The Car My Grandson Sold
The fall of 2019, Cody turned sixteen. His father had been gone from the picture since the boy was five, and Renee worked doubles at the county clerk’s office, so it fell to his grandfather. Lyle was already thin by then, already tired in a way that sat behind his eyes. But every Sunday after church he would put on his good cap and say, “Cody, let’s go,” and out they went onto the gravel roads east of town in the Buick, the boy at the wheel and the old man in the passenger seat with one hand on the door handle, grinning like a kid on a carnival ride.
“Ease off, son,” I heard him say once through the open window, in the driveway. “The road doesn’t care how fast you get there.”
In January, a few weeks before the end, Lyle asked Cody to drive him out to Pleasant Ridge. I stayed home. I knew it was theirs. They sat out there in the heated seats with the engine running for most of an hour, and neither one of them ever told me what was said, and I never asked.
So that was the car. That was what sat in my garage “losing value.”
Renee came back that evening alone. She stood at the foot of the bed twisting the strap of her purse until I thought it would come apart in her hands.
“Mom, I swear to you I didn’t know until it was done.”
“Sit down, Renee.”
“He had the title out of the box in your hall closet. He had the spare key off the hook. And he had the copy of that paper you signed for me, so I could pay your bills while you were laid up.” Her voice broke on the last of it. “He showed it all to Hollis Pruitt, and Hollis has known him since Little League. Hollis didn’t think twice. I found out Tuesday when Hollis called to ask how you were doing. He was just being kind. He thought you knew.”
“Did you tell Cody he could do it?”
“Lord, no.” She sat down hard in the vinyl chair. “Mom, he’s behind on that truck. Three payments. And a credit card. And some loan with a name like Quick Cash that I didn’t even know about until I made him tell me tonight. He’s been drowning for a year and hiding it from everybody. I’d have helped him. I would have found it somehow.” Now she was crying, the angry kind. “But he took the car out from under you in a hospital bed. I don’t care if he’s mine. That’s theft, Mom. That’s what it is. I’m going to call Tommy Haskins.”
Tommy Haskins is a county deputy. Everybody in Sorrel Creek is in somebody’s grade.
“Renee,” I said. “Hand me that water.”
She handed it to me. I took my time with it.
“Here is what I know about my grandson,” I said. “I know he sold a woman’s car and told the whole family he did her a favor. A boy like that does not have the sense God gave a goose. But I also know that he held my husband’s coat at the funeral and did not let go of it the whole service. I know there is a heart in him somewhere, because I put some of it there.”
“Mom.”
“If you call Tommy, I might get the car back. I might not. And I will have a grandson with a record and a mother who will never forgive herself, and he will spend the rest of his life telling this story to himself as the day the old woman called the law on him. I don’t want that for him. I don’t want it for you.”