The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

I came down the steps. I do not remember doing it. I remember the dew on the grass was cold through my house slippers.

I walked around it, as one does, all the way around.

On the driver’s side behind the door there was a dent, a shallow crease in the rear fender about the size of a man’s palm, where in the fall of 1991 Lars had backed into a grain leg while looking over his shoulder at me and had never let anyone fix it. Travis had fixed everything else. He had cut out the rust and welded in new steel, panel by panel. But he had worked right up to that dent and around it, and the green paint ran over it smooth and shining, and it was still there, shallow as a thumbprint.

“I figured he’d want it left,” Travis said behind me. He hadn’t moved from where he stood. “It took me about a week to decide.”

I put my hand in the dent. It fit.

Under the mirror hung the little wooden cross Annika made in Sunday school. Travis had cleaned it and strung it on a new bootlace.

“Go ahead,” Travis said. “Get in.”

I walked to the passenger side. I had my hand out for the handle, and I did what I had done ten thousand times, which was to lean my shoulder into the door at the spot just under the window.

It swung open so easily I nearly went in headfirst.

Behind me Annika laughed out loud. Not at me. It was the laugh of a woman who has held something in her chest for five months and has finally been allowed to let it out. Isaac laughed. Even Travis made a short surprised noise in his throat.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I fixed the hinge. Then I stood there and thought, he’d hate that. I almost put the lean back in.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know how to do it on purpose.”

I stood in the open door of that truck, laughing and holding on to the frame. Then I looked inside, and I stopped.

The seat was covered in a plain gray-green tweed, the same pattern that had been on it in 1979, the one that had worn to the backing in two places. Travis had tracked it down, somehow, from a supplier in Iowa. The mouse’s nest was gone. The floor was a clean black mat. The gearshift knob had been left alone, rubbed smooth and pale by forty years of Lars’s palm, because, I understood, there was no way to restore that and no reason to try.

On the visor lay a fresh pack of Juicy Fruit.

I sat down on the seat, sideways, with my feet still out on the running board, and put both hands over my face.

I had not cried for my husband in front of anyone, not at the funeral, not in October at the tarp, not in the dark at the kitchen table on any of the nights since. I had held it so long I’d begun to wonder if there was something wrong with me, if you could forget how. It turned out you cannot. It was all in there, every bit of it, waiting for a green truck with a dent in it.

Nobody said a thing. Nobody moved to touch me. Annika stood in the grass and let me, and Isaac looked at the sky, and Travis took two steps back toward his pickup and stayed there with his cap. He understood, I think, better than anyone, that there are things a person has to do by herself in the front seat of a truck.