The Car My Grandson Sold

“I went to Mr. Pruitt the Monday after the cemetery. I told him everything. All of it, what I did and why and how I used Mom’s paper. He didn’t say much. He said he ought to have called you himself, and that was on him.” Cody glanced back at the road. Hollis raised two fingers off the steering wheel. “He still had it on the back row. He said nobody wanted a Buick. He said I could have it back for exactly what he paid, not a dime more.”

“That still isn’t an answer.”

“I sold the truck.”

I said nothing.

“It was worth a good deal more than I owed on it, and that’s the part that embarrasses me. I could have sold it any day of the year. I paid off the loan and the card and Kyle, and that left fifty-eight hundred, near enough, and some Saturdays at the shop covered the rest.” He looked at the ground. “I figured the truck was what I’d been trying to protect. And it’s only a truck, Grandma. I like it a lot. It was too high for anybody.”

“What are you driving?”

“Mitch at the shop lent me his daughter’s old Ranger until I find something. It’s a stick shift.” He gave a little crooked grin. “It’s fine. It’s low. Bernice can step right in.”

I took the key from him. I held it a moment. It was warm from his hand.

“Cody,” I said, “your mother brought me a check for this.”

“I know. She told me.” His face did something complicated. “I’m glad you turned it down.”

“She wanted to save you,” I said. “I told her to let you carry something.”

Then I unfolded the card.

It was one of Renee’s recipe cards, the lined kind, and he had written on it in the hand of a boy who didn’t write much. It said:

Grandma, I took more than a car. I took your say. I’m sorry. I would like to keep driving you and Bernice on Mondays if you’ll have me. I’ll ride in the back if that’s how you want it. Cody.

I read it twice. Then I folded it and put it in the pocket of my cardigan, where it still is.

“Hand me your arm,” I said.

He did. I got myself down the driveway and around to the driver’s side of that old Buick, and I put my hand on the roof, which was warm from the June sun, and I looked at it, and I could not have told you right then whether I was laughing or crying.

“Go on,” Cody said. “Sit in it.”

I sat. I sat down in a seat a woman can sit down in. The wheel was cool. The whole car smelled like glass cleaner and, underneath that, faintly, like Lyle’s good cap, which I had not known a car could keep for six years.

Then I felt it, a little warmth coming up through my skirt.

“Cody,” I said. “It’s June.”

“I turned them on.” He was standing by the window, rubbing his neck. “I figured it was the first thing you’d check.”

The seat warmed me through on a ninety-degree morning and I did not turn it off. I sat there with the heat coming up under me, and I thought of a thin man in a driveway with a ring of keys, and for the first time in all those weeks I let myself picture Lyle in the passenger seat beside me, one hand on the door handle, grinning at the pair of us.