The Last Pull in Grandpa’s Ford

“Not even gas money?”

“I don’t think so.”

She lay there a while. “That’s my cousin,” she said finally. “He’s not a bad man, Brad.” I didn’t say he was. I lay there and listened to the fan.

I brought it up with Ty once, in August, out in the driveway while he was washing his car.

“You ever talk to Butch about the purses?” I asked.

He kept washing. “It’s his truck, Dad.”

“You’re the one driving it.”

“It’s his truck,” he said again. “He pays for everything. Fuel, tires, the blower, all of it. He’d let somebody else drive it if I made a thing about it. Please don’t make a thing about it.”

I stood there with my hands in my pockets. My son was sixteen and he had never asked me for much of anything, and here he was asking me for this.

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t make a thing about it.”

And I didn’t. That was the truth of it. I couldn’t argue the purses. It was Butch’s truck, Butch’s money in the truck, Butch’s name on the side. My boy loved driving it and asked me straight out not to make a scene, and a man keeps his word to his son.

Then came the fair two counties over, the third week of August, and the grandstand, and the microphone, and the hired help.

Driving home that night, Ty sat in the passenger seat of my pickup with his fire suit unzipped and tied around his waist and his helmet in his lap, and he looked out the window at the beans going by in the dark.

“He was just joking,” he said, before I’d said anything.

“I know.”

“It’s just how he talks.”

“I know it is.”

“It was kind of funny,” Ty said, and his voice cracked on funny, just a little, the way it hadn’t cracked since he was fourteen.

I didn’t answer that. I couldn’t. I just drove.

When we got home Tricia was waiting up in the kitchen. She took one look at Ty’s face and didn’t ask a single question. She made him a grilled cheese at eleven o’clock at night and sat across from him while he ate it.

After he went up to bed, she turned to me.

“I heard about it,” she said. “Pam called me.”

Pam is Butch’s wife. She’d been in the grandstand.

“Pam said she wanted to crawl under the bleachers,” Tricia said. “She said she told him on the way home it wasn’t funny, and he said everybody laughed. And she said, Butch, everybody always laughs at the man holding the microphone.”

“Smart woman,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” Tricia asked.

“I told Ty I wouldn’t make a thing about it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“The county fair is Labor Day weekend,” I said. “The grandstand pull. It’s the last pull of the season.”

“I know when the fair is, Brad.”

“There’s a stock class,” I said. “Street trucks. Seventy-five dollars to enter.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she started to smile, slow, the way she smiles when she has figured out what a kid is really sick with.

“Your dad’s Ford,” she said.

My dad, Cecil Ketchum, is seventy-four years old. In the spring of 1978, when he was twenty-six, he walked into the Ford dealer in town, the one that’s a tire shop now, and bought a brand new F-250 four-wheel drive with a 400 under the hood and a four-speed on the floor.