The Payment Stub on My Son’s Truck Title
I thought about every Sunday I had sat three pews behind that woman. I had not known any of it.
I had thought she was just proud. Maybe she was. But it was a frightened kind of pride, the kind that is mostly fear in Sunday clothes.
“She wants to talk to you,” Caleb said. “She’s on the porch. She said she’ll wait as long as it takes.”
“Do you want me to?” I asked him.
He thought about it. He is like his granddad on my side that way. He thinks before he talks.
“I want you to do whatever you want,” he said. “But she’s my grandma, Mom. She’s the only one I’ve got on that side that shows up.”
That was the truest thing anybody said that whole day. Travis’s father died when Caleb was two. Travis was in North Dakota.
Marlene had come to every ball game Caleb ever played, every 4-H show, every band concert, every parent-teacher conference I could not make because I was asleep. She had driven him to the orthodontist in St. Joseph six times. That was true too.
“Okay,” I said.
Marlene was sitting in the lawn chair with her purse on her lap. Her hands were folded on top of it. She did not get up when I came around the corner. I think she was afraid her legs would not hold her.
I sat down in the other chair. For a while neither of us said anything. We watched the guests’ cars lined up along the fence row, and a couple of kids chasing barn cats, and the sun moving over toward the west.
“I’m sorry, Shannon,” she said finally. Her voice was thin. “I don’t know how to say it any better than that.”
“You told eighty people you bought that truck, Marlene.”
“I know.”
“You told them in my shed. At my son’s party. While I was standing right there.”
“I know.” She pressed her lips together. “I didn’t plan to. I had a cup of punch and the microphone was there and everybody was looking at him, and I just wanted, for one minute, for him to look at me like that. Like I was the one who did it.”
I looked at her hands. They were shaking a little on her purse. She has had a tremor for the last two or three years. I had noticed it at church and never asked.
“He’s going to love you no matter what,” I said. “You know that, don’t you? You didn’t need to buy him.”
She started crying then. Not loud. Marlene has never been loud about anything in her life except the Pruitt name. She just sat there in my lawn chair with tears running down into the powder on her cheeks, and she nodded, and nodded, and kept nodding.
“Travis called me last week,” she said after a while, when she could talk. “He said he couldn’t get off. He said he’d make it up to Caleb. He always says he’ll make it up to him.”
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve been making it up for him for eleven years, Shannon. I’m seventy years old. I’m tired.” She took a tissue out of her purse and pressed it to her eyes.