What I had been seeing
I had been seeing it for a while, if I was honest. I just had not put it together until Delia said it out loud.
At the September rally, Oren had stopped driving after dark. He made a joke of it, said he was getting old and liked his bed early. But he also stopped coming to the potluck if it ran past sunset, and Oren Pruitt has never in his life walked away from a covered dish.
He drove with his headlights on in the middle of the day. He wore his sunglasses even under the pavilion. At church back home in Winter Haven, he had started holding the hymnal out at arm’s length, and then he had started not opening it at all and singing the old ones from memory.
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And the glare. That afternoon in Arcadia, the sun had been low and to the west, straight off the white sides of every trailer on the row.
I drive a bus. Every spring I sit for the physical every bus driver has to pass and read the eye chart, and the nurse who does it told me once that glare is the first thing that goes with cataracts.
Bright light just turns into a wall.
My own grandpa had them. He drove his truck into the ditch by his mailbox in broad daylight and told my grandma a deer ran out. There was no deer. There was just the sun on the wet road.
“If you’re right,” Eric said, “then he can’t be driving that rig.”
“I know.”
“Then why are we sitting here?”
“Because if I file a claim on his insurance, an adjuster calls a sixty nine year old man and asks him how he missed a twenty six foot white trailer in broad daylight,” I said.
“And he either lies to the adjuster, or he tells the truth to a stranger before he tells it to you. I don’t want either one.”
Eric rubbed his face. “So what do you want?”
“I want him to tell you himself,” I said. “I want him to get to keep his pride and still hand you the keys. I think I can get him there. Give me till his birthday.”
His birthday was five weeks away. It would fall on the Saturday of the November rally, at a county campground on a lake outside Sebring.
Eric thought about it. He is not a man who likes waiting on something that matters. But he loves his father, and he knew his father better than anybody, and he knew what being cornered would do to him.
“Till his birthday,” he said. “Not one day after. And he doesn’t drive at night, and he doesn’t back in without a spotter, and if I see one more scrape, I’m taking the keys myself.”
“That’s fair,” I said. And it was.