The Truck I Drove Back to the Bank

There was a lunch box on the floor and a hard hat behind the seat.

I backed it out slow. I have driven a lot of things in my life. I have driven a grain truck and a stock trailer and my dad’s old Farmall.

But I had never once driven anything that tall, and I took that corner onto Main like it was made of glass.

It is four blocks from Tyler’s apartment to the bank. I drove them at fifteen miles an hour with both hands on the wheel.

I passed the café, where the farmers were already lined up at the counter, and I saw two of them turn their heads.

In a town of thirty-five hundred people, everybody knows everybody’s truck. By the time I parked in the bank lot, I would bet you money that somebody at that café was already saying, Isn’t that the Albers boy’s pickup? Isn’t that Deb driving it?

The bank does not open until eight-thirty. I sat in the lot with the engine off for almost an hour, in my scrubs and my old gray fleece, with the frost slowly melting off the hood in the sun.

I did not cry. I thought I would, but I did not.

I mostly sat there and thought about the day I bought my first car, in this same lot, from this same bank, when I was twenty-one years old.

It was 1997. A blue Chevy Cavalier with ninety thousand miles on it, forty-two hundred dollars. I did not have a co-signer.

My dad was not the kind of man who signed things. I sat at a desk across from a loan officer named Merle and begged.

Merle was a young man then, maybe forty-one, with a big mustache and a tie with ducks on it.

He looked at my pay stubs from the care center and he looked at me, and he said, “I think you’re good for it.”

I paid that Cavalier off eight months early. When I made the last payment, Merle came out from behind his desk and shook my hand, and he said, “Told you.” I have banked there ever since.

At eight-twenty, the lights came on inside. At eight-twenty-five, the front door opened and Merle himself came out, seventy years old now, in a brown sweater vest, with no coat on, walking straight across the lot toward me.

I suppose the teller had seen the truck from the window. Or maybe somebody from the café had already called.

In a town like ours, you never really know how word travels. It just does.

I climbed down out of that truck, slowly, the way my lungs made me.

I had the spare key in my hand, the one that had hung on the hook by our back door for two years. I held it out to Merle.

“Morning, Merle,” I said. “I’m the co-signer on this loan, and my savings just paid it fourteen months ahead. I didn’t agree to that. Either it comes undone, or the truck comes back to you.”

He did not take the key. He looked at the truck, at the lift kit and the light bar, and then he looked at me, at my scrubs and the circles under my eyes, and something in his face got very gentle.

“Deb,” he said. “What happened?”