The Truck Keys at the Sale Barn Cafe

So it had been two hours. Close to it.

“Hang on,” I told Donna. “Don’t hang up. I’m going to try his dad.”

I called Cody from the office line at the front desk while Donna stayed on my cell. It rang. Then Donna said, through my phone, “I can hear a phone buzzing in the cab. In the cup holder up front.”

I hung up and called again, just to be sure, and Donna said, “There it goes again.”

That was the moment I stopped calling him. His phone was sitting in the cup holder two feet from our son, and Cody was somewhere inside that barn with a sale bill in his hand and nothing in his pocket at all.

I could have called the sale barn office and asked them to page him from the auction block. I thought about it for about one second.

The office girl would have to find a pen and get Gene to say it over the speaker between lots, and Cody would have to hear it over the cattle, and then he would walk out there in his own time. I did not want my son waiting on any of that.

“Donna,” I said, “I’m twenty minutes away. I have a key. If he stirs and doesn’t look right to you, if he’s crying hard or he’s pale or anything at all, you break that back window and you tell dispatch and you don’t wait for me. I’ll pay for the glass. I’ll thank you for it.”

“I’ve got a tire iron right here,” she said. “I’ll stay with him. Drive careful. Don’t you put yourself in the ditch.”

I went back into the operatory. Mrs. Albrecht was still in the chair, looking at the ceiling tiles, her bib on, patient as a church pew.

“I am so sorry,” I told her. “That was about my little boy. I have to go right now.”

She is seventy-eight and she raised five kids on a place out north of town. She sat straight up in that chair and said, “Then go, honey. My teeth have waited most of eighty years for things. They can wait for this.”

Dr. Kuhn was in the next room with a crown. I stuck my head in and said “family emergency, it’s Wyatt,” and he waved me out with both hands before I finished.

I did not stop to take my lab jacket off. I grabbed my coat off the hook and my keys out of my purse and I ran out to the car with the coat still in my hand.

It is about twenty minutes from the office to the sale barn if you take the county blacktop instead of the highway.

I drove it in sixteen. I am not proud of that, and I will not do it again, but I did it that day.

I had the heater in my Corolla turned all the way up even though I was the only one in it. I think I was warming the car for him before I had him.

While I drove I made myself think about practical things, because if I let myself think about the other kind I was going to go off the road.

The key. I had the spare on my own ring, a plain old brass copy we’d had cut at the hardware store the summer we bought the truck used.