The Green Truck in the Driveway

I figured I was the one riding along. That’s what I had planned. I’m his dad. I had my wallet and my license in my pocket and my coffee in my hand.

Then Ethan turned around and looked at my father.

“Grandpa,” he said. “Would you ride with me?”

Dad looked at him. He didn’t say anything.

“You have to have somebody over 21 in the front seat,” Ethan said, and his voice was a little uneven, the way it gets when he has worked up to something. “I want it to be you. It’s your green.”

I have seen my father cry twice in my life. Once when my mother died, and once the day he sold the cows. He didn’t cry that morning.

But it was close. I saw it come up in him and I saw him put it back down, the way men his age learned to.

He handed me his coffee cup without a word. Then he walked around the front of that green truck, opened the passenger door, and climbed in.

It took him a minute. His knees aren’t good. He settled into the seat and pulled the door shut.

He sat there and looked at the dash for a long time. He ran his hand along the top of it.

Then he looked over at his grandson, standing in the open door, and he smiled the biggest smile I had seen on him since my mother passed.

“Well, get in,” he said. “You’ll be late, and I’m not writing you a note.”

Ethan laughed and climbed in. I stood there on the gravel with two cups of coffee in my hands and watched my son start his truck.

It caught on the first try. It always did, after the work we had put in.

I wasn’t the least bit sorry about the passenger seat. I want you to know that. Watching the two of them sitting there was worth more to me than any ride I could have taken.

Town

I followed them into town, a good long ways back so I wouldn’t make him nervous. He drove those eleven miles like he was carrying eggs.

He signaled every turn, even on the empty gravel. I could see Dad’s cap through the back window, nodding along.

Dad and I ate breakfast at the cafe on the square while Ethan was in class. Dad told the waitress all about the truck, then the two old men at the next table, then the waitress again.

When class let out at noon, we walked back over to the lot.

Ethan came out with a handbook under his arm and a look on his face like he’d just been given the keys to the world.

It was Saturday, and that meant it was the start of his mother’s week. Normally I would drive him in and drop him at the curb.

That day, he was going to drive himself, with Grandpa in the passenger seat, and I was going to follow and bring Dad home after.

I could tell Ethan had been thinking about it. He sat behind the wheel a second before he started it, and he looked at me through the open window.

“Should I park it on the street?” he asked me.

I thought about it. I thought about it hard. Then I said, “Son, it’s your mother’s house too. You park it wherever you think is right.”

He nodded slowly and started it up.