The Truck I Drove Back to the Bank

Thursday I worked my first night back. Ten at night to six-thirty in the morning, the same hall I have worked for years.

My chest still hurt when I bent over the beds, but my hands knew what they were doing.

Around four in the morning, Mrs. Hansen in room twelve was awake, the way she always is.

She is ninety-one, a farm wife from out by the river, sharp as a tack and up every night with her rosary.

“You’ve been gone,” she said when I came in to turn her. “They said pneumonia. You look like something the cat dragged in, Debbie. Sit down a minute.”

I told her I could not sit down, I was on the clock. She said the clock would keep.

So I sat on the edge of the chair by her bed for one minute, and somehow I told her all of it.

She listened to the whole thing with her rosary going through her fingers.

When I got to the part about fifty being too old, she made a noise in her throat like a hen that has been stepped on.

“I was fifty-four when I learned to drive,” she said. “My Harold always drove. Then he had his stroke, and somebody had to get the cattle to the sale barn, and it was me or nobody.”

“I never knew that,” I said.

“Nobody knows anything about old women,” she said. “That’s our secret weapon.” Then she patted my hand. “Go get your school back, honey. Don’t break the boy doing it. But go get it.”

I finished my shift. I charted, I gave report to the day girl, and I walked out into the parking lot at a quarter to seven with the sky just going pink over the elevator and frost on every windshield in the lot.

Steve was waiting in his pickup with the heater running, the way he does when I work nights. He had the spare key in the cupholder.

I had told him on the phone what I wanted to do, and he had said just one thing.

“You sure, Deb?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’m on that loan. I’m not stealing anything. I’m taking my name’s half of it down to Merle and setting it on his desk.”

He drove me across town to Tyler’s apartment building. It is a long brick building by the school with a gravel lot out back.

The truck was right there, nose in, black and shining under the one streetlight that was still on.

“You want me to wait?” Steve asked.

“No,” I said. “Go to bed. You’ve got to be in the field by nine.”

He looked at me a long time, and then he leaned over and kissed my cheek. He smelled like coffee and corn dust.

“Proud of you,” he said. “For whatever it’s worth. I’ll have my phone.”

I had to grab the door frame and the chrome step both to get up into that truck.

It was so high off the ground I felt like I was climbing into a combine. I sat there a minute catching my breath before I turned the key.

It smelled like Tyler. Cologne and cigarettes he thinks I do not know about, and that burnt metal smell of welding rod that gets into everything a welder owns.