The Truck Grandpa Left Came Home

I didn’t know what to say, so I hugged him. He smelled like coffee and cold air. He patted my back twice, the way old farmers do, and walked off toward the next wagon.

Colton and I drove the truck home. I drove, and he sat in the passenger seat with his arm out the window like Arnold used to, even though it was forty-five degrees. We left my car at the Hartwig place. The sale crew said they’d keep an eye on it until Sunday.

The transmission was fine. Of course it was. It shifted as smooth as the day Arnold drove it off the lot. Somewhere around the county line, Colton said, “So Grandpa Rodney just lied.”

“Yes,” I said. There wasn’t any use pretending otherwise.

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “I think something must be very wrong for a man like Rodney to do a thing like that. But I don’t know what.”

I called Clint that night. He was in a motel in Albert Lea with three other linemen, and I could hear a ballgame on the television behind him and somebody laughing.

I told him all of it. The bidding. Merle with his hat off. The clapping. Rodney’s empty spot in the gravel.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, “He said Grandpa’s name. Into the microphone.”

“He did.”

“In front of everybody.”

“Half the county,” I said. “Or it’ll be half the county by Monday. You know how it goes.”

I heard him breathe out, slow. “Where’s the truck?”

“In the machine shed. Where it belongs.”

“Okay,” he said, and his voice cracked on it. “Okay. Thank you, Amber. I mean it. Thank you.”

I didn’t tell him about the Christmas money. He knew. He didn’t mention it either.

Bev called Sunday afternoon. It was the call I’d been dreading since Thursday, and when her name came up on my phone, I sat down on the back step before I answered.

“Amber,” she said. Her voice was small. “Arlene Larson called me after church. She said you bought Dad’s truck at the Hartwig sale yesterday.”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

“She said Rodney sold it.”

“He consigned it, Bev. Yes.”

There was a long silence on the line. I could hear her rooster clock ticking in the kitchen.

“He told me it went to the junkyard,” she said. “He told me the transmission went and he had it hauled to Mason City for scrap. He said Clint didn’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s what he told Clint, too,” I said.

“I’m going to go now,” Bev said. “I need to talk to my husband. I love you, honey. Tell Colton I love him.”

She hung up. I sat on the step a long time after that. I had wanted Rodney caught. I’ll own that. But I had not wanted Bev to find out from Arlene Larson after church, and that part sat on my chest like a stone.

Clint came home Tuesday around four, sunburned in October from three days up in a bucket. He went straight to the machine shed before he even came in the house.

I watched him from the kitchen window. He opened the driver’s door of the Ford and just sat in it with both hands on the wheel and his forehead resting on top of them.

He was still sitting there when Rodney’s pickup came up the lane.