The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook

He was quiet at supper all week. Not sulking, exactly. Thinking. I know the difference in that man after nineteen years.

Sulking has a slammed cabinet in it. Thinking is just quiet, and he was quiet.

Thursday night he said, from behind the paper, not looking at me, “Dale asked me today was everything all right at home.”

I did not say anything.

“In front of the whole dock,” he said. “‘Everything all right at home, bud? See your truck in the lot but it ain’t you driving it.'”

“What did you tell him,” I said.

“I told him it was a long story.” He folded the paper down and looked at me then, and there was no fight in his face, just a kind of tiredness. “It’s not a long story, though. Is it. It’s a real short one.”

“No,” I said. “It’s short.”

He went back behind the paper. But something had turned, I could feel it, the way you feel the weather change before the sky does anything.

I did not push it. You do not push Greg. You leave the keys on the hook and you let him get there.

Eileen at the Door

Friday I took the Ram like always and worked my line and came home at four with my ears still ringing from the floor. When I turned onto our street I saw my Equinox sitting in our driveway.

For a second my heart did something stupid and hopeful, the way it does. Then I saw Eileen standing on the back step in her good wool coat, the maroon one she wore to Ron’s funeral.

She had a towel-covered dish balanced on both hands and her chin going like a leaf.

I parked the truck at the curb and walked up slow.

“Lori,” she said. Her eyes were red. “I baked you a pie. It’s a sour cream raisin, it’s Greg’s favorite, I don’t even know why I made Greg’s favorite, I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

She laughed a little and it came out wet. “And I filled the tank. I filled it clear up.”

“Eileen,” I said. “You didn’t have to bring the car back.”

“I did, though.” She set the pie down on the rail and she took my hands, both of them, in her cold ones. “Honey, I did not know it was your only car. I want you to hear me say that.”

“Greg told me you all had two and you didn’t need the second one and his daddy would have wanted me taken care of. He said it so sure. And I was so tired and so sad I just took the keys and said thank you. I never once thought to ask was it yours.”

“It was mine,” I said, gentle as I could. “Paid it off in June.”

Her face just came apart. “Oh, Lori. Oh, I feel sick. June. You paid it off in June and my son handed it to me like it was a spare.”

She pressed her lips together hard. “Larraine Prewitt called me Wednesday. Dale’s wife. From church. She said she heard Greg was riding the carpool, and wasn’t that something, and I said what carpool, and she told me the whole thing right there in the fellowship hall.”

I had not thought about that. That it would get back to her through the church ladies, the way everything in a town our size gets back to everybody through the church ladies.

“I have been up two nights,” Eileen said. “A grown woman up at the window two nights over a car.”