The Widow Who Learned Three On The Tree
I could have told Brad no, right there. I want to say that plainly, because I have had people ask me why I did not.
A no would have kept the truck in the shed. It would not have made one word of what he said untrue.
“Thank you, Brad,” I said. “That’s a kind thought, keeping it in the family. Let me think on it.”
“Take your time,” he said. “Offer stands.”
He squeezed my shoulder on his way out. He meant it kindly. I am sure of that even now.
I stood in the shed a long while after his pickup went down the drive.
Then I walked up to the house and found the title in the lockbox. Both our names were on it. Dale E. or Nancy J. Whitaker. He had seen to that the day he registered it, antique tag and all.
It was half mine on paper, and I could not so much as back it out of the building.
I did not sleep much that night.
Around four in the morning I gave up, put on Dale’s barn coat over my nightgown, and went out to the shed with a flashlight.
I opened the driver’s door. It closed and opened with a sound like a bank vault. He had spent one whole winter on the door gaps alone.
I got up on the bench seat.
My feet did not reach the pedals.
Dale stood six foot one. The seat was run all the way back for him, and I sat there with my shoes dangling like a child in a church pew, and I laughed out loud, by myself, in the dark. Then I cried a little. Then I blew my nose and looked at what was in front of me.
Three pedals. A long thin lever sticking out the right side of the steering column with a white knob on the end. A knob on the dash with a C on it. Another with an L. A key.
I did not touch the key.
I opened the glove box instead, looking for the owner’s manual.
There was no manual. There was a tire gauge, a pair of his reading glasses, a roll of butterscotch candies, and a green clothbound record book, the kind the school office used to keep for attendance.
I opened it under the flashlight.
It was a logbook. Dale’s square mechanic’s printing, every line.
The first entry was from the summer he got it running. Date, odometer, and then: First drive. End of the lane and back. 1.2 mi. Runs hot. Smiling anyway.
I turned the page. Co-op and back. 6.4 mi. Thermostat fixed.
Church. 3.1 mi. N. would not ride, said her hair.
That was true. I remembered that Sunday. I had just had a permanent.
He had written down every mile. Every oil change, every set of points, every tank of gas. Seven years of driving it to the co-op and the cafe and the cemetery on Memorial Day, all of it in pencil.
I read about twenty pages sitting there.
Then I felt how thin the book was getting under my right thumb, how few pages were left before the back cover, and I knew that the last thing written in it would be the last thing, and I shut it.
I was not ready to be at the end of anything else of his.
I put it back in the glove box and went in the house and made coffee and waited for it to be a decent hour.