The Old Farm Truck That Gave Daddy Back

The first Monday

I asked Daddy if he wanted to wait a week or two and get used to the truck.

He looked at me like I’d asked if he wanted to wait a week or two to breathe.

The first Monday in January he was up at five. I came out anyway, before work, because I couldn’t stand not to.

I told him I’d follow him in, just this once, and he said that was fine, as long as I stayed back far enough he didn’t have to look at me.

The sun came up a little before eight, low and orange across the stubble, so bright it lit up the frost on every stalk of stubble in the field.

It was clear and dead cold, about eighteen degrees, with no wind at all, which in the Panhandle is a kind of miracle.

He pulled the white Chevy out of the yard and down the dirt field lane to the county road. I was behind him in my car with the heater going.

And right there at the end of the lane, before he turned onto the pavement, he rolled his window down.

Eighteen degrees. He rolled it all the way down and put his forearm on the door, the way he drove every summer of my life, his hat square on his head and his brown canvas coat on.

He looked both ways for a long time. There was nothing coming for two miles either way. There never is. He looked anyway.

Then he pulled out onto the county road toward the elevator and town, and he didn’t look back at me once.

I stayed two lengths behind him for thirty miles. He drove fifty-five the whole way, steady as a combine, and signaled for every turn, even the ones with nobody around for a mile.

At the dialysis center he parked in the front row, got out, locked the truck, and walked in on his own two feet.

I sat in my car in the lot and watched the door close behind him, and then I went to work and couldn’t get a thing done all morning.

Tina in the lot

I’d meant to tell Tina. I really had. I’d started a text to her three different times between Christmas and New Year’s and deleted it every time.

Partly I didn’t know how to say it. Partly, I’m not proud of it, I wanted to see her face.

So I took a late lunch that Monday and drove back over to the center at a quarter past one.

I wanted to make sure Daddy’s pressure was good before he drove home. That was what I told myself.

His truck was still in the front row. And Daddy was sitting in it, behind the wheel, with the window down and his arm on the door.

Pat had taken his pressure and it was fine, and he’d eaten his crackers, and he was sitting out there in the sun because he wanted to.

“What are you waiting on?” I asked him, walking up.

“Your sister,” he said. “She’s my Monday ride. I wasn’t going to just leave without telling her.”

That is my father. A month of her running late, a month of that bench in the wind, and he was still not going to stand her up.

The SUV pulled in at one-forty. Tina was forty minutes late, the same as always.