The Buick We Brought Our Boy Home In

“There’s no contract, hon,” I told her. “Just a handshake in his kitchen. The law doesn’t come running over a brother being a snake about a used truck.”

And going to our parents would only split the family down the middle three days before their first grandchild got here.

Jen did not need that kind of storm while she was trying to bring a boy into the world. Neither did my mother.

“I’m not going to fight him,” I said. “I’m not going to beg him either. We’ve got four days. We’ll figure it out quiet.”

She reached across the table and put her hand on top of mine.

“Travis, I just need to get our boy home warm,” she said. “That’s all I care about. I don’t care what we drive to do it.”

I lay awake most of that night listening to her breathe.

Around two in the morning I remembered a thing my grandpa used to say. I was a kid riding shotgun in his old sedan, both of us eating gas-station peanuts out of the same bag.

He would pat the dash and say a car was just a tool for keeping the people you love out of the weather. Nothing more. Nothing less.

In the morning I drove the six miles out to his place.

Grandpa’s Driveway

Grandpa Roy lives out on a blacktop road, in the farmhouse he and my late grandmother raised four kids in.

He is eighty-one. He does not farm anymore. He leases the ground to the Hendricks boys.

But he still keeps the yard tight and the machine shed swept, and he still wears the same green feed cap he has worn my whole life.

His car sits in that shed. A 1998 Buick LeSabre, deep maroon, the 3800 V6 under the hood.

He bought it new the year I was born. He has babied it every day since.

Oil changed on the dot. Garaged every winter. Fewer than ninety thousand miles on it, because he mostly drives it to church and to Casey’s for his lottery ticket and back home again.

I found him in the kitchen with his coffee and the farm report on the radio.

I told him the whole thing. Kyle and the truck and the two thousand dollars. Jen on the end of the lane in the dark. All of it.

I did not drive out there to ask him for anything. I came because he is the one man I have always been able to think straight next to.

He listened the whole way through without a word. That is his way. He lets a thing land before he picks it up.

Then he got up, slow the way he moves now, and took his keys off the hook by the door.