The Payment Stub on My Son’s Truck Title
My brother Wayne had come up beside me by then. He farms the ground east of my place, and he has the same red hair I do, gone mostly gray at the sides. He leaned down and said quietly, “You want me to say something, Shan?”
“No,” I said.
“She’s standing in your shed telling a lie.”
“I know where she’s standing,” I said.
Here is what I knew, standing there by the tea. If I corrected a seventy-year-old woman in front of half the county at her grandson’s graduation, Caleb would have to choose.
He would have to stand in the middle of that shed and decide whether his mother or his grandmother was the liar. He was eighteen years old. He had been in the middle of grown people since he was seven.
I was not going to put him there again. Not on his day.
So I did not say a word. I set down the cup I was holding and walked to my truck, the old Dodge parked out by the grain bin, and I got the manila envelope out of the glove box.
I had been planning to give it to him at the end of the night, quiet, just the two of us.
I had pictured it a hundred times. Him and me on the tailgate after everybody went home, me handing him the envelope, him not knowing what it was.
That picture was gone now. Marlene had seen to that.
You need to understand about the truck.
Caleb was fifteen when his old 4-H project, a rusted Ranger he had bought for four hundred dollars from a man in Jamesport, threw a rod on Route 6.
He had his learner’s permit and a job lined up for the summer bucking hay for my brother Dale, and Dale’s place is eleven miles from ours.
I was working days then at the feed store in Gallatin, making a little over twelve dollars an hour. There was no way.
Travis, his father, had been gone eight years by then. He paid child support for about the first fourteen months, and after that it came the way weather comes. Sometimes. Mostly not.
Travis is not a bad man. I want to say that plainly, because people like to make the ex-husband into a cartoon.
He is a man who got his back hurt on a pipeline job at thirty-four, got hooked on the pills they gave him for it, and spent ten years climbing out.
He is clean now. He drives a water truck in the oil field in North Dakota. He still does not send much.
The trucking company in Chillicothe was hiring a night dispatcher. Six nights on, eight hours a night, ten at night to six in the morning. Two dollars an hour more than the feed store, plus a night differential. I took it.
The credit union gave me a three-year loan on a used Silverado off a lot in Cameron. The truck cost twelve thousand dollars even, and I put down what I got for the Ranger as scrap, which was two hundred and sixty dollars. My payment was $358 a month.
I put the truck in my name, because Caleb was fifteen and could not sign for anything. He drove it to Dale’s every morning that summer.