The Ranger I Signed Over to Mom

Saturday

Saturday morning Mom came out to our place for coffee, which she does about twice a month. She drove herself, of course. She parked the Ranger right back under the pecan tree where it used to live, and laughed at that too.

We were sitting at the kitchen table with the back door open and the screen latched when a pickup came up the gravel drive. It was Darrell’s truck.

Bodie set his cup down and stood up and went to the door. He did not go out. He just stood in the doorway, a big quiet man in his work shirt, so Darrell could see him.

Darrell got out slow. He had an envelope in his hand, a bank envelope, white and thick. He came up the steps and stopped on the porch and did not try the screen.

“Is Arlette here?” he asked.

Mom got up from the table before I could say anything. She went to the screen and looked through it at him, and then she unlatched it and stepped out onto the porch, and I went right behind her.

Darrell held out the envelope. His hand was not steady.

“It’s thirty-two hundred,” he said. “All of it. I went to the bank in Abilene yesterday.” He swallowed. “I can’t get the car back. The man already sold it on. I asked.”

Mom did not take the envelope right away. She looked at him. He was fifty-two years old and standing on my porch like a boy sent home from school.

“Why did you do it, Darrell?” she asked. Not angry. Just asking.

He looked at the porch boards a long time.

“I thought it was Daddy’s,” he said finally. “I thought since his name was on it, it was the last thing of his, and it ought to come to me. I told myself it was mine.” He shook his head. “Cletus asked me what Daddy would say. I know what Daddy would say.”

What Mom said

Mom took the envelope then. She did not open it or count it. She just held it in both hands.

“Your daddy was a good man,” she said. “He loved that car. But he loved you more, and he loved me, and he would not have wanted either one of us fighting over a Buick.”

“I’m sorry, Arlette.”

“I know you are,” she said. “Sunday dinner is at one. Fern is coming over from Abilene if she can manage the car with her hip. You come too.”

Darrell looked up at her. I do not think he had expected that. I am not sure I had expected it either, though I should have. Mom answered every call on that switchboard for thirty-one years, and she never hung up on anybody.

He nodded. He did not say anything else. He went back down the steps and got in his truck and drove off slow down the gravel.

Mom came back into the kitchen and set the envelope on the table and poured herself more coffee and sat down.

Bodie sat back down too. He looked at me across the table and lifted his eyebrows, and I shook my head. Neither one of us had anything to add.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose we know what this is for.”