The Payment Stub on My Son’s Truck Title
I could hear the box fan at the far end of the shed and the hum of the cooler compressors and, way off, somebody’s dog barking down the road.
It was the Missouri certificate of title for a 2006 Chevrolet Silverado. On the front was the credit union’s lien, with their release signed and stamped below it.
On the back, in the assignment section, I had already signed it over to Caleb Wayne Pruitt, the week the release came back in the mail.
Stapled to the top corner was a small slip of paper, a little smaller than a dollar bill. It was the receipt from the credit union drive-up for my last payment. Paid in full. Balance zero.
I handed it to him. I did not say anything. I just held it out, and he took it.
Caleb read the front of the title first. Then he turned it over and looked at the back, at his own name in my handwriting. Then he looked at the stapled slip.
He read it for a long time. Longer than it takes to read a credit union receipt. I watched his lips move a little, the way they used to when he was learning to read at the kitchen table.
Beside us I heard Marlene make a small sound. When I looked over, she had her hand up at her throat, flat against the collar of that floral top, the way women of her generation do when the air goes out of them.
Nobody in that shed moved. Eighty people, and you could have heard a cotton ball drop.
Caleb looked up at me. His eyes were wet. He held the slip up close to his face and read something off it again.
“February eighteenth,” he said.
I nodded.
“That’s the blizzard,” he said. “That’s the morning after the blizzard.”
I had not known he would remember. I had not known he would even notice the date.
The blizzard came through northern Missouri the week of Presidents Day. Fourteen inches in Chillicothe, drifts over six feet on 36, and the wind ran forty miles an hour all night long. They closed Interstate 35 from Cameron to the Iowa line.
I had nine trucks caught out in it. Two jackknifed on 36, a man named Ron stuck on the shoulder near Hamilton for eleven hours with his engine running and a quarter tank of fuel, and a young driver on his first winter who called me every twenty minutes because he was scared.
I stayed on the radio with that boy all night. I talked to him about his girlfriend in Joplin and his grandma’s cornbread and anything else I could think of to keep him awake and calm, while I worked the phones with the highway patrol and a wrecker service in Cameron. At five in the morning a plow finally reached Ron.
My relief could not get in. Nobody could. I worked that shift straight through to noon, fourteen hours, until the day dispatcher’s husband got her there on his tractor with a blade on the front.