The Ranger I Signed Over to Mom

The car and the woman who drove it

I should tell you about the Buick, because to anybody else it was only an old silver sedan with a dent in the back bumper from a feed store post.

My stepdad bought it new in 2009, the year he retired from the gas company. He drove it to his coffee every morning and to church every Sunday, and he washed it every Saturday in the driveway with a bucket and a chamois.

When he got sick, Mom drove him in it. Every Tuesday and Thursday for most of a year she drove him to his treatments in Abilene, thirty-some miles each way, with a thermos of coffee and a crossword book on the seat between them.

After he passed, three years ago this spring, the Buick became hers in every way but on paper. She kept meaning to go to the tax office in Baird and put it in her name. There was always a reason to put it off.

That car was how Mom stayed Mom. She drove herself to the store every Thursday. She drove to her heart doctor once a month. She drove to Aunt Fern’s on Sunday afternoons and to Wednesday night supper at church.

She did not ask anybody for rides. She had not asked anybody for anything since my real daddy died when I was nine and she went to work nights on the switchboard to keep the lights on.

Darrell is my stepdad’s son from his first marriage. He was twenty-one and long gone from home when Mom married his daddy. I was fourteen. We were never close, but we were never enemies either.

He came to Thanksgiving most years. He sat with his daddy at the end. At the funeral he took the strongbox out of the hall closet and said he would sort out the papers. Nobody thought a thing about it.

Why we did not call anybody

I know what some people would say. Call the sheriff. Call a lawyer. Make him bring it back. I said all of that myself, sitting on that porch step with the phone still warm in my hand.

Mom sat down next to me and put her hand on my knee.

“I will not have your stepdaddy’s boy arrested,” she said. “Not over a car. Not with his daddy three years in the ground. I just want to be able to drive.”

“Mom, he sold your car.”

“He sold his daddy’s car,” she said. “That is what he will tell anybody who asks, and the paper is on his side. I don’t want the Buick, Kyra. I want to get to the store on Thursday without calling you at work.”

She was right about the paper, and that was the part that stuck in my throat. The title said my stepdad’s name and nothing else. Untangling that would take months, and Mom would sit home the whole time.

I am the county extension agent here. I spend my days on soil tests and 4-H steer weights and pecan scab. I know how long things take when the paper is crooked. I did not want Mom waiting on paper.

So I took her inside, and I made her a grilled cheese, and I put her suitcase in her room, and I drove home with my jaw so tight my teeth hurt.

The whole way home I passed pastures I had walked for work. Mesquite, prickly pear, a stock tank full from the February rain. None of it looked the same.