The Truck Money He Owed Me

The flyer

I should explain about the truck, because people who don’t come from a town like ours sometimes think a truck is just a truck.

My dad left when I was six. He didn’t die, he just went to Kansas City with a woman from his work and kind of faded out, a birthday card for a few years and then not even that.

Mom raised me alone in a rented house on Fourth Street until I was ten.

Then she met Glenn Fischer at a church soup supper, and a year later they got married in the Methodist church with me standing up front in a clip-on tie.

We moved into his house on Lincoln Avenue, the brick one with the big maple tree out front.

I want to be fair to Glenn, because this story isn’t fair to him if I don’t say it.

He was good to my mom. He never once raised his hand or his voice to me in nine years.

He taught me to drive on the gravel roads north of town in his old Ranger. He taught me to back a trailer, which is harder than anybody thinks.

He made me read every word of a contract before I signed it, which is funny now.

But he was careful with money in a way that sometimes felt like a wall.

When I was thirteen I asked for a new bike and he said, “You can have anything you want in this life, son, as long as you can pay for it.” He meant it as advice. I took it as a challenge.

So the spring I was fourteen, I took a piece of poster board from the kitchen drawer and a fat black marker and made a flyer. I lettered it by hand, slow, so it would look professional.

It said: Tyler Vance, Lawn Mowing and Trimming. Dependable. $20 a yard. Call after school. And our home phone number under that, because I didn’t have a cell phone yet.

I made copies at the library for ten cents apiece and walked them around town in a backpack.

I put one on the bulletin board at the grocery store and one at the post office and one at the feed store out on the highway.

For eleven days nobody called. I was about ready to give up.

Then on a Tuesday night the kitchen phone rang and Mom handed it to me with a look on her face like it might be the President.

“This is Doc Albers,” the voice said. “I saw your sign at the feed store. My knees aren’t what they were and my yard looks like a hayfield. Can you come Saturday?”

Five summers

Doc lived on a corner lot at the edge of town, a white house with a deep porch and a chain-link fence around the back for his dog, an old black Lab named Pete.

It was the biggest yard I’d ever seen that wasn’t a farm.

I showed up that first Saturday with Glenn’s old push mower, a gas can and a pair of boots from the farm store that were a size too big so I could grow into them.

It took me three hours. I missed spots. I scalped the ditch.

When I was done, Doc came out on the porch and looked the whole thing over for a long minute without saying anything.

Then he handed me a twenty, and a five on top of it, and a cold can of pop from a little fridge he kept out there.

“The five is for showing up when you said you would,” he said. “You’d be surprised how rare that is. You missed a strip along the north fence. Get it next week.”

I got it next week. By the end of that first summer I had nine yards.

By the second summer I had fifteen, and I’d bought a used Toro of my own for forty dollars and a string trimmer that only started if you talked nicely to it.

I kept the money in a coffee can on the shelf in my closet and wrote every dollar in a spiral notebook.

Name, date, amount. Glenn had taught me that. Write it down, he said, because memory lies.

Those boots were stained with grass and dirt by the end of the first July and never came clean.

You can’t get grass stains out of leather. After a while I stopped trying. They were the most honest thing I owned.

The summer I was sixteen, I had a little over three thousand dollars in the can and a learner’s permit, and I was hauling my mower around town on a wagon behind my bike. People honked at me.