The Game Day I Towed Them All

I did not drive it. I could not sell it either. Some things you just keep.

Denny is my only one. He is thirty-nine, and last spring his marriage came apart.

He does not talk about it, and I will not say much here except that Kayla moved to Fort Wayne and took the house in the settlement, and Denny got the dog and a duffel bag and a lot of silence.

He called me on a Sunday. “Ma,” he said, “would it be all right if I stayed with you a little while. Just till I get back on my feet. Just till spring, maybe.”

What is a mother going to say to that. I said of course. I said the garage has heat and I will put a bed out there and you come on home.

So I did. I ran a space heater line out to the second bay, and we moved Dale’s workbench to the side, and Denny set up out there with his duffel and the dog, a shepherd mix named Biscuit, and for a while it was almost nice.

He is my boy. I liked the light being on out there at night. I liked frying two eggs instead of one.

He got on part time at the window plant out on the highway, forty hours some weeks and twelve the next, the way those places do you now.

And every other weekend he had his daughter. My granddaughter. Ruthie, who is eight, who has a gap in her front teeth and a laugh like a screen door.

She would come Friday night and the garage would get a second cot and a string of those little battery lights, and Saturday morning the three of us would have pancakes, and I thought, all right. We are getting through it.

I did not see the driveway thing start because I was not looking for it. That is the honest truth.

The first home game of the season, I came back from the early service at the Methodist church and there were four cars in my driveway I did not know.

Denny was out front. “Oh,” he said, “yeah, couple of the guys needed to park. I told them it was fine. You weren’t using it.”

And it was true, I was not using it. My Buick was at the church. So I said all right and I did not think another thing about it.

It was a month before I understood there was money in that tackle box.

I came out on the second home Saturday to get my hose and I saw a man I did not know hand my son two twenties, and my son fold them and put them in the tray, slick as a bank teller, and point the man to a spot by the fence.