The Note I Showed Her in the Bleachers

The Truck That Never Changed

The first thing that was wrong, I did not even see as wrong. His truck never got fixed.

Week after week he came to pick me up in it. It still ground going into second, and it still died at the four-way by the Dollar General.

I asked him about it once. He said the shop was backed up, parts on order, you know how it is out here.

I did know how it was out here. Parts do come slow on an old truck. So I let it lie.

One evening I even offered to ride with him to the shop and see about hurrying it along. I had worked thirty years around machines and I am not shy about a service counter.

He got strange about that. Said he would handle it, said he did not want me spending my Saturday on his mess. I thought that was him being considerate. I know now it was him being careful.

But a woman notices things even when she is trying hard not to. He started being busy on Wednesdays, and then on Sundays after church.

He quit leaving his phone face up on the table the way an easy man does. Little things. The kind you talk yourself out of.

My friend Kim is a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly, and she has eyes in the back of her head. That is the kind of talent a small town runs on.

She called me on a Tuesday. She did not want to say it, I could hear it in her voice.

“Connie, I don’t want to be ugly,” she said. “But I rang Rick up Saturday with a whole buggy.”

“What kind of buggy,” I said.

“Boys’ jeans, a case of them. Three backpacks. Little sneakers with the lights in them. And he paid cash off a roll.”

I stood there holding the phone and did some arithmetic I did not want to do. Rick did not have any children.

Rick had never once mentioned a child to me in three years.

“Maybe for a nephew,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Maybe,” Kim said, in the voice that means no.

Where It Went

It took me two more weeks to put it together. I am not proud of how slow I was.

Love makes you stupid in a very particular way. It makes you argue the other side of your own case.

Her name was Tammy. She lived over in the next township in a rented doublewide with three kids and an on-again husband who was more off than on.

Rick had known her the whole time he had known me. A good while before, even.

I found out the way you find out everything in a county like ours, which is sideways and all at once.

A woman at the beauty shop, not meaning a thing by it, said she had seen Rick putting together a trampoline in Tammy’s side yard the Saturday before.

Sweating through his shirt. The kids jumping on it before he even had the net up.

A trampoline. A fourteen-foot trampoline runs you three, four hundred dollars at the farm store out on the highway.