The Man Who Drove Cody to Practice

The porch

Coach’s little white house sits on a corner lot on the east side of Bedford, with a porch, two metal chairs, and a flowerpot that Evelyn left behind and no one has ever managed to kill. Every Tuesday and Thursday at four o’clock since March, Coach told me later, he had been sitting out there in his gray windbreaker with his thermos on his knee, facing the street. The rec center was dark. He said he couldn’t think of a better place to be than where he could see the road.

We came around the corner a little before four, and he did not look up at first.

Then he did. He tipped his head toward the sound, the way a man does when somebody he hasn’t seen in a long time speaks his name from across a room.

He stood up. He did it carefully, with a hand on the porch rail. His thermos slid off his knee and rolled down the step, and he didn’t go after it.

Cody stopped the truck at the curb and left the engine running. He came around the front, and I got out the other side. The three of us stood on the sidewalk, and for a while nobody said anything.

Coach came down the walk slowly, with one hand out in front of him like a man in a dark room. He reached the front fender and laid his palm flat on it. He walked his hand along the side of the truck, the way you’d walk a horse. He found the dent in the tailgate with his thumb, and his thumb stayed there.

“Whose truck is this?” he asked. His voice was not steady.

“Yours, if you want it,” Cody said. “I’ll be driving it.”

“You’ll be what?”

“Driving it.” My son cleared his throat. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was thinking I’d pick you up at four and take you out to the rec center so you can open the gym. Then I’ll bring you home after.” He paused. “I pass your place anyway, Coach.”

Wendell Voyles turned his head toward that voice. His eyes were unfocused, and I knew he was seeing little more than the shape of a tall young man in a work shirt.

“No you don’t,” he said.

“No, sir,” Cody said. “I don’t.”

Coach reached out, found the door handle, and opened the passenger side. He stood there a moment looking at the bench seat, the tape, the cracked dash. Then he bent, very slowly, and put his hand on the glove box door.

His thumb found the place on the corner where a boy of twelve, bored on a long drive home from Seymour, had scratched two letters with the end of a house key, and then been so ashamed that he could not eat his supper. C.S. All Coach had ever said about it was, “It’s a truck, son.”

He ran his thumb over the letters twice.

“You never fixed that,” he said.

“It wasn’t mine to fix,” Cody said.

Coach nodded. He nodded for a while. Then he patted the dash twice with his open hand, the way you’d pat a good dog, and got in. I got in the middle. Cody went around and got behind the wheel.

The glove box had swung open on its hinge. Cody reached across me and shoved it shut with the heel of his hand.

“Thank you, sir,” said Coach, without looking.