The Payment Stub on My Son’s Truck Title
Marlene Pruitt took the cordless microphone out of my brother’s hand like it had been waiting for her all afternoon. She was standing between the cake table and the coolers, in her good floral top, her gray perm fresh from the beauty shop in Trenton.
“I just want to say a few words about this young man,” she said, and the speaker on the hay wagon squealed until my brother Dale reached over and turned the knob down. Eighty people turned toward her. Folding chairs scraped on the concrete.
It was the third Saturday in May, and my machine shed in Daviess County, Missouri, had never looked better. Red and white streamers ran across the rafters and along every beam.
Caleb’s school colors. I had hung them myself at five that morning, standing on the tailgate of my brother’s Ford.
My son stood near the open shed door in his red graduation gown, open over a tan T-shirt, a paper plate of pulled pork in one hand.
He had walked across the stage at the high school gym that morning. He was eighteen. He was taller than everyone in his family except my brother Wayne.
Behind him, parked right at the door where everybody could see it, sat his truck. A 2006 Chevy Silverado, silver, with 141,000 miles on it when we bought it and 168,000 now.
“When this boy turned fifteen,” Marlene said, “he told me he wanted a pickup more than anything in the world. And I said, Caleb, Grandma will take care of it. And I did.”
She turned and pointed at the Silverado. A few people clapped. Caleb’s best friend Tyler whistled through his fingers.
“Twelve thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s what a grandmother’s love looks like. The Pruitts take care of their own.”
The clapping got louder. Somebody from the church said, “Bless you, Marlene.” I watched my son’s face, and I saw him look at the truck, then at his grandmother, then at me.
He did not know what to do with what he had just heard. I could see that from forty feet away.
I was standing by the sweet tea dispenser in my green blouse, with my red hair pulled back in a ponytail because it had been ninety minutes of hauling ice.
I felt every eye in that shed slide over to me, the way people look at the ex-wife at any party where the ex-husband’s family is talking.
My name is Shannon Pruitt. I kept the name for Caleb. I am forty-four years old, and for the last three years I have worked the night desk as a dispatcher for a trucking outfit off Highway 36, outside Chillicothe.
I paid for that truck. Every dollar of it.
I want to tell this honestly, which means I have to tell you what I wanted to do first.
I wanted to walk across that concrete floor, take the microphone out of Marlene’s hand, and read eighty people the loan history off my phone. I had it. Thirty-six payments of $358 to the credit union in Chillicothe.