The Man Who Drove Cody to Practice
The kitchen light
I should tell you about the light, because it is the thing I think about most.
It was a night in March of Cody’s eighth grade year. The plant lost power at six and sent the whole second shift home, and I made the drive back to Old Mill Road in the dark and the rain, a good three hours before I was due.
I turned onto the lane at ten after eight. At the far end, where the gravel meets the county road, there was a pickup parked on the shoulder with its parking lights on and its engine running. I knew the truck before I knew anything else.
Cody was already inside. I could see the porch light on, and the kitchen window glowing yellow.
I pulled up alongside and rolled my window down. Coach started in his seat, and then looked at me for a long moment through the rain. He looked caught.
“Rhonda.”
“Wendell, what on earth are you doing?”
“Waiting on the light,” he said.
“The light?”
“The kitchen light.” He nodded toward the house. “I let him out at the porch, and he goes in, and he turns on the porch light and then the kitchen. I don’t pull off until I see the kitchen.” He cleared his throat. “Used to be he’d forget to lock the door. I’d sit a few minutes and watch it come on. It’s a habit now.”
He said it as if I might scold him.
“Every night?” I said.
“Well.” He looked down at the wheel. “He’s alone out here, Rhonda. I’d just as soon see a light come on.”
I looked at the house, and the porch light, and the little yellow window, and I thought about every night for two and a half years that a man who owed me nothing had sat at the end of my lane in the dark for four or five minutes before he drove eighteen miles home.
I did not cry in front of him. I want that on the record. I got out in the rain and stood at his window until he rolled it down, and I put my hand on his shoulder and kept it there. He looked straight ahead at the wipers.
“Go on in,” he said. “You’ll catch your death.”
That was the closest we ever came to saying anything.
Years
The years were made of ordinary things. Cody growing five inches the summer he was thirteen and folding himself into that passenger seat with his knees against the dash. Thursdays, the pie. The spring his voice broke and Coach pretended not to notice.
I worked second shift until 2010, then third when they cut the second, and in 2016 I took a day job at the billing desk at the hospital in Bedford. It was the first time in my adult life that I ate supper at the same hour as everyone else.
Avery Stogsdill’s son sold me the farmhouse in 2015, and I live there still, at the end of the same gravel lane.
Cody went to a two-year program for electrical work and then an apprenticeship with the electric co-op. He is a journeyman lineman now, thirty years old, one of the men who goes out when the power fails in an ice storm. He has his own house in Oolitic and a dog named Sarge. He comes to my table every Sunday after church and calls on the nights between.