The Night I Towed His Cadillac Home

The glove box

I bolted the rebuilt alternator back in at about a quarter to five, ran the belt, plugged the harness, and put the battery back on. Then I started the car and put the meter on it.

Fourteen point two volts. Steady as a church bell.

“There she is,” I said.

Harlan let out a breath I think he’d been holding since Good Thunder. “Is that right? Fourteen?”

“That’s right.”

He asked me to get his reading glasses out of the glove box so he could read the meter himself. That was Harlan. He’d been a banker nearly fifty years, and he was not going to take a number on faith, even now.

I leaned across the seat and opened the glove box. His reading glasses were on top, in a brown case. Under them was the owner’s manual, the registration, a tire gauge, and a small white envelope, soft and yellowed at the corners.

On the front, in Margaret’s handwriting, it said: Julie and Dale, June 12, 1993.

I should not have opened it. I did anyway. I think I knew what it was before I touched it.

It was the photograph from the church steps, the big group picture, the one the photographer took after the receiving line.

The whole family, both sides, on the steps of Trinity Lutheran in the sun. Julie in the dress her mother had sewn. Me in a rented gray tuxedo with my hair too short. And standing right beside me, shoulder to shoulder, because the photographer had told him to and Margaret had made him, was Harlan.

It was the only picture ever taken with the two of us in it. I had not seen it in thirty years. I had forgotten it existed.

He had kept it in his glove box.

I sat there on the edge of the seat with the door open and the engine running and that picture in my hand, and I could not see it very well for a minute.

“Margaret put it in the Buick,” Harlan said quietly. He had come up behind me. “That summer. She said, ‘You keep this where you’ll see it, so you’ll remember who your family is.’ When I got the Cadillac, I moved it. I’ve moved it to every car I’ve had since.”

“You never looked at it,” I said. “Not with me there.”

“No. I looked at it when you weren’t there.” He took his glasses from my hand, but he did not open the case. “I told myself I kept it for Margaret.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I put the photo back in the envelope and the envelope back in the glove box, right where it had been, and I closed it. Some things you put back the way you found them.

Tyler

At six-thirty, the side door banged, and our son Tyler came in stomping snow off his boots, his lunch cooler in one hand. He works the shop with me. He’d had no idea about any of it. I’d let him sleep, because one of us ought to be worth something that day.

He stopped dead inside the door.

Harlan had dozed off on the stool by the heater, his chin on his chest, my chore coat pulled up to his ears and his fedora still in his lap. The DeVille sat running under the lights, purring like nothing had ever happened to it.

“Dad,” Tyler whispered. “Is that Grandpa?”

“That’s Grandpa.”

“In your coat?”

“In my coat.”

Tyler set his cooler down very carefully, like he might wake a baby. He looked at me, and then at his grandfather, and then back at me.

Tyler had grown up at that Thanksgiving table. He had heard “the mechanic” passed down the potatoes for his whole life. He had asked me about it once, when he was twelve, and I had told him some people take a long time to come around.

He went and got the shop blanket off the back of the office chair and laid it over his grandfather’s knees. Harlan did not wake. Tyler stood there a second with his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“I’ll take it around the section for the road test,” Tyler said quietly. “So you don’t have to leave him.”

So my son drove his grandfather’s Cadillac four miles around the section in the gray before dawn and brought it back and said it charged at fourteen two the whole way and the heater would blow you out of the seat.

Then he went into the office and put on a fresh pot of coffee, because he is a good man, and I did not have to teach him that.