every piece of paperwork I owned into one pile on my kitchen table. Registration. Insurance card. The letter First State Bank had mailed me two years back confirming the loan was paid in full. The title itself, which the state of Missouri had reissued in my name alone the month after that letter came. Seven years of maintenance receipts going back to the day I bought that truck used off a farmer outside Ava with four thousand miles already on it.

While I was digging through the filing cabinet for the title, a folded envelope fell out from behind the hanging folders, one I didn’t recognize, addressed to me at my parents’ address from a credit union two counties over. I almost hadn’t opened it. I’m glad I did.

It was a payment reminder. Not for my truck. For a truck loan with Cleora’s name on it, cosigned, according to the letter, by one Burnell R. Birdsong, sixty days behind on payment number two.

I read it four times standing at my own kitchen counter with the water running cold in the sink behind me, because I had never in my life signed a loan application for anybody, let alone one for a sixty thousand dollar truck.