The Old Farm Truck That Gave Daddy Back

Christmas morning

Mike drove the Chevy out to the farm before daylight on Christmas morning, and I followed him in our car.

We parked the truck in the front yard, right in front of the porch steps, where the first thing Daddy would see when he opened the door was that faded white hood.

It was a clear morning, cold, the kind of Panhandle Christmas where the sky goes from black to pink to that hard winter blue all in about fifteen minutes, and the frost is on everything and nothing moves but the windmill.

Mike went in and got the coffee started. I sat on the porch steps and waited. I could hear Daddy moving around inside, slow, the way he does in the mornings now.

When he came out the door in his coat and his hat, he had his coffee cup in his hand.

He saw me first. He said, “Sis, what are you doing out here in the cold?” Then he saw the truck.

He stood on the top step for a long time. I don’t know how long. Long enough for the steam to quit coming off his coffee.

“That’s Gene’s,” he said finally.

“It’s yours,” I said. “Gene sold it to me and I’m giving it to you. The title’s in the glove box. Monday we go to the tax office and put it in your name.”

He didn’t say anything. He set his coffee cup down on the porch rail and went down the steps one at a time, holding the rail, and walked out across the frozen grass to the driver’s side.

He opened the door. It creaked the way those old Chevys do.

He got in and sat behind the wheel. He put both hands on it, at ten and two, the way he taught us.

He didn’t start it. He just sat there with the door open and looked out the windshield at the county road.

I stayed on the steps. I figured a man ought to have a minute.

After a while he reached into his coat pocket and took out his wallet, and I thought he was going to try to pay me, and I was getting ready to argue.

But he took out one dollar bill, smoothed it flat on his leg, and laid it on the dash, right up against the windshield where the sun could hit it.

“What’s that for?” I called.

“Pat’s coffee,” he said. “She’s been buying mine out of her own pocket every Monday since I came home. I’m going to start buying hers.”

That is when I quit being able to sit on those steps.

I went in the house and stood in the hall by the coat hooks and cried into Mike’s shirt, and Mike patted my back and said, “Well, it runs,” which is the most romantic thing he has ever said to me.