The Old Farm Truck That Gave Daddy Back

The wind was coming hard across the hospital parking lot in Amarillo, and my sister was holding her purse against her chest like something in it might get away from her.

“Don’t look at me like that, Lacey,” Tina said. “He signed it. He wanted to sign it. You can go up there and ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.”

I had taken the afternoon off from the grain co-op and driven up from Hereford with clean pajama pants for Daddy and a sack of Allsup’s burritos for whoever was hungry.

I had not expected to find my sister waiting by my car.

“Signed what?” I asked, though I think I already knew. The corner of a Texas title was sticking up out of her purse zipper, folded once, with the state seal showing on the back.

“The truck,” she said. “Daddy’s truck. Lacey, he is seventy-four years old. He’s on dialysis three days a week. He just about died of a kidney infection. He’ll never drive again anyway.”

She said it the way you say the weather. Then she pulled her coat tighter and looked off toward the interstate, where the trucks were going by in a long gray line toward Oklahoma City.

Daddy’s truck was a 2016 Chevrolet Silverado, half-ton, paid off three years before.

He had bought it with the last good wheat check he ever got, the summer before his kidneys quit on him, and he kept it washed even when nobody else on our road bothered.

“Where is it?” I said.

“Where is what?”

“The truck, Tina. It was in his driveway Sunday. Where is it right now?”

She had the grace to look at the ground. “There’s a dealership on Soncy that’ll take it in on trade. I’m going over there this afternoon. It’s done, Lacey. I’m not asking you. I’m telling you so you don’t hear it at church.”

I stood there in that wind with the burritos going cold in the sack, and I did not yell at my sister.

I want to say that was because I was raised right. Mostly it was because I could not think of a single word.

The title in the bed

Daddy was sitting up when I got to his room, with the TV on a cattle sale out of Oklahoma that he was not watching.

His hands were on top of the blanket. They looked bigger than usual, the way an old farmer’s hands do when the rest of him has gone thin.

I didn’t take my coat off. I sat in the chair by the window and asked him straight out whether he had signed his title over to Tina, and he said yes, he had, that morning, and he would thank me not to make a fuss about it.

“She needed it worse than I do, sis,” he said. That’s what he called both of us, all our lives. “I’m not going anywhere for a while. No sense it sitting in the yard.”

“Daddy, she’s trading it. She’s not driving it. She’s trading it on something for herself.”

He looked at the TV a long time. A man in a white hat was selling black baldies by the pound, and Daddy watched the price like it mattered to him.

Then he said, “Well. I signed it. A man signs something, he signed it.”

I told him I could talk to somebody. I didn’t know who. A lawyer, the dealership, the county tax office. Somebody. He shook his head before I finished the sentence.

“You are not going to get your sister in trouble over a pickup,” he said. “Not while I’m alive. I won’t hear of it, Lacey. You hear me?”

I heard him. That was the whole of it. He signed the title himself, with a clear head, and he would not let me lift a finger against his girl.

So I didn’t. I couldn’t undo it, and I have made my peace with that.