The Green Truck in the Driveway

“That can’t sit here, bud,” Brent said. He was standing at the edge of his garage with his arms folded, looking at my son’s truck the way you look at a dog that got into the trash.

Ethan had the engine still running. He had both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way the permit book tells you, and he did not take them off for a long second after Brent spoke.

I was in the passenger seat. It was a Saturday afternoon at the end of August, hot and still, and we had just driven that truck eleven miles from a farm north of town where Ethan had bought it an hour before.

“Put it on the street,” Brent said. “Out front is fine. Just not in the drive.” He said it pleasant enough.

He smiled when he said it. That was almost the worst part of it, how easy it came out of him.

Ethan shut the key off. The truck shuddered once the way old V8s do and went quiet, and then it was just the sound of somebody’s sprinkler two houses down and Brent’s dealership truck ticking in the shade.

“Okay,” Ethan said. That was all. He started it again, backed it down onto the street, and parked it along the curb in front of his mother’s new house like it was something he had borrowed and was ashamed of.

My name is Shane Lindgren. I am 44 years old, and I fix diesel engines at the co-op in our little town in eastern Nebraska.

I work on grain trucks, tractors, the big sprayers, and anything else that comes through the shop door with a problem.

Kara and I divorced three years ago. Nobody cheated and nobody threw anything.

We just got married at 21 and grew into two different people, and by the end we were polite to each other like neighbors who share a fence.

We have one son together. Ethan was 15 that summer, tall and lanky and quiet, all elbows and long feet.

He has my mother’s brown hair and Kara’s way of thinking a long time before he says anything at all.

We share custody, a week at a time, Saturday to Saturday. Kara lives in the county seat now, about eleven miles from my place.

I kept the acreage, the old house, and the steel shop my dad and I put up the year Ethan was born.

Kara married Brent Voigt a year and a half ago. Brent is 46. He sells new trucks at the Ford dealership in town, and he is good at it.

His picture hangs on the wall by the showroom door, salesman of the month more often than not.

Brent has two kids of his own from his first marriage, Kaylee, who is 13, and Norris, who is 10.

They are at the house every other week, same as Ethan. The weeks line up, so the three of them land under one roof together.

I had never had a real problem with Brent. He was friendly to me at ball games. He shook my hand.

He was a talker and I am not, but that is not a crime, and Kara seemed happier than she had been with me for a long time.

So I sat in my son’s truck on that street and watched Brent go back into his garage, and I told myself to let it lie.

It was Brent’s house. It was Brent’s driveway. It was not my place to stand in it and tell him what he could park there.

Ethan sat still beside me for a while after Brent went in.

He looked at the gauges on the dash, the fuel needle sitting just above a quarter, the temperature needle settled right where it ought to be.

“It runs good, though,” he said.

“It runs real good,” I told him. “That’s a 360 with a four-speed. Those old trucks will run forever if somebody takes care of them. You did fine picking it out.”

He nodded and didn’t look at me. Then he got out, got his duffel bag out of the bed, and walked up to his mother’s front door.

He waved at me once from the step, and I went home.