The Man Who Drove Cody to Practice

March

I am fifty-five years old now, and Wendell Voyles turned eighty-two this year.

He had slowed down, as people do, but not by much. He still lived alone on the east side of Bedford in the little white house with the green shutters that Evelyn picked out in 1971. He still got up at five. And two afternoons a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, he still opened the rec center gym for whatever boys and girls wanted to shoot, with the lights on and a rack of balls and nobody required to come.

About two winters ago his eyes started going. The doctor called it macular degeneration, and Coach told me as if it were a thing that happened to somebody else’s father. He stopped driving at night, and then on highways.

This March, he went to the license branch to renew, and they ran the vision test, and he failed it.

I got the call on a Thursday, at my kitchen sink, with the phone on my shoulder and my hands in dishwater. Coach did not sound upset. That is the part I couldn’t bear. He sounded the way he sounded when he read the lineup before a game. Plain and level and a little bit bored.

“Well, they took my license, Rhonda,” he said. “It’s all right. I knew it was coming. My niece Janelle drove down from Indianapolis, and she’s got me set up with a man to do my groceries. And she sold the truck.”

“She sold the Silverado?”

“A fella from Paoli who parts out old trucks. Eighteen hundred dollars.” There was a little pause. “It’s got three hundred and eleven thousand miles on it. Wasn’t going to pass inspection anyhow.”

“Wendell.”

“It’s a truck, Rhonda,” he said. “It’s just a truck.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute, because I couldn’t. I could hear the radio in his kitchen. It was tuned to the station Evelyn used to play at four o’clock.

“How will you get to the gym?” I asked.

“I won’t,” he said. “Billy Hess can open it Tuesdays. The kids will manage.”

I told him I’d come by Saturday with a pie. We said goodbye. I stood there with the phone against my chest and the water running cold over my hands.

Cody was at my table that Sunday, as he is every Sunday, eating a ham sandwich and reading something on his phone. I told him all of it in order, the way I’m telling you, and when I got to the truck I told him what Coach had said. It’s just a truck.

My son set the sandwich down on the plate. He wiped his hands slowly on a paper towel and folded it in half and then in half again. He did not look at me. He looked at the window over the sink.

He picked up his keys off the table.

“Cody,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll call you tonight, Mama,” he said, and kissed me on the top of the head, and was gone.