The Old Ford in Mom’s Driveway

The $300

Monday I was back at Mom’s on my lunch hour. I work on tractors and grain trucks at the implement dealer in town, and Mom had called the shop at nine.

“Trace is coming by at noon,” she said on the phone. “He has an idea about the truck.”

I did not like the sound of that, and I got there first. Mom had coffee on and a plate of sugar cookies out, because that is what she does when anybody is coming, even family, even about bad news.

Trace pulled in at ten after twelve. He came in the kitchen door with his cap in his hand, which he did not usually do, and he sat down at the table across from his grandmother.

“Grandma, I feel real bad about the truck,” he said. “I been thinking about it all night.”

“Well, it’s not your fault it’s old,” Mom said. That was Mom. She would hand you the excuse before you could even reach for it.

“I asked around,” he said. “An engine for that truck, put in by a shop, you’re looking at four or five thousand dollars. And the truck’s thirty years old. It’s not worth it, Grandma. It’s junk.”

Mom did not say anything. She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

He took three hundred-dollar bills out of his shirt pocket and laid them on the oilcloth. “I’ll haul it off myself so you don’t have to pay a wrecker.”

I sat there and looked at that money. Three hundred dollars was about what a scrap yard would give you for a dead truck that size. He had done his homework. He had made it sound like a kindness.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked him.

He did not look at me. “Part it out, probably. Sell what’s good.”

I already knew. Trace was building an old Mustang for the dirt track at the fairgrounds, and since spring he had asked every mechanic in the county for a good Ford 300 six, the kind that is hard to kill and cheap to build.

Dad’s truck had the 4.9 liter inline six, the Ford 300, with its oil changed every three thousand miles for thirty years.

The crankshaft was hurt, but the block was the prize. A good block that has never been overheated is worth real money to a boy building a race engine. A lot more than three hundred dollars.

He had broken it, and then he had come to buy the pieces cheap from the woman he broke it on. And he figured his grandma would never know the difference between a dead truck and a block he could clean up and race.

Mom looked at the money for a long time. Then she looked out the kitchen window at the truck sitting in the drive under the maple, with the leaves just starting to turn on the side that got the afternoon sun.