The Car My Grandson Sold
On the third morning, Bernice told me, there was a plastic step stool from the Dollar General in the bed of his truck. He set it by the passenger door without a word and held out his arm. Bernice put her hand on it. She said she nearly cried and did not let him see.
Nobody told him to buy it. I want you to notice that, because it is the whole story. I never once sat my grandson down and told him what he had taken. I only gave him a Monday morning to see it for himself.
I came home on a Thursday in the middle of May, on a walker with tennis balls on its feet. Renee drove me in her little Ford.
The garage door was up. I had not planned to look, but a woman cannot not look at the place where her car used to be.
There was an oil spot on the concrete the shape of a dinner plate. On the wall, the hook where the key lived. On the shelf, the bucket and the chamois I used to wash it every Saturday. Nothing else.
Cody was standing in the yard, waiting. He had cut the grass and edged the walk, which nobody had asked him to do. He looked at me, and then at the garage, and then at his shoes.
“Hey, Grandma.”
“Hello, Cody.” I looked at the empty space, and I took my time, and then I said, “Thank you for seeing to the yard.”
That was all. I did not say a word about the car, and I saw his shoulders go down an inch, like a man who has braced for something and doesn’t know whether to be glad.
The next Monday I made him take me along.
I had not planned to. But Bernice called Sunday night and said, “I’d like you to ride with us, Wanda. The boy talks to me now. I’d like him to talk in front of you.” So at ten past five I came out on the porch on my walker, and my grandson was at the bottom of the steps with the truck running, and the plastic step stool beside it.
It took him and the step stool and a good deal of my pride to get me up into that seat. When I was in, my new hip aching like a bad tooth, he shut the door very gently. Then he stood outside the window with his hand still on the frame.
“That’s why Grandpa bought the car, isn’t it?” he said. Not to me, exactly. To the glass.
“It’s a high seat,” I said.
He nodded. He got in. We drove to Bernice’s.
For the next ten days I rode along in that truck every Monday and Wednesday, and on Thursday he took me to Ellis’s Market and carried my sacks. He waited at the pharmacy and drove me to my follow-up in Springfield. He did all of it without complaint, and I did not thank him more than I’d have thanked a neighbor. I was careful about that. A thank-you can be a kind of payment, and I did not want him thinking the account was square.
Mostly we didn’t talk. Bernice talked, about her husband who ran the feed store, about the winter of 1978, about the woman in the next chair who had no one, and every bit of it showed on my grandson’s face.
And I watched my grandson become a person who listened.
The first Sunday in June, Cody drove me out to Pleasant Ridge.