The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

The winter

The lights burned in Travis’s shop every night that winter.

I know because I drove past it. Choir practice at Bethany is Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the quickest way home goes past the body shop. I did not mean to look. In a flat country at night, a lit building is the only thing there is to look at.

Eight o’clock, nine, ten. The big door was always down, and the long narrow windows along the top were yellow, and sometimes a thin blue flicker of a welding arc crossed them. Once I slowed at the edge of the lot with my window open in a ten-degree wind, and heard a grinder going.

What would a man grind on, at that hour, to sell a truck for scrap?

I asked Annika, the first week of December, at her kitchen table, over a pot of tea I did not drink. “Is Travis selling your dad’s truck?”

She looked into her cup.

“Mom, I can’t. I promised him. Please don’t ask me.”

“Just tell me if it’s gone.”

She looked miserable. “It’s not gone,” she said. Then she added, “Not the way you mean,” which I did not understand, and filed away under things my daughter says to protect her husband.

I drove home with the radio off. I thought: well, that is what it is to be married. You take his side. I had done it for forty-six years.

I stayed angry through Christmas. Not loudly. Travis set a plate of his mother’s kringle on my counter on Christmas Eve and kissed my cheek and said, “Merry Christmas, Verlee,” and I said it back, and we passed the potatoes at a table with Lars’s chair empty at the head. When Dean heard where the truck had gone, he said, “Mom, you can’t just hand Dad’s truck to a guy who never even came to the farm.”

In January, on a Tuesday of heavy snow, I put together a pan of scotcheroos on impulse. I have always baked when I don’t know how to speak. I drove the ten miles to town at fifteen miles an hour and knocked on the side door of the shop at four in the afternoon, when the light was going.

Isaac opened it about eight inches. My grandson is fifteen, and just then he had the face of a boy who’d been told to guard a bank.

“Gram. Hi.”

“Hello, Isaac. I brought bars. Is your dad here?”

“He’s at the parts place. Gram, I can’t let you in. He said nobody. I’m sorry.”

Behind him I saw the inside of the shop, a workbench, a rack of tools, a radio on a shelf playing the farm report. And in the far bay, under a bright blue tarp, a long shape with a light shining down on it.

Isaac saw me look. He stepped sideways to block the line of sight, like a boy in a school play.

I have been a mother and a grandmother long enough to know what a child looks like when he is being loyal to somebody against his own good sense. It was in his ears. They were red.

I gave him the bars. “Share them with your father. Tell him I said hello.”

I drove home through the snow with a hot, tight feeling in my chest that I took for anger. It wasn’t. It was loneliness, the kind a person feels when everyone she loves is in on something she is not.