The Green Truck in the Driveway

The Driveway

The subdivision was quiet on a Saturday noon. Somebody was mowing. A couple of kids were throwing a football in a front yard.

Ethan turned in off the highway and drove slow down the curving street, past the young trees and the new houses all alike.

He slowed at his mother’s house. I pulled up along the curb behind him and stopped.

For a second I thought he was going to park on the street the way Brent had told him to in August. His blinker was off.

Then he put the blinker on, turned up into the driveway, and pulled all the way up beside Brent’s dealership truck, and stopped.

He shut it off. He didn’t get out. He just sat there with his hands on the wheel, and Dad sat next to him.

The kids with the football stopped throwing it. They came across the yard to look, two boys and a little girl, and then the boy from across the street came over on his bike.

In a minute there were five or six kids standing on the sidewalk staring at that truck.

The front door opened and Norris came flying out in his socks. “Ethan!” he hollered. “Is that it? Is that your truck?”

Kaylee came out behind him, slower, with her phone in her hand, and stopped on the step with her mouth open.

Then the garage door started up.

Brent came out from inside. He had a cup of coffee in his hand, and he stopped at the edge of the garage, right where he had stood in August with his arms folded, and he looked at that green truck for a long time.

I got out of my pickup and stood by the mailbox. I didn’t go up the drive.

It wasn’t my place. Kara came out on the front step behind Kaylee and put her hand over her mouth.

Brent set his coffee down on the workbench in the garage. He walked down the drive, slowly, all the way around the truck.

He bent down and looked at the cab corner behind the driver’s door. He ran his thumb along the seam where the patch panel was welded in.

He stood up and looked at the yellow wheels. He looked at the new tires. He knelt down and looked underneath at the new brake lines, and he stayed down there longer than I expected.

The old man next door came out of his garage, too. His name is Grady, and Kara told me later he was the president of the homeowners association, the same one who sent the letter in the spring.

He walked over across the grass with his hands in his pockets.

“Well, I’ll be,” Grady said. “Is that a ’76? My brother had one just like it. Except his wasn’t green.” He looked in the passenger window at Dad. “Who did the paint?”

“The boy did,” Dad said. “Him and his dad.”

Grady whistled. He walked around it the same way Brent had. “That’s the nicest thing that’s been parked on this street since we moved in,” he said.

He turned to Brent. “You ought to be proud of him, Brent.”

Brent stood there on his own driveway, beside his own truck, with the association president and half the neighborhood kids looking at him.

His face went red, slowly, from the collar up. He didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he walked around to the driver’s window. Ethan had rolled it down. Brent put one hand on the green door and looked at my son for a long moment.

“You did this?” he asked. “The welding? The brakes?”