The Ranger I Signed Over to Mom

The seat

She climbed up behind the wheel. She had to grab the door frame and pull, and she laughed at herself doing it, a little huff of a laugh.

Then she reached down under the seat for the lever and pulled it and scooted the whole bench forward. It went clunk, clunk, clunk, all the way to the last notch, until the steering wheel was nearly in her lap.

She sat there with her feet barely reaching the pedals and her chin about level with the top of the wheel, and she started laughing, a real laugh, the kind I had not heard out of her since before my stepdad got sick.

“Look how little I am,” she said. “Kyra, look at me. I look like a child driving her daddy’s truck.”

“You look fine,” I said, and my voice broke right down the middle of the word.

She rolled the window down. She held the key ring up in the bright light like it was a prize at the fair, and she grinned at me, and I leaned on the door with the signed title still in my hand.

A woman pushing a cart past us smiled at the two of us without knowing why. I suppose we looked like two people who had just won something. I suppose we had.

“Your stepdaddy would have liked this,” Mom said. “He always said you kept this truck cleaner than you kept your kitchen.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s a little true,” she said, and she started the engine.

Driving herself home

Bodie had left his truck at the feed store across the road that morning and caught a ride to work with his brother. I walked over and got in it. I wanted Mom to drive home by herself.

I followed her out of the lot. She signaled every turn, even the ones with nobody behind her but me. She drove three miles under the limit the whole way, both hands on the wheel, like she was taking her driving test.

When she turned into her own drive she pulled the Ranger right under the carport, into the spot where the Buick used to sit. The front tire stopped right on top of the old oil stain.

She sat in the truck a minute with the engine off. Then she got out and carried her own groceries into the house in two trips, and would not let me take a single sack.

“I am perfectly able,” she said. “I have a truck.”

Inside, she put the salmon in the cabinet and the milk in the icebox, and then she picked up the kitchen phone, the old one on the wall with the long cord, and called Aunt Fern in Abilene.

“Fern,” she said. “Kyra gave me her truck. No, the blue one. No, I drove it myself. I’ll be over Sunday same as always. Yes. Tell your hip hello.”