The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook

The Title He Signed

Here is how I lost my car. I want to tell it plain because the plainness is the part that still gets me.

Greg’s father, Ron, passed in October. A heart thing, fast, in the recliner during the Bears game, which is the way Ron himself would have picked if anybody had asked him.

Eileen found him. She called Greg before she called anybody, and Greg was out the door in his socks. For a month after that our house ran on casseroles and whispered phone calls and Greg sitting up late at the kitchen table with a glass he did not drink.

I loved Ron. I want that said too. He taught me to back a trailer and he never once treated me like the girl his boy brought home.

When he went, a light went off in that family. Nobody felt it harder than Eileen, who had cooked that man three meals a day for forty-six years and did not know what to do with a quiet house.

So when Greg came to me in December and said his mother needed a car, I said of course. Ron’s old truck had a bad transmission and sat dead in her drive, and Eileen had quit driving it years back anyway.

She needed something reliable to get to church and the Kroger and her sister’s place over in Clinton. I said yes before he finished the sentence.

I even said we should help her shop. I pictured the three of us at the lot on a Saturday, Eileen in the driver’s seat of something sensible, me reading the window sticker out loud. I had the whole good picture in my head.

That is the part that stung later. I had been glad to help. He never gave me the chance to be.

What I did not know was that he had already decided which car.

I came home from the plant on a Tuesday and my spot in the driveway was empty. For one cold second I thought it was stolen. Then Greg came out on the step with his hands in his pockets and that look on his face, the one that means he has done a thing and would like it to be over.

“I took the Equinox over to Mom’s,” he said. “She needs it more than we do.”

The Equinox was paid off in June. Six years of payments, the last one made in the summer. I had cried a little signing that final check because it was the first thing I had ever owned clean and clear in my life.

Eighty-one thousand miles on it and not a dollar owed. I drove it to the plant every single morning and it started at twenty below without a complaint.

“You gave her my car,” I said.

“I signed the title over this afternoon,” he said. “It’s done. She’s family, Lori.”

He said it done like a door closing. I stood in the driveway in the dark and did the only math there was to do. One car left. His.