The Man Who Drove Cody to Practice

Six weeks of overtime

Cody called every night, but he stopped coming on Sundays. He said there’d been a run of storms, which there had, and that the co-op had him on double shifts, which I believed. He said he was saving for something. I assumed it was a ring.

On Saturday I brought Coach a sugar cream pie on a glass plate wrapped in a dish towel, and we sat on his back porch and listened to the birds. He ate two pieces. He said, “Pie’s good,” and looked at the yard.

“Boy calls every night,” he said. “Asks if I’ve got my pills sorted. Asked me last week if I’d miss the truck.” He kept his eyes on the yard. “I told him I’d miss the way the glove box shut.”

I know now what Cody was doing, because he told me all of it later, and so did the man in Paoli.

The man was named Elvin Ballard. He had paid eighteen hundred dollars for the Silverado and parked it behind a pole barn in Orange County, planning to sell it off by the pound. Cody drove down there the same afternoon he left my kitchen, and stood in the weeds next to the truck for a long time, Elvin said.

Elvin said he figured the kid had a story. Cody told it, all of it in about two minutes, and Elvin looked at him and then at the truck and said, “Give me what I paid.” Cody wouldn’t take it that cheap. They settled on two thousand dollars and a handshake.

It needed work. The transmission slipped and the brake lines were rusted through. He spent six Saturdays in a buddy’s shop in Oolitic rebuilding the one and replacing the other. He bought a new seat cover, tan, and a roll of the right duct tape so he could put the old tape back.

He did not touch the glove box.

His buddy Trey told me Cody stood there looking at it with a wrench in his hand for ten minutes one night. “He said it wasn’t his to fix,” Trey said. “I didn’t know what he meant.”

I did.

Tuesday afternoon

On a Monday evening at the end of April, Cody called and said, “Mama, can you take Tuesday afternoon off?”

“Why?”

“I need you home by three. That’s all. Please.”

So I told my supervisor I had a dentist appointment, and I stood in my kitchen at three o’clock with my purse on the counter.

At twenty-five past three, I heard a sound out on Old Mill Road. A low, slightly ragged rumble, with a small tick in it at idle, that I had heard come down that lane two thousand times and had not heard in twelve years.

I went to the window.

The tan Silverado turned in at the end of my lane. It came up the gravel slowly, throwing a little dust, and it stopped next to the porch. The dent was in the tailgate. The duct tape was on the seat. My son was behind the wheel in his work boots and his co-op shirt, and he did not smile and he did not wave. He just sat there with both hands on the wheel at ten and two.

I do not know how long I stood there. I know I went out in my stocking feet with my hand pressed against my mouth, and the tears were already coming, and Cody leaned over and opened the passenger door, and I got in.

“Scoot over, Mama,” he said. “You’re riding in the middle.”

I did. The seat smelled the same. Peppermint and gum and motor oil. I put my hand down flat on the bench and I could feel where the tape was.

“You bought his truck,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“With your own money.”

“Mama.” He put it in reverse. “It’s a thirty minute drive and we’re picking him up at four. Let me concentrate.”