The Truck My Brother Sold For Scrap
I’m not a fast man. My wife will tell you it takes me a day and a half to get mad and a week to get over it. But I wasn’t going to stand in my dead father’s kitchen and watch my girl cry over a thing I could still do something about.
“Get your coat,” I told her.
Rick set the cup down. “Where are you going?”
“You said it was nothing but rust.”
“It is.”
“Then I’ll go buy some rust.”
He looked at me a long moment. “You’re going to pay a man nine hundred dollars for a truck that’ll cost you three thousand to make run.”
“More than nine hundred,” I said. “He’ll want something for his trouble.”
“That’s foolish.”
“Probably.”
I didn’t ask him to call Lyle and undo it. I have thought about that since, because it would have been the easy thing, one phone call from the man who’d made the deal. But the check was already in the bank, and in forty-one years I had never seen my brother walk back a thing once he’d done it. Asking would have gotten me an hour of him explaining why he was right, and I didn’t know how many hours that truck had left.
What I did do was call the yard, from Dad’s wall phone, with Rick sitting right there. Lyle answered himself. I told him who I was and what I was after and asked him to hold that truck till I could get there.
“Come see me,” he said, and hung up.
That was all. It was not a yes, and I could not tell what was in it.
There was another reason too, and I’ll own it. If I asked Rick, it would be Rick’s to give back. I wanted to go get it myself.
Josie and I stopped at our house in town. Kim was at work at the clinic, so I left a note on the counter. Then I went to the desk in the front room and opened the bottom drawer.
We aren’t people with nine hundred dollars lying loose. What was in that drawer was a bank envelope with “Josie, teeth” written on it in Kim’s hand, the money we had been setting aside since spring toward the down payment on her braces. There was nine hundred and fifty in it, in twenties and tens. I counted it twice on the desk top. Then I wrote Kim a second line on the note that said I would explain, and that I would put it back.
Josie watched me count it. She knows what that envelope is for. She has wanted those braces since the fifth grade.
“They’ll keep,” she said. “My teeth aren’t going anywhere. Go on, Dad.”
In the garage I took the tow strap off its nail. It’s a yellow one, twenty feet, with a hook on each end, and it has pulled a good many people out of a good many ditches. I threw it on the seat between us.
“Can you even pull a truck that far with a strap?” she asked.
“You can if you go slow and somebody steers the back one.”
“Who’s going to steer?”
I hadn’t gotten that far. “We’ll see what we’ve got when we get there,” I said, which is a thing my father said to me about once a week for the whole of my childhood.
Lyle’s is east of town on the old highway, a long tin building with a gravel lot in front and about eleven acres of other people’s bad luck behind it. I had been there a hundred times for parts. You tell the man at the counter what you need and he tells you what row, and you walk out there with your own wrenches.