The Car My Grandson Sold
He opened his mouth. I shook my head.
“I forgave you in that hospital bed,” I said. “That’s mine to give, and it’s given, and you can’t give it back. But forgiving a thing is not the same as the thing being made right. You know that already. I think you’ve known it since the step stool.”
He didn’t say anything for a long while. A mockingbird started up in the cedar by the fence.
“Take me home, honey,” I said.
He did not come for nearly two weeks.
He still covered Mondays and Wednesdays, a quarter past five, never late once. But he did not come by the house and he did not stay for Sunday dinner, and Renee began to haunt my kitchen with a worried look and a casserole.
She brought up the check the second Sunday of his silence.
She stood at my sink with her back to me. “Mom, I went to the bank yesterday.” She turned around, and in her hand was a cashier’s check, folded once. Fifty-eight hundred dollars. “Please. I can’t stand this. Let me square it with Hollis, and we’ll all just put it away.”
I had known she would try. I held out my hand, and she gave me the check, and I looked at it for a long time. “Renee,” I said, “put it back in your account.”
“Mom, he’s drowning.”
“He’s learning to swim. You can feel him kicking.” I gave her the check. “If you pay it, he learns his mother catches what he drops. That’s the cruelest thing we could do to him, and we’d call it love.”
She cried again, and I held her, and she said, “I’m a terrible mother.”
“You’re a tired one. It isn’t the same.” I smoothed her hair. “This once, let him carry something.”
I’d like to tell you I wasn’t afraid. I was. There was a real chance that I had made the wrong call, that my grandson would choose to be ashamed rather than changed, and simply stop coming.
I said my prayers and washed the dishes and waited.
On the third Saturday in June, at a quarter to ten in the morning, I heard tires on gravel.
I went to the screen door on my walker. And there in my driveway, pulling in slow, in the very same careful way a sixteen-year-old had been taught on a Sunday afternoon, was a pewter-colored Buick.
My grandson was behind the wheel. Hollis Pruitt’s pickup came in behind him and stopped at the road.
I stood there. I could not make my feet go.
The Buick had been washed and waxed. Cody shut off the engine and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel, and then he got out, and he stood by the open door with something in his hand, and he did not come any closer. He waited for me.
I got down the steps by myself. It took me a while.
“Hello, Grandma.”
“Cody.”
“I’ve got something to give you.” He held out three things. A key on a ring I knew. A title with my name typed on it, new, and Hollis Pruitt’s signature at the bottom. And a plain white index card, folded once.
“Where did you get fifty-eight hundred dollars?” I said.
He swallowed.