The First New Car of Her Life
She picked up the pen and put the cap back on it, and she closed the checkbook and laid her hand flat on top.
“I know what you’re going to say, Stacy,” she said.
I hadn’t said a word. I hadn’t said a word all year, if I’m honest, and that is part of this story that does not make me look very good.
I’d rolled my eyes in my own truck. I’d complained to my husband. I had never once said it to her.
“I’m not going to say anything, Mom,” I told her.
“You were going to call him.” She looked up at me over her reading glasses. “You’ve got that look your daddy got when the elevator docked him for moisture. Don’t call him. Please. It’s my money. I’m the one who gave it.”
That was the truth, and it was the whole reason I never picked up the phone. Shane had never once taken a dollar from her she didn’t hand him.
He asked. She gave. If anybody was going to stop it, she wanted it to be her.
“Then what do you want me to do?” I asked.
She reached across the table and pulled the Saturday paper out from under the napkin holder. It was already folded to the car ads.
Somebody had drawn a circle in pen around the Ford dealer’s half page, out on the highway in the county seat, twenty miles from her house.
“I’m going to stop it myself,” she said. “I just need you to drive me.”
I should tell you about my brother, because he is not a monster, and I don’t want anybody reading this to think he is.
Shane is three years younger than I am. He was the baby, the one who could make Dad laugh at the supper table when Dad had come in from the field too tired to talk.
He was the one who cried at the Christmas pageant when the angel’s wings fell off a smaller kid.
He went to the university in Champaign and then straight to a sales job in Chicago, selling software to grocery chains. He sounded important on the phone.
He was thirty-four when Dad died. He came home and he stood in the back of the funeral home in a suit that cost more than my first car, and when they closed the casket he walked out to the parking lot and threw up behind the hearse.
I held his shoulders while he did it. Neither one of us has ever mentioned that to Mom.
What I didn’t understand then was that Dad had been quietly covering for Shane for years. A car payment here, a security deposit there, a credit card he’d let get away from him.
Dad never told Mom. He told me once, in the cab of his truck, and made me swear.
“He’ll grow out of it,” Dad said. “I did.” He didn’t, though, not in three years, and when Dad was gone, the calls just moved one chair over at the kitchen table, from Dad’s place to Mom’s.
So that’s Shane. He loves our mother. He calls her every Sunday night.
He also figured out, somewhere in that grief, that if he called her on a Wednesday instead and asked in that soft voice, she would open the checkbook. And she always did.
I drove home that night with the heater on high and the radio off.