The Grand Marquis Across the Highway

The Porch

“I’m sorry, Amber,” he said. He did not say it to the yard or the car. He turned and said it to my face. “I’m sorry I asked. I’m sorry I opened that door. I’m sorry for every time I took something from you and Kaylee and gave it to him. The roof. All of it.”

“I know you are.”

“I want to take her Thursday,” he said. “To the orthodontist. I’ll take off. I’ll find the down payment.”

“Jesse, where are you going to find nineteen hundred dollars by Thursday?”

He looked out past the car, at the shed. I knew what was in it before he said it.

His fourteen-foot jon boat and the trailer and the little trolling motor, the one he took out on the lake every Sunday afternoon from April to October. The one thing in this world that was his.

“Hank Watkins has been after that boat for two years,” he said. “He’ll give me fourteen hundred for it and the trailer. I’ll have the other five hundred with the overtime they’ve been offering on Saturdays.”

“You love that boat.”

“I love that girl,” he said. “And I love her mother. The fish will be there.”

I am not someone who cries easy, whatever this story makes it sound like.

But I put my head on his shoulder right then and let him hold me, the two of us sitting on our own porch steps in the cold, looking at a twenty-two-year-old Mercury that smelled like an old lady’s peppermints.

“It was twenty-four hundred,” I said after a while. “I gave him the nineteen. He’s carrying the other five hundred himself, twenty dollars a month.”

“Then I’ll pay it,” Jesse said. “Every month. I’ll drive it out to him myself.”

“It’s seventy miles, Jesse.”

“It was seventy miles today,” he said. “I figure I owe that road a few trips.”

Thursday

Jesse sold the boat to Hank on Tuesday. Merle called on Wednesday morning to say the check had cleared and the title was in the mail, and that Bev said hello and was Kaylee okay.

On Thursday, Jesse took the whole day off without pay. He drove Kaylee to the orthodontist in his truck, and I rode along, and we let her pick the color of the little rubber bands.

She picked purple. Jesse paid the down payment in cash, every dollar of it, counted out of an envelope that still smelled like the shed.

Kaylee came out of that office with her mouth sore and full of metal, and she smiled.

She smiled with her whole mouth open, right there in the parking lot, for the first time in a year. Jesse had to go stand by the truck for a minute.

That weekend we drove the Marquis back out the two-lane to Merle’s lot. All three of us.

Jesse brought the first twenty-dollar payment in an envelope and a jar of his mother’s apple butter, because Jean had insisted when he told her the whole thing.

Merle came out of the block building in the same felt hat and suspenders. He shook Jesse’s hand a long time.

He looked him in the eye while he did it, the way old men do when they are deciding something about you.

Merle took the twenty and wrote it in a little spiral notebook he kept in his shirt pocket, under my name.

Then Jesse offered to weld the busted hitch on Merle’s flatbed trailer, the one I had seen leaning against the block building, for nothing, and Merle said that he would allow.

So Jesse spent the afternoon on his back on the gravel under that trailer with his welder plugged into Merle’s shop outlet, and Merle stood over him the whole time telling him how they did it in 1962, and Jesse said “yes, sir” and did it his own way, and I could tell they both enjoyed every minute.

Bev and Kaylee and I sat in the office with the heater going and ate peanut brittle out of a fresh jar, slow, on the sides of our mouths, because Kaylee’s teeth were still tender.

“Not till after the braces come off,” Bev said to her, laughing. “I told your mama that.”

“She can have one piece,” I said. “It’s a special day.”