The Ranger I Signed Over to Mom

Monday morning

I took the morning off. The county owes me more comp time than I will ever use, and my secretary said she would hold the calls from the man with the yellow peach leaves.

Bodie checked the oil and the transmission fluid before he went to work. He aired up the tires and frowned at them. “These are about done,” he said. “She’ll get through spring on them, but not summer.”

I washed that truck in the driveway with a bucket and a sponge, the way my stepdad used to wash the Buick. I cleaned eighteen months of seed catalogs and fence staples out from behind the seat.

I found a 4-H ribbon from 2014 under the floor mat and a pair of fencing pliers I had given up for lost. I vacuumed the bench seat and wiped down the dash until it shone.

Then I sat in the driver’s seat a minute with my hand on the wheel. That truck had carried me to every county fair and every stock show and every pasture call for fourteen years. It knew the way to Mom’s by itself.

I did not feel sad about it. I felt like I was finally handing something back to a woman who had handed me everything.

The grocery store

I picked Mom up at one o’clock. She came out the front door in her turquoise windbreaker with her list in one hand and her purse on her arm, like any Monday, and climbed up into the Ranger’s passenger side.

“Is this your old truck?” she asked. “I thought you didn’t drive this anymore.”

“It still runs,” I said. “Buckle up.”

The sky was that hard bright blue we get out here in March, before the wind turns and the dust comes. The wheat fields along the highway were green and the redbuds were just starting to show in town.

At the store she went down her list the way she always does, one aisle at a time, nothing that was not written down. Bread, milk, oatmeal, two cans of salmon, a bag of oranges, a jar of the good pickles.

At the register Shirlene rang her up. She has been checking groceries there since before I was in high school, and she knows every car in the county by sight.

“Where’s your Buick, Arlette?” she asked. “I didn’t see it out there.”

Mom counted her bills out of her coin purse. “It’s been seen to,” she said, and that was all she said, and Shirlene knew better than to ask twice.

Out in the parking lot I put the sacks in the bed of the truck. Then I opened the driver’s door instead of the passenger door, and I stood there holding it.

“Mom,” I said. “Get in this side.”

She looked at me for a long moment. She is little, maybe five feet even, and the afternoon sun was full on her face, and I could see her working it out one line at a time.

“Kyra,” she said. “What did you do?”

I took the title out of my back pocket. I laid it flat on the hood and signed the back where it says seller, and in the space for the price I wrote the word gift in plain letters.

Then I handed her the pen and showed her where to sign as the buyer. Her hand shook a little on the first letter and then steadied, and she wrote Arlette Pinson in the same round hand she has used on every birthday card of my life.

I put the keys in her palm and closed her fingers over them.

“It’s yours,” I said. “It’s paid for. It has good brakes and a new battery. Bodie says the tires will get you to summer.”

“I can’t take your truck.”

“You’re not taking it. I gave it to you. There’s a difference, and you taught me the difference.”