The Cadillac That Finally Paid Me Back
He revved it one more time. The wheel spun. The truck did not care.
And here is the part I am proudest of, and it is not the concrete.
I set down my coffee and I walked over, and I did not say one single thing about the corner, or the banana bread, or the agree to disagree, or any of it. I said, “Hang on, Brent, I’ve got a floor jack in the garage. We’ll get you down off there before you tear up the oil pan.”
He looked at me like he could not understand the words.
I got my big jack and my blocks, and the Petersen boys came over, and Darryl Hutchins happened to be driving through for the yard sale and he pulled over and put on his brake like it was a job site, and old Walt from the corner brought his come-along, and about six of us who had been laughing at Brent Kessler sixty seconds earlier got under that white Cadillac and lifted it gentle off my stand and backed it down onto the street, and we checked the tire and it was fine, and the only casualty in the whole thing was the running board and that man’s whole idea of himself.
He stood there holding his torn-off chrome step rail. And he said, to me, in front of everybody, in a voice I had not heard him use, “I’m sorry about your trash cans, Hollis.”
I said, “I know you are.”
And Alma Reyes, seventy-eight years old, walked over and handed Brent Kessler a paper cup of her lemonade and said, “You should set up a table next year. Everybody comes out.” And she said it kind, not sharp. And that, more than the Cadillac on the stand, is the thing I wish I could explain to people about where I live.
That was a year ago now.
The stand is still there. Bright red, reflectors, solar light, the whole works. Brent never did get me a bill for the running board, and I never offered to pay for it, and both of those facts are, I think, a kind of apology and a kind of acceptance that passed between two men without either of us having to say another hard word.
He takes the corner wide now. Every morning. Slow, careful, giving my red stand a respectful little berth like it is a crossing guard he does not want to get on the wrong side of. Sometimes he lifts two fingers off the wheel at me, the little country wave, and I lift mine back.