The Man Who Drove Cody to Practice

What he never said

He never let Cody feel like a charity case. In the truck he quizzed him on spelling words, and in the seventh grade on the principal exports of South America, which Cody has not forgotten to this day. He did not talk about basketball on the way to practice. He said a boy ought to arrive at a gym with his own thoughts.

He never told Cody to be grateful, either. That one I noticed most of all. Coach just opened the passenger door, handed Cody a peppermint from the glove box, and asked about his math test.

The truck had a smell I can still call up in my sleep. Peppermint and Juicy Fruit gum and motor oil. The bench seat was cracked along the driver’s side and mended with duct tape. There was a dent in the tailgate from some forgotten spring. And there was a glove box door that did not latch unless you gave it a particular shove with the heel of your hand.

Cody learned the shove the first week. For seven years, that was his job, to shove the glove box shut, and when he did, Coach would say, without looking, “Thank you, sir.”

The ditch

In January of 2009 the ice came down on a Wednesday afternoon, and that night the truck went into the ditch on Old Mill Road with Cody in it. I was at work. I got the story from him the next morning, over toast, with his eyes enormous.

They’d been coming home from practice. The truck came around the bend by the old Whitaker place and just kept going, sideways and slow, like a dream, into the ditch nose first. Cody hit his knee on the dash. Coach hit his head on the window, hard enough to raise a goose egg over his left eyebrow.

Half a mile, in the dark, on a road you could not stand up on, to Avery Stogsdill’s back door. Coach, sixty-four years old, with a bad knee and a knock on the head, carried Cody’s gym bag and held onto Cody’s arm the whole way. Once he slipped and went down on one hand, and got up again saying nothing.

Avery fed them supper, drove them to the emergency room in his own truck, and pulled the Chevy out of the ditch at six the next morning. He would not take a dime. Coach had a mild concussion. He told the nurse he was fine, and the doctor, and then me, when I went by his house that afternoon. He was on the couch in a flannel robe with a bag of frozen peas on his head.

“I’m fine, Rhonda,” he said. It was the first time he had used my name. “Is Cody all right?”

“Cody’s at school.”

“Good.” He shut his eyes. “Practice is at five thirty.”

“Wendell, you are not driving to practice.”

He opened one eye. I think he was deciding whether I was serious. I was.

“I’ll have Billy Hess cover the gym,” he said finally. “But I’m coming to get him at four thirty. It’s Thursday.”

I did not argue with him. I knew the sound of a decision.