The Car My Grandson Sold
“So you just let it go?”
“No.” I surprised us both with how quickly it came out. “No, I don’t let it go. There is a kind of forgiving that is just a way of not looking, and I won’t give him that. It would be a lie, and he’d know it was a lie by Christmas.” I set down the cup. “I want two things from you. First, don’t you write him a check. Don’t you fix it. If you fix it, he learns that his mother catches whatever he drops, and he’ll be dropping things till he’s sixty. Second, I want to be the one who asks him for something.”
“Asks him for what?”
“I haven’t decided. Give me a night.”
That night I could not sleep, so I did what I have done most of my life when I can’t. I reached for the Bible in the nightstand drawer, the little brown one they leave in every hospital room, and I opened it where it opened, which was the Psalms. Psalm seventy-one. Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth.
I read it three or four times. And lying there in the dark I thought, Wanda, he did not do this because he hates you. He did it because he does not know what you are.
Not to him. To the town. To Bernice. He had never once ridden along at a quarter past five in the morning. In five years I had never asked him to look. The boy had been carried by that car, and he had never seen what it carried.
That did not excuse him. I want to be plain about that. A twenty-three-year-old man knows better than to sell what is not his. But it was a door. And I thought, if I walk through it with him and not at him, maybe there is a boy on the other side of it.
By morning I knew what I would ask.
Pastor Ames came by that afternoon with news I had been dreading. Bernice had missed her Wednesday treatment. His wife Joyce had tried to cover, but she teaches school, and the church van had a flat. By the time somebody got Bernice to Lebanon on Thursday she had been swollen and miserable for two days. She was resting, he said. She was asking after me.
I thanked him, took my phone off the bed rail, and called my grandson.
He answered on the fourth ring, wary. I could hear a compressor running behind him at the shop.
“Grandma? Is everything okay?”
“Everything is as okay as it gets with a new hip.” I looked at the water stain shaped like Texas. “Cody, what time do you start work on Monday mornings?”
A pause. “Eight. Why?”
“You’ll have to ask them for eleven,” I said. “I need a driver.”
I told him about Bernice. I did not tell him what he had done to her, and I did not say the word car. I said that I was going to be in the care center for three weeks, and that after that I would be on a walker, and Bernice Tate needed to be in a chair in Lebanon at six o’clock every Monday and Wednesday morning, and I could not do it, and neither could anybody else I could find.