The Game Day I Towed Them All

I did two things first, before anyone was awake. I went out to the garage, quiet as I could with Biscuit thumping his tail at me, and I pulled the bedsheet off of Dale’s truck.

The battery was dead, of course, four years dead, so I had my charger on it the night before, out there in the dark while Denny slept twenty feet away and never heard a thing.

In the morning it turned over on the third try and caught. I sat there a second with both hands on that wheel, the whole cab smelling like him still, like Lava soap and WD-40, and I will not pretend I did not have a moment.

Then I backed Dale’s 1994 Ford out of the bay, and I drove it the length of my own driveway, and I turned it sideways across the mouth of the drive.

Right across the opening to the street, nose to one side and tailgate to the other. I shut it off and I took the keys and I put them in my robe pocket.

Nothing was coming in. Nothing was coming out except around it, one car at a time, and only if I moved.

Then I made coffee and I waited on my own front steps where no stranger could wave me off, and at a quarter to eight the first of them came.

Tuck’s truck rolled up and stopped at the end of the drive, because there was a robin’s-egg Ford across it, and Tuck leaned out his window and hollered, “Denny! Your mom’s truck’s blocking the whole deal!”

Denny came out of the garage in his sock feet with his hair every which way and his tackle box under his arm.

He looked at Dale’s truck across the mouth of the drive. He looked at me on the steps in my robe with my coffee.

“Ma,” he said. “Ma, what are you doing. Move the truck.”

“No,” I said. It is a short word. I had not said it to him in a long time and it felt like setting down something heavy.

“Ma, I’ve got people coming, I’ve got guys already paid, you can’t just . . .” He trailed off, because down at the end of the street, turning the corner slow and wide, came the first wrecker.

Then the second one behind it. Then a third, Donnie’s cousin’s, a big flatbed, all three of them with their yellow lights going around and around in the gray morning like a parade nobody had told Denny was coming.

Donnie Vance climbed down out of the first truck in his coveralls with a clipboard, and he walked up my driveway past all those parked cars, and he came to the foot of the steps and he took off his cap to me.

“Mrs. Gaddis,” he said, loud enough to carry. “You want these vehicles removed from your property?”

And I stood up off my steps, and I said, “Yes, Donnie. Every one of them. Thank you for coming.”