The Truck My Husband Built With His Hands
In the glove box he kept a green spiral notebook, and he wrote in it for thirty-three years. Every fill-up. Every oil change. Mileage, date, price per gallon, and now and then a note in pencil. “Heater core sweet-talked back to life.” “Wyatt steered from my lap at four, Kari swears she will never forgive me.” The last entry was from the week before he died. “Tires rotated. Smells like rain.”
That notebook is the closest thing I have to a diary of my husband’s days, and it lived in that truck.
Roy died in January. By April I had started to feel like a person again, in small pieces, the way you start to feel your hands after a hard frost.
Shane called on a Tuesday.
I should be fair about Shane, because the Lord is watching and so is my daughter. Shane Hollis is forty-four years old and runs a fence and post business, and he works hard. He comes in after dark with his hands scraped raw, and he has kept a roof over my daughter and my two grandchildren for nineteen years. He cried at Roy’s funeral, standing by the back pew with his hat crushed in his hands.
He is also a man who has found that if you ask for a thing with enough charm, a good many people will simply let you have it. Roy used to say Shane could borrow a cup of sugar and walk off with the cupboard. We laughed about it right up until the day it was our cupboard.
“Joanne, I hate to ask,” Shane said on the phone that Tuesday. “The transmission went out on my work truck. The shop says two, three weeks to rebuild it. I’ve got four fences to set and I’m dead in the water. Roy’s truck is just sitting in the barn, and I’d treat her right. Just till mine is back on the road.”
I weighed Roy, who loved that truck the way some men love a dog. I weighed my daughter, three months without her father and walking around with her shoulders up near her ears. I weighed the fact that Shane’s family was my family, and you do not hold a thing against your own kin when they are in a bind.
And I weighed one more thing, which I am not proud of. I weighed how it would feel to say no to a man who had a payroll and a pickup in the shop.
“Of course,” I said. “Be careful on the gravel.”
He came by that evening and took the spare key off the nail by my kitchen door. He said, “Two weeks, Joanne. Three tops.” He kissed my cheek. He drove away with the window down and my husband’s radio playing, and I stood on the porch and told myself that Roy would have said yes too.
Roy would have said yes. That is true. But Roy would have said yes once, and he would have looked at a man’s face while he did it, and he would have known by the end of the conversation exactly what kind of yes it was.
The two weeks went by. Then the three.
In June, at the end of a Sunday dinner, I said with a smile, “I’ve been meaning to ask when you think you’ll have the truck back.” Shane squeezed my hand. “Next week, for sure. I don’t know what I’d have done without you, Joanne.”
Next week came and went.