The Day the VFW Filled the Showroom

His truck was a white 2017 Chevrolet Silverado with 58,000 miles on it, and Ryan bought it the summer he turned twenty-two. He paid 26,400 dollars, every cent in cash, saved a paycheck at a time from the co-op and his drill pay. “Owe nobody anything,” Wendell told him. “It’s the only way a man sleeps.”

Wendell died on the ninth of December. Ryan was home for it. He stood at the grave in his dress uniform, straight as a fence post, and when it was over he put his arm around me and did not say a word, because there was nothing in the English language that was going to help.

Two months later he deployed.

He left from the armory in Braddock on a gray morning in February with his transportation company, bound for Kuwait, and half the town turned out in the cold. The Auxiliary ladies had made sandwiches. Someone’s grandpa played the national anthem on a trumpet that was a little flat.

The night before he left, Ryan parked the Silverado in the lot behind Kessler Motors. Their storage program ran on the radio all fall: Deploying? Park it with Kessler. Fifty dollars a month, inside the pole barn, we start it for you. Ryan prepaid 450 dollars for nine months, through the end of October, and got a receipt on a carbon form with his signature at the bottom. The dealership kept his title in its safe, which the form said was for insurance. Title held by dealership for safekeeping.

He asked me for one thing as he handed me the spare key. “Would you start her up the first Sunday of every month? Ten minutes, let her idle. Grandpa said a truck that sits will die.”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

He opened the passenger door and set something on the seat. It was Wendell’s old green Stanley thermos, the dented one that had ridden in every truck Wendell owned for forty years, with a carrying strap Wendell had braided himself out of a piece of lineman’s rope.

“Grandpa rides along,” Ryan said, and he looked off at the barn rafters as if something were up there.

I laid my hand on the cold metal. “He does,” I said.

For seven months I let myself in through the side gate that Bobby Bauer, the lot porter, always left unlocked for me, and started that truck. I sat with the engine running and the thermos beside me and told it the news. The Cardinals. The price of hay. Who had died at church. It was foolish and I did it anyway.

On the first Sunday in October, I walked to the third stall in the barn and stood looking at a rectangle of clean concrete with a dark stain of oil in the middle.

Bobby came across the yard with a push broom he did not need. He is a heavy, soft-spoken man in his fifties who has worked that lot twenty years, and he would not meet my eye.

“Bobby, where’s Ryan’s truck?”

“Mrs. Tuttle.” He looked at the broom. “I really think you ought to talk to Mr. Kessler.”