The Buick We Brought Our Boy Home In

The Last Few Days

Those last days before Mason came, I kept finding reasons to go sit in that car.

I would tell Jen I was running out for diapers or a gallon of milk, and I would, but first I would just sit behind the wheel in the driveway a minute with the engine off.

I was thirty-one years old and I had never once owned a vehicle I was not a little ashamed to park at church. The Cobalt. A Ranger before that with a bed full of rust.

This Buick was not new. It was older than some of the trucks the young guys drive to the co-op. But it was clean and it was sound and a man had loved it for thirty years before he handed it to me.

I wiped the dash with a rag. I lined up the maintenance folder square in the glovebox. I kept the car-seat base clicked in and waiting.

One evening Jen came out in her coat and her slippers and got in the passenger side and just sat with me.

“You keep coming out here,” she said.

“I know it.”

“Why?”

I thought about how to say it. “Because every time my brother made us wait, I felt small,” I told her. “Like we were the poor relations. Like we had to take whatever he decided to give us, on his schedule.”

She was quiet.

“And then your grandpa hands me the nicest thing he owns for a dollar,” I said. “And it doesn’t feel like charity. It feels like he thinks I’m worth it. I never had a car make me feel worth something before.”

Jen took my hand on the seat between us. The yard light buzzed overhead.

“You were always worth it,” she said. “It just took an old man and a Buick to tell you.”

We sat out there until the baby inside her got to kicking and she laughed and said he wanted to go in where it was warm.

I called Grandpa Roy every night that week. He pretended it was to check on the car. We both knew better.