The Truck I Sold For Payroll

The math I did on a fender

I keep a grease pencil in my pocket. I pulled it and I did the arithmetic right there on the quarter panel of the Suburban, small, down low where it would sand off.

Payroll was seven thousand eight hundred and change. Four men, two weeks, after the taxes Marie takes out. The Hartley insurance check was fourteen thousand two hundred and it was real, it was coming, but it was not coming today and might not clear till the middle of next week. We had forty one dollars.

I had a truck.

It was out in the lot where it always sat, a 2019 Ram 2500, four by four, dark blue, the long bed, a hundred and nine thousand miles on it and every one of them babied. I bought it used three years back with money I had saved in coffee cans practically, and I had changed the oil every three thousand miles myself and never once hauled anything in it that would ding the bed liner, and Carla laughed at me about that truck because I loved it like a dog.

The book on it, clean, private party, was right around twenty three, twenty four thousand. I knew that because I had looked it up in the spring just to feel good about myself.

I rubbed the numbers off the fender with my thumb.

Then I went in the office and I asked Marie for a piece of poster board and the fat marker she uses for the lobby specials.

“Dale,” she said. “What are you doing.”

“Making payroll,” I said.

I wrote it out on the poster board on the hood of the Ram, in the gravel, with the sun coming up over the propane tank across the highway. FOR SALE. And under it the year and the engine and the miles, and under that, CASH TODAY, and my cell number big enough to read from the road.

I put it in the windshield behind the glass so it would not blow.

Wade came out to the lot for something, a fender clip out of the parts shed, and he stopped when he saw me standing there with the sign in the windshield of my own truck.

“You selling the Ram,” he said. He said it like I had told him I was selling a kidney.

“Thinking about it,” I said.

“You love that truck.”

“It’s a truck,” I said.

He stood there a second. Wade is not a dumb kid. He looked at the sign and he looked at me and something moved behind his eyes, some first dim understanding that the ground was not as solid as a nineteen year old needs it to be, and then he decided, the way kids do, that it could not be what it looked like, and he went and got his fender clip.

I watched him walk back to the bay. I thought about his little trailer out on Route M and the payment he had told me about twice.

I have a son of my own, grown and gone to Columbia for work, and I will tell you that in that minute Wade was about as much mine as anybody.