The Green Truck in the Driveway

Supper

I did not hear about supper until Monday. Kara called me at the co-op on my lunch break, and I took it out back by the fuel tanks where it was quiet. She did not say hello. She just started talking.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “And I need you to not do anything about it. Can you promise me that?”

“I can’t promise till I know what it is,” I said.

She was quiet for a second, and I could hear her breathing. Then she told me how Saturday supper had gone.

All five of them were at the table, Brent at the head, the kids in between, a roast she had put in the slow cooker that morning.

Norris, Brent’s boy, had asked whose old truck was out on the street. He was 10 and he did not mean anything by it. He was just curious, the way boys are about trucks.

And Brent laughed and said, “That’s Ethan’s. I told him if he parks it in the driveway, the neighbors are going to think we took in a hired man.”

Kaylee laughed. Norris laughed, because his dad laughed. Kara said she laughed too, a little, before she caught herself, and she told me that part as if it hurt her to say it.

“Ethan didn’t laugh,” she said. “He just ate his supper. He said thank you for the roast. Then he went down to his room and shut the door, and he didn’t come up the rest of the night.”

I stood out there by the fuel tanks with the phone in my hand and looked at the grain elevator across the tracks. It was a while before I could trust my voice.

“What did you say to Brent,” I asked her.

“I told him it wasn’t funny,” she said. “After, in the kitchen. He said it was a joke. He said the boy needs a thicker skin if he’s going to get anywhere in this world.” She stopped. “Shane, he’s not a bad man.”

“I didn’t say he was.”

“I know you didn’t.” She let out a long breath. “There’s more to it. In the spring, the association sent us a letter and fined us a hundred dollars. My old Pontiac was in the drive with the rust on the quarter panel, and somebody complained. Brent was embarrassed half to death.”

“So he sold it,” I said. I remembered her driving a new Ford in May.

“He traded it in at the dealer that same week. He says he was teaching Ethan to have some pride in what he owns. He says he’ll thank him someday.” She was quiet again.

“I don’t think he thought about how it sounded at the table. Not till after.”

I believed her. I want to be fair to Brent here, because I have thought about him a great deal since.

I think he really did believe he was doing my boy a favor. But a joke about a hired man, in front of his own kids, was not a favor.

“Is Ethan okay?” I asked.

“He says he is,” Kara said. “You know how he is.”

I did know how he was. He was the kind of boy who would rather swallow a thing whole than make anybody uncomfortable, and that worried me more than if he had hollered.