The Man Who Drove Cody to Practice

The first time Wendell Voyles pulled into my gravel drive, I was standing at the kitchen sink in my robe at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, scrubbing a skillet I had burned the night before, and I thought he was lost.

It was a tan Chevy pickup with a bench seat and a thermos on the dash. A man got out slowly, the way a man does when his knees have opinions, and settled a feed store cap over a head of white hair. He came up the porch steps and knocked on the screen door with one knuckle.

“Mrs. Sipes?” he said. “I’m Wendell Voyles. I coach the sixth grade boys down at the rec center.”

I dried my hands on my robe. I had never been a Mrs. anything. Cody’s father and I had never gotten around to it, and by then he was in Texas and it hardly mattered. But I didn’t correct the man. I was too busy being ashamed of the skillet.

“Is Cody in some kind of trouble?” I asked.

“No, ma’am. Cody’s got a jump shot I’d hate to see go to waste. That’s the trouble. He’s missed the first week of practice, and I wanted to find out why.”

That was the moment I should have told him the truth. Instead I stood there with one hand on the doorframe and said something about a busy season.

The year the Cavalier died

Here is what was true that November of 2007.

I was thirty-six years old, and I worked second shift at a casework plant in Mitchell, building the boxes that kitchen cabinets get hung from. Three in the afternoon until half past eleven at night, and then the long dark drive home on county roads with the radio turned low so I wouldn’t fall asleep. I had worked there nine years. I was good at it. I was never going to get rich at it.

Cody was eleven. His father, Danny Ray, had left for a trucking job in Texas when Cody was four, and the child support came the way weather comes, which is to say sometimes, and never when you plan for it. Danny Ray sent a Christmas card most years. Some years it was still in the mailbox in February.

We rented a farmhouse out on Old Mill Road, fourteen miles from the rec center in Bedford, at the end of a gravel lane that washed out every spring. The rent was four hundred and twenty-five dollars. The landlord, a farmer named Avery Stogsdill down the road, let me pay on the fifth when I needed to, and I needed to more often than I admitted.

In October, my 1999 Cavalier threw a rod on the way home from work. The garage in Mitchell wanted eleven hundred dollars to fix it, and I had about three hundred in the bank. I bought a junker from a fellow at the plant for four hundred cash, and it lasted nineteen days.

By November I was riding to work with a woman named Peggy from the packing line, paying her gas money I did not have. Peggy lived in the opposite direction from the rec center and picked me up at half past two. It worked for me. It did not work for a boy who needed to be somewhere at five thirty.

Cody had made the sixth grade team. I had stood at the back of the gym on my day off in my plant jacket and watched him make four shots in a row, and he looked over at me after the fourth like he couldn’t believe it was allowed.

Practice ran Mondays through Thursdays at five thirty, in town. His bus dropped him at the end of our lane at ten to four. I was already gone, and had been since half past two.

So Cody rode the bus home, let himself in, ate a bowl of cereal, and sat on the porch steps with his gym bag at his feet, watching the road.

He did it for a week and never said a word. I found out from the wrong end. I came home after midnight on a Thursday and saw his bag by the door, still zipped, with the tags on a pair of shoes I had bought him at the Goodwill on my lunch break.

I had asked everyone I could think of. My sister Bonita in Evansville said she’d send gas money if I could find a driver, which was no help. Everyone was kind. Nobody had an empty afternoon.