The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

The glove box

When I had stopped, I wiped my face with the dish towel, which still had flour on it, so I imagine I looked like a ghost, and I said, “Travis. Why?”

He came back over slowly and stood at the open door.

“Open the glove box,” he said.

It stuck. It had always stuck, and he’d left that too. I hit the latch with the heel of my hand the way Lars did, and the door dropped open, and inside was nothing but a small spiral notepad with a feed-store logo on the cover and a stub of carpenter’s pencil clipped to the wire.

“I found it the first night,” Travis said. “It was right there when I opened the glove box. I put it back where he had it. It’s your husband’s handwriting.”

I knew the handwriting. I had read it on grocery lists for forty-six years, square and slanted, with the sevens crossed.

The first page was dated January of the winter before last. It was a list, in pencil, one item to a line.

Rockers. Cab corners both sides. Bed floor, oak not pine. Fuel pump. Tank too probably. Seat foam. V. says the bounce is gone. Heater, maybe leave it. Leave the dent.

And at the bottom, underlined twice, one more line.

Ask C.

I read it four or five times.

“He was going to ask you,” I said.

“I think so.” Travis’s voice was very quiet. “He never did.”

“Verlee.” He looked at the ground, and then he made himself look at me. “I need to tell you something, and I don’t know how to do it in front of everyone. Annika says I should.”

“Then tell me.”

“Thursdays,” Travis said. “For two winters, your husband used to come to the shop.”

I did not understand. “To the shop?”

“Every Thursday, about nine. He’d get whatever you had on the list at the parts store on Main, and then he’d drive over to my place and sit on the bucket by the bench and watch me work. Two hours, usually. Sometimes three.”

The parts run. I thought of Lars coming home on Thursdays at noon, hours later than a parts run should take, smelling faintly of primer, saying he’d had coffee at the cafe. I had never questioned it. I’d assumed he and Burl stood around and complained about the co-op.

“He didn’t say much,” Travis said. “He’d ask what I was doing, I’d tell him, and he’d watch. The second winter he started asking about the Ford. Whether it could be done. I told him I thought it could. He said, ‘Not yet.’ He wanted to do the engine himself, and then I could do the tin. He said if Burl got wind of it he’d never hear the end, and could I keep it between us.”

“Between you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I wasn’t going to tell you. It seemed like his to tell.”

“And then he died.”