The Payment Stub on My Son’s Truck Title
And then I drove home on roads that had been plowed one lane wide, in my old Dodge, and I stopped at the credit union drive-up in Chillicothe on the way, because the payment was due that day and I had never been late on that truck. Not once in thirty-six months.
The teller, a young woman named Amber who knew me by then, looked at me through the window and said, “Shannon, honey, you look like you’ve been through the wringer.”
“Last payment,” I said.
She ran it, and she printed the receipt, and she leaned into the microphone and said, “Congratulations. It’s all his.”
I sat in the drive-up lane for a minute and cried. Then I drove home and slept for eleven hours.
Caleb had been home all day, with school canceled, and he found me asleep on the couch in my coat with my boots still on.
He had pulled the boots off and covered me with the afghan off the back of the chair. I never knew it until that day in the shed.
“You were at work all night,” Caleb said now, in front of eighty people. “You were at work all night and all morning. And you went and paid on my truck.” He swallowed. “Then you fell asleep on the couch in your coat. I pulled your boots off. You never even woke up.”
“It was due,” I said.
He put the title down on the folding table beside him, very carefully, the way you put down something that might break. Then he stepped forward and put both arms around me, and he held on.
He is six foot two. My face was in his gown, which smelled like the high school gym and the pulled pork and the cologne his girlfriend had given him at Christmas.
He held on for a long time. I felt his chest jump once, the way it does when he is trying not to cry.
“Thank you, Mom,” he said, right against my ear, where nobody else could hear it. “Thank you.”
I did not trust myself to say anything back. I just patted his back like I used to when he was little and could not sleep.
Then he let go of me. He wiped his face with the sleeve of the gown. And he turned around.
I did not know what he was going to do. I want to be honest about that.
I had raised him for eighteen years, and I still stood there with my heart in my mouth, because I had just handed my son a piece of paper that made his grandmother a liar in front of the whole county, and I did not know which way he would go.
Part of me, a part I am not proud of, wanted him to say something cutting to her. Just one sentence. Just enough so people would know.
Caleb walked across the concrete to his grandmother. Marlene was still standing in the same place, her hand still at her throat.
Her face had gone pale under the rouge. She looked very small and very old, and I had never in my life thought of Marlene Pruitt as small.