The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

The keys

It was the second Saturday of November, gray and raw, with a wind coming across the stubble, when Travis’s pickup pulled into my yard.

He came by himself. He parked right by the house, not at the mailbox, which I noticed, and he stood by the truck door a minute with his hands in his coat pockets.

I went out on the step.

“Verlee. Do you have a minute?”

“I have all the minutes there are,” I said, which was a thing I’d started saying. It always made people uncomfortable, and Travis was no exception. He looked at his boots.

“I was wondering if you’d mind if I took Lars’s old truck to the shop for a while.”

He walked out with me past the machine shed to the tarp and stood there with his cap in his hands. He is a tall man, Travis, long in the arms, with a way of speaking that runs half a second behind his thinking. His knuckles were scarred from thirty years of metalwork. He had a Band-Aid on one thumb.

“What for?” I said.

“I’d like to look at it. See what it’s got left. It’s worth knowing.”

I understood that to mean what Dean had meant. He’s going to see what it’s worth, I thought, and I can hardly blame him. He wants it gone and he’s too polite to say so.

I was so tired. I want to say that plainly, because it matters. That fall I was tired in a way I hadn’t known a person could be. One fewer thing to decide was almost a kindness.

“The keys are on the nail by the kitchen door,” I said.

“You don’t want to think about it?”

“I’d rather not.”

“I’ll take care of it, Verlee. I promise you that.”

“I know you will,” I said. I didn’t know anything of the kind.

I took the ring from the nail, a plain steel ring with three keys and a brass tag from the Lyon County fair of 1986, and put it in his hand. He closed his fingers over it very carefully, as if it might break.

I did not ask what he meant to do with it. A woman should ask. I didn’t, because I did not want to hear the answer.

The flatbed came Monday morning, a green one with Rutten Auto Body & Frame on the door. Travis drove, with Isaac beside him. They winched the Ford up the ramp in ten minutes, flat tires dragging, and strapped it down at four corners. Then Travis put a second tarp over the whole thing before he pulled out of the yard. A fresh one, bright blue.

When they turned onto the county road, I walked out behind the machine shed, where the grass lay flat in a rectangle the shape of an F-250 and the cinder blocks sat in a heap.