The Game Day I Towed Them All
He pulled my Buick out of a ditch in the ice storm three winters back and would not take a dime for it. He said my Dale once gave his dad a side of beef in a hard year, and Donnie Vance does not forget a thing like that.
“Donnie,” I said, “it’s Loretta Gaddis. I have got a situation at my house on Saturday and I need to know what it costs to have some cars towed off of private property.”
He was quiet a second. Then he said, “Mrs. Gaddis, is this about what I think it’s about. Because the whole route out here knows your boy’s running a parking lot off your place.”
“It is about exactly that,” I said.
“Those cars on your property without your say so?”
“They are on my grass and my concrete and I have not given one soul permission. My son has.”
“Then that’s an unauthorized vehicle on private property,” Donnie said, and I could hear him getting happy about it, “and in this town that’s a hundred and fifty a car to the owner, not to you, you don’t pay a thing. I just need you out there to tell me go, because it’s your land. You say go, they go.”
“How many can you do at once.”
“I’ll bring both trucks and I’ll call my cousin to bring his. Mrs. Gaddis, for you, on a Saturday, I will bring the whole fleet.”
I want to be clear about one thing because I have turned it over in my mind many nights since. I did not do this to hurt my son. You will think I did, and I understand, but I did not.
I did it because I had asked, more than once, kind and then plain, and I had been told to go park at the church. A person can only be waved off her own front steps so many times before something that has been bending finally sets.
I did not tell Denny. I did not tell Tuck. I told exactly one person besides Donnie, and that was Jolene Pruitt, because Jolene has lived next to me for thirty years and because I was going to need a witness and a cup of coffee.
“Loretta,” she said, when I told her, on her porch, low, “you are not.”
“I am.”
“Oh, honey.” She put her hand over her mouth. “What time.”
The last home game was against the school from over by the river, a big one, and the town was going to be packed, and Denny had been talking it up all week. Come early. Lot’s gonna be full. Tell your people cash.
That Saturday I was up before the sun.