The Cadillac That Finally Paid Me Back

The Petersen boys noticed, because the lid kept landing in their yard. Darryl Hutchins himself noticed, because he had to keep hunting for my cans up the driveway, and one Thursday he leaned out of the truck and hollered, “They keep wanderin’, Hollis,” and I just waved.

Everybody noticed. And here is the thing about a small town that a man like Brent Kessler, who bought the lifestyle like it was a subscription, never understood: the watching is the town. It is not nosy. It is the thing that holds. Carl Dunmore knew that. Alma knows it. I grew up knowing it. You are never alone on a street like Delaney, for better and for worse, and that cuts both ways, and Brent did not know yet which way it was going to cut for him.

It got to where it was a thing people talked about at the Depot, the little diner on the square where half the town eats breakfast off the same ten stools. I would come in for my eggs and Loretta behind the counter would top off my coffee and say, “He get your cans again, Hollis?” and I would say he did, and some fellow I barely knew down at the end of the counter would shake his head and say something about people from the city. I never started those conversations. I did not have to. The whole town was keeping score for me whether I wanted them to or not, and a part of me, a part I am not especially proud of, started to like the scorekeeping. It is a lonely thing to be stepped on. It is a little less lonely when the whole diner knows your cans by name.

The thing that finally moved me was not even the cans. It was my granddaughter.

My daughter Renee lives over in Lincoln with her husband and their girl, Posey, who is seven and thinks my garage is the greatest place on earth. One Thursday in July they were visiting, and Posey was out front with me in the morning, and we had just set the cans down at the curb, back at the old spot because I had gotten stubborn and moved them back, and Brent came roaring out and cut the corner and flattened them not ten feet from where my granddaughter was standing.

She was fine. He did not come close to her, I want to be clear about that, there was never any danger to the child. But she jumped, and she grabbed my pant leg, and she looked up at me and said, “Grandpa, that man is a bad driver.”

And something in me that had been letting go for sixty years just quietly stopped letting go.