Mom saw him too. I watched her hands on the wheel. I did not know what she was going to do. I honestly thought she might just look straight ahead and drive on by.
Instead she tapped the horn twice, two short friendly taps, and lifted her whole hand off the wheel and waved at him. A big wave, the kind she gives to everybody in town she has known for fifty years.
It was not mean. That was what made it land. It was the exact same wave she gives the mailman and the pastor and the boy who sacks groceries. There was nothing in it but good manners.
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Darrell lifted his hand halfway. He did not know what else to do. Every man on that bench had seen Arlette Pinson come by in a blue Ford Ranger and wave at her stepson like the sun was shining on her.
I watched in the side mirror as we went on down Main. I saw Cletus turn and look up at Darrell. I saw him say something. I saw Darrell shake his head and look down at his coffee.
What Cletus asked
I did not hear it myself. Bodie heard it the next morning at the co-op, from Cletus, who told it to him straight while they were loading feed.
Cletus had asked Darrell, right there in front of everybody, where Arlette’s Buick was. The Buick his daddy had been so proud of. The Buick he had washed every Saturday.
Darrell had said he sold it. Cletus asked who to. Darrell said a fellow from Eastland. Cletus asked who gave him the right to sell his stepmother’s only car.
“I didn’t raise my voice,” Cletus told Bodie. “I just asked him. And then I asked him what his daddy would have said. And that boy couldn’t give me one word. Not one.”
The other men on the bench did not say anything either. One of them got up and went inside the feed store. Another one finished his coffee and drove home early.
That was all of it. Nobody yelled. Nobody called anybody names. But by Friday everybody in Clyde knew Darrell had sold his stepmother’s car while she was away caring for her sister.
They did not hear it from Mom. They did not hear it from me. They heard it from the plain fact of a seventy-seven-year-old woman driving a borrowed-looking truck and waving at him like nothing in the world was wrong.