The Car My Grandson Sold
“Grandma, I don’t know. That’s like, five in the morning.”
“A quarter past five. She will be on her porch.”
“What would I drive?”
“What do you have?” I said.
I heard him breathe out. He had a truck. He had been three payments behind on it. We both knew it, and neither of us said so.
“I’m not ordering you,” I said. “I couldn’t. I’m asking. If you say no, then I’ll ask somebody else, and I won’t think any less of you.”
That was a lie, a little. But I wanted him to feel it was his to give.
It was quiet for so long that I thought the call had dropped. Then he said, very low, “I’ll be there Monday.”
I was not there for those first three weeks, so I have to tell you what I got from Bernice, and she gave it to me in pieces over the following months, the way she gives away everything, a little at a time and with a look.
The first morning Cody pulled up at ten past five. His truck is a Silverado, a crew cab, jacked up on bigger tires than a farm boy needs. Bernice came down her steps with the purse in front of her. He got out and stood by the passenger door. She looked up at that seat. It sat nearly level with her chin.
“Young man,” she said, “I am eighty-three years old and I have had a catheter put in my chest. You may climb up there and haul me in by the belt, or you may find something else.”
He told her afterward that he had never in his life thought about the height of that truck.
He lifted her. He is a strong boy, and he set her up in the seat like a sack of feed, and she told me she held her breath the whole time, and so did he. On the way to Lebanon she said nothing to him. Not a word, not for twenty-six miles. Then at the door of the center she turned around and said, “I heard what you did. Everybody heard. I’m not mad at you. I’m just not talking to you till we get home.”
And she did not.
For four hours he sat in the waiting room on a chair built for no one. He watched them come in. A man not sixty with a wife who held his coat. A farmer in his seed cap, who sat the full four hours with his eyes closed like a man in church. A woman alone, who had come on a medical van that was supposed to come at five and showed up at seven. He said it looked like a very quiet family.
On the way home Bernice finally said something. She said, “Your grandfather drove me to my first one.”
Cody looked over.
“Lyle. In that old truck of his. I was scared to death, and he talked about the Cardinals the whole way over so I wouldn’t think. After that Wanda took it over.” She looked out the window at the soybeans. “I don’t suppose either of them ever mentioned it.”
“No, ma’am.”
“No. They wouldn’t have.”
That was all. She did not scold him. She did not need to.