The Old Farm Truck That Gave Daddy Back

Why Tina did it

I want to be fair to my sister, because people who hear this story tend to make her into somebody she isn’t.

Tina is four years older than me. She sells houses in Amarillo, and for a few years there she was good at it.

She had a nice office on the west side and a picture of herself on a bus bench on Georgia Street, smiling in a red jacket.

Then her husband left in the spring, and the market went soft over the summer, and she quit getting closings. I knew some of that.

I did not know she was two payments behind on her car and getting calls from a man in Dallas about it.

She told me later, a long time later, that she lay awake every night that fall listening for a tow truck.

She said she would have rather died than tell Daddy, and she would have rather died twice than tell me.

She also told me she was scared to death of Daddy driving. He had gotten light-headed once after a treatment in October and pulled off on the shoulder for a while.

She found out about it from a neighbor. In her mind she was doing two things at once: saving her car and keeping him off the road.

I believe she believed that. I also believe it was easier to believe because the second thing paid for the first one.

She traded her own car and Daddy’s truck together on a brand-new SUV, thirty-eight thousand dollars, with her name on the note.

The truck covered what she owed on her car and then some. Her payment went down. She told herself it was what Daddy would have wanted.