The Ranger I Signed Over to Mom

The tax office

Tuesday morning I drove Mom to the tax office in Baird, the county seat, with the signed title in a manila envelope on the seat between us. This time she drove and I rode.

The clerk at the window was a girl I had judged a 4-H rabbit for once, all grown up now with reading glasses on a chain. She looked over the title, had Mom fill out the application, and checked our licenses.

Because it was a gift between family and not a sale, there was no sales tax. There was a ten dollar gift tax and the title fee, and Mom paid it out of her own coin purse in exact change.

“The new title will come in the mail in about three weeks,” the girl said. “In your name, Mrs. Pinson. The sticker on the windshield is still good through October.”

Mom thanked her as if she had done something wonderful. Then she called her insurance man from the parking lot and had him move the Buick’s coverage over to the Ranger. It took four minutes.

“There,” she said, and snapped her purse shut. “That is how you do a thing properly.”

I thought about the Buick, and the title still in my stepdad’s name, and the man in Eastland who had paid cash for it. I thought about how a thing done properly takes four minutes, and a thing done crooked takes years.

Darrell calls

Darrell called me Tuesday night. I knew he would. Clyde is a small town and Shirlene is a fine woman, but she does talk, and Mom’s Ranger had already been seen in two parking lots.

“You trying to make me look bad?” he said. No hello.

“I gave Mom a truck,” I said. “That’s all I did.”

“Everybody at the coffee shop wants to know why Arlette’s driving your old Ford. What am I supposed to tell them?”

I thought about that for a second. I stood in my kitchen and looked at the empty spot under the pecan tree where the Ranger used to sit.

“Tell them whatever’s true, Darrell,” I said. “I haven’t told anybody a thing. Neither has Mom. She won’t. You know she won’t.”

He was quiet. I could hear him breathing. For a second I thought he might say something real. Then he said, “It was Daddy’s car,” the way you say a thing you have said too many times to yourself.

“I know it was,” I said. “And she was his wife. Goodnight, Darrell.”