The Truck I Drove Back to the Bank

He drove me home. On the way, he told me about the bin plant, and the foreman who hired him, and how Kenzie had cried when he got the call.

He talked more in those eight minutes than he had in two months of Sundays.

When we pulled in, Steve’s pickup was still in the yard. He had not gone to bed. He had not gone to the field.

He was sitting on the porch steps in his chore coat with a cold cup of coffee, waiting.

Tyler got out and walked straight up to his father. I stayed by the truck. I could not hear what they said.

I saw Tyler talk for a long time, and I saw Steve listen without interrupting once, which for Steve Albers is a miracle all by itself.

Then Steve stood up and put his arms around our son. Just like that, on the porch steps. Steve is not a hugger.

I have seen him hug Tyler maybe four times in his life. It went on long enough that I had to look at the barn for a while.

That was a Friday. On Monday, Tyler started at the bin plant. On the first Friday after his first check, there was a transfer into my savings account.

Two hundred dollars, with a note in the memo line that said Week 1.

The second week, there was another two hundred. The third week, there was a transfer for twenty-two hundred more.

I called him, worried, and he laughed. He had sold the lift kit, the big wheels and the light bar to a kid from Pilger.

“It rode like a hay wagon anyway,” he said. “And my mother shouldn’t need a ladder to ride in my truck.”

The truck sits low and plain now, on stock wheels, like a work truck ought to. Steve says it is the best-looking that truck has ever been.

He says it to Tyler every Sunday at dinner, because Tyler comes to Sunday dinner again, with Kenzie, every week.

By the first of January, with his Fridays and the parts money, there was enough in my account for the first semester.

Tuition, books, the scrubs in the program color, the stethoscope, all of it. I paid it myself, at the college office, in person.

On the second Monday in January, my first day of class, it was nine below zero with a north wind.

At six-fifteen in the morning, there were headlights in our yard. I looked out the kitchen window and there was the black truck, idling, with the heater running.

Tyler came to the back door. He had taken the morning off, his first morning off at the new job.

He had a travel mug of coffee for me and a sack with two caramel rolls from the café in it.

“I’ll drive you today,” he said. “Roads are bad. And it’s your first day.”

“I can drive myself to Norfolk, Tyler,” I said. “I’ve been driving to Norfolk since before you were born.”

“I know you can,” he said. “I want to.”

So I let him. I put on my coat over my brand new navy scrubs, and I took the spare key off the hook by the back door, and I put it in my pocket for luck.