The Taillights We Fixed for Free

Why He Lived With Me

Tyler has lived with me since he was fourteen. People in town know the story, or they know a version of it, so I will tell you the true one.

My daughter Lisa had Tyler young. His father works the oil fields out in western North Dakota, and he calls on Sundays when he remembers. Lisa raised Tyler mostly on her own, working nights as a nurse at the hospital in the next town over, and I helped where I could.

When Tyler was thirteen, Lisa married Craig Hanson.

I want to be fair to Craig. He did not drink. He did not run around. He went to work every day and came home every night, and he was good to my daughter in all the ways a woman can see from the outside.

But he was hard on Tyler. Not with his hands, never that. With rules. Curfews posted on the refrigerator. A chore chart with initials. Grades checked every Friday on the school website. Tyler’s phone taken away for a week because he left a wet towel on the bathroom floor.

Tyler took it for about a year. Then one night in March he walked the mile and a half across town to my house in a snowstorm, with his backpack and his pillow, and knocked on my back door at eleven o’clock.

“Grandma, can I stay here for a while?”

A while turned into three years. Lisa cried about it, and then she agreed to it, and then she stopped crying about it. She came for supper on Sundays when she was not working. Craig came with her about half the time, and he and Tyler said about eleven words to each other across my table.

I retired from the school kitchen the year Tyler moved in. Thirty-one years of serving lunch at the elementary, and I had served it to Tyler every school day from kindergarten through fifth grade. Tater tot hotdish on Thursdays. He always asked for extra.

It was not hard to have him. It was the easiest thing I ever did, and I would do it again tomorrow.

The County Lot

The tow yard was out on the county road past the fairgrounds, a chain-link fence around a gravel lot with a little white office trailer. The county contracts with a private towing outfit, and the outfit charges what it charges.

I drove Tyler out there Monday morning before school. He had not said much all weekend. He had gone to church with me on Sunday and sat with his arms folded through the whole sermon, and Pastor Ron had looked at him twice from the pulpit.

The woman in the trailer was named Deb. I knew her from Tuesday bingo at the Legion hall.

“Marge,” she said, and then she saw Tyler and she knew exactly why we were there. Everybody already knew. “Two-eighty. Two-twenty for the tow and sixty for the two days.”

“Two days? It’s been a day and a half.”

“Any part of a day,” Deb said. She said it kindly. “I’m sorry, Marge. I don’t make the rates.”

I paid it out of my purse in twenties. Two hundred and eighty dollars is a good piece of a month for a retired school cook. Tyler watched me count it out and his ears went red.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said in the car.

“I know you will.”

“I mean it, Grandma. I’ll pay you back every dollar.”

“Tyler. I know you will.”

The ticket was separate. It came to $130 with all the fees once it went through the court administrator, and Tyler insisted on paying that himself. He drove his car home with the cracked light, very carefully, in daylight, and parked it in my garage and did not touch it again until the part came.