The Man Who Drove Cody to Practice

Tuesdays and Thursdays

“I’ll tell you what I came to say,” Coach said, there on the porch with his cap in his hand now. “I drive out this way Tuesdays and Thursdays anyway. I could pick him up at the end of your lane at four thirty and have him at the gym in plenty of time. Bring him home after.”

I looked at him. He was sixty-three years old, in a gray windbreaker zipped to the chin, with big hands scarred across the knuckles, like a man who had worked in a quarry or a mill, which, I learned later, he had.

“I can’t pay for gas, Mr. Voyles,” I said. It came out harder than I meant it. “I’m telling you now so you don’t think I’m going to. I can’t.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“And I’m not taking charity.”

“I wasn’t offering any.” He turned the cap around in his hands one full time. “I’m offering to pass your road anyway. You can call it what you like.”

Cody had come to the kitchen door by then, standing in his socks with his hand flat against the frame, not breathing.

“Coach,” Cody said. “Can I?”

I should have thought about it longer. A stranger, a boy, a pickup. A mother who works nights has a long list of things she is supposed to be afraid of, and I had read every one. But Cody’s face had a look on it I had not seen in years, and I decided the way you do when you’re tired, which is all at once.

“Tuesday,” I said. “Four thirty. And I’m going to want to see your driver’s license.”

Wendell Voyles reached into his back pocket without a word and handed it to me.

Tuesday at four twenty-nine, the tan pickup was in the drive with the engine running, and Cody was already on the steps with his bag. I had traded a shift to be home and see it with my own eyes. I watched from the kitchen window until it turned onto Old Mill Road, thinking, he will last a month.

By Christmas, it was Mondays and Wednesdays too.

By spring it was Saturday mornings at six, a tournament in Seymour, a summer league in Washington and Jasper and a ballfield outside Salem with nothing but a backstop and a cornfield. He never called to say he was on the way, and he never called to say they were back. The pickup was simply there when it needed to be and gone when it didn’t, like a good neighbor, or the sun.