The Ranger I Signed Over to Mom

The kitchen table

Bodie was at the kitchen table with the farm paper when I came in. He took one look at my face and folded the paper and got up and poured me a glass of tea without a word.

I told him the whole thing. He listened the way he listens to a cow that is calving wrong, quiet and still, with his hands flat on the table.

“I could go talk to him,” Bodie said. “Just talk.”

“Mom doesn’t want trouble,” I said. “She wants a car. She wants to drive to the store on Thursday.”

Bodie sat a long minute. Then he looked out the kitchen window at the old blue Ford Ranger parked under the pecan tree, the truck I drove for fourteen years before the county gave me a work truck.

“That Ranger is paid off,” he said. “Has been for nine years. It just sits there.”

I looked at the truck and then at my husband. He had already gotten up and gone to the gun safe in the hall, where we keep the deeds and the titles and the birth certificates in a gray accordion folder.

He came back and laid the Ranger’s title on the table in front of me. Cream paper with a green scroll border, my name on the front, the back still blank where a seller signs.

“She can’t drive a stick,” I said.

“It’s an automatic,” Bodie said. “You bought the automatic because you said you were tired of clutching through every cattle guard in the county.”

I laughed for the first time all day. Then I put my head down on my arms on the kitchen table and cried for about two minutes, and Bodie rubbed my back and did not say a thing.

When I sat up, he had already found a pen in the junk drawer and set it on top of the title.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Give it to her tomorrow. Before she has to ask anybody for a ride.”