The Truck Money He Owed Me

The calls

I didn’t say anything for so long that she asked if the call had dropped.

“I’m here, Mom,” I said.

“He said you’d agreed to it. That it was only fair, since you won’t need a truck in the Army. Isn’t that what you two decided?”

I was sitting on the edge of a bunk in a barracks in Missouri with forty other guys around me. I looked at my hands.

“Sure, Mom,” I said finally. “I’ve got to go. Love you.”

I want to explain why I said that, because I’ve thought about it a lot. I could have told her the truth right then.

But she would have had to pick between us from three hundred miles away, with me unable to come home for two months.

And I couldn’t call the sheriff. The title was in Glenn’s name. On paper, he had sold his own truck. There was nothing illegal about it.

So I called Glenn instead. That night, and the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that. Three calls. He didn’t answer any of them.

He texted once, a week after my first call. It said: Busy season here. We’ll talk when you’re home. Proud of you.

That was all. Proud of you.

The morning

I graduated advanced training on a Monday and got ten days of leave before I had to report to Fort Carson in Colorado.

Mom drove down to Kansas City to meet my bus, and we got home a little after ten on Tuesday night.

Glenn’s work truck wasn’t in the driveway. Mom said he’d been working late a lot.

She said the agency had been through a rough patch, but she didn’t know the details, Glenn didn’t like to bring work home.

I heard his truck come in around midnight. I heard it leave again before six.

When I came downstairs at six thirty, there was a plate on the counter covered in foil and a note in Mom’s handwriting that said Welcome home, sweetheart, and Glenn’s coffee cup was already in the sink.

I stood in the kitchen and looked at that cup. It was Wednesday. Rotary met Wednesdays at seven, in the back room of the cafe, and had for fifty years.

I could have waited for him to come home that night. But he’d had two months to call me and he’d been gone both times I was awake, and I had nine days left, and I was tired of waiting for a man to decide he was ready to talk to me.

I put on the only clothes I had at home that weren’t Army: a plain gray t-shirt and a pair of jeans.

Then I went to the back porch and got my old boots, the stained ones, because my good boots were still in my duffel and those felt more like me anyway.

The cafe was four blocks away. I walked. I didn’t have a truck.