The Payment Stub on My Son’s Truck Title
I watched the dust settle on the section road. I thought about Marlene in the passenger seat of that truck, and I thought about Caleb, and I did not know what they were saying to each other, and I could not stand not knowing.
When the truck came back up the drive, Caleb parked it at the shed door again, right where it had been. He came around and helped his grandmother down.
She did not come back into the shed. She walked around the side of it, toward my porch, and she sat down in one of the two old metal lawn chairs I keep there.
Caleb came and found me. He took me by the elbow and walked me out back behind the shed, where the bean planter sits under the lean-to, and nobody could hear.
“She told me,” he said.
“Told you what, honey?”
“The truth. She said it first thing, before we even got to the blacktop.” He swallowed.
“She said, ‘I didn’t buy you this truck. Your mother did. I gave five hundred dollars one time, and I let it get bigger every time I told it, until I believed it myself.'”
I did not say anything.
“She said she was sorry,” Caleb said. “She said she wasn’t sorry to me, she was sorry to you, and she didn’t know how to say it to you, so she was saying it to me first so she could practice.”
He laughed a little, the way you laugh when something is not funny but is too much to hold.
“And then she told me why,” he said.
What Marlene told my son on that section road was something I had known for years and never once said out loud, even to myself.
Travis was her only boy. When he got hurt, and then got hooked on the pills, and then left, Marlene was the one who had to come to church every Sunday and sit in the pew knowing what people said about her son.
She was the one who had to face Caleb at Christmas when his daddy did not call.
So she had started covering. Little things at first. When Caleb was nine, a bicycle showed up at Christmas with a card that said “Love, Dad.”
Travis had not bought it. Marlene had. When Caleb was twelve, a check came for his 4-H steer. That was Marlene too, with Travis’s name on the memo line.
“She said she was so scared I’d grow up thinking the Pruitts didn’t care about me,” Caleb said.
“That I’d hate Dad. That I’d hate her. That I’d hate the whole name. So she kept telling stories about how the Pruitts took care of me, and some of them were true, and some of them were her, and some of them were nobody.”
“And the truck,” I said.
“She said the truck was the biggest thing in my life and she couldn’t stand that none of it was from her side.” He looked at the ground.
“She said every time somebody at church said, ‘That’s a nice truck Caleb has,’ she said, ‘Well, I helped.’ And then one day she said, ‘I bought it,’ and nobody corrected her, and after that she couldn’t take it back.”