The Spare Key on Dad’s Hook

The phone call

I called Brent from my car that afternoon, parked in the bus barn lot before the afternoon routes went out. I gave him every chance to make it easy.

“Brent, I’m calling about Dad’s pickup. He needs it back. He’s been walking to the cafe since August. A mile each way.”

There was a long breath on the other end. Somewhere behind him I could hear a nail gun popping.

“Merilee, he’s eighty-five,” Brent said. “He’s got no business driving. I’m doing everybody a favor. My truck’s dead, I’ve got jobs lined up till Thanksgiving, and an old man doesn’t need a pickup to drink coffee.”

“His license says he does.”

“His license says he passed an eye test.” The nail gun popped again. “Look, I’ll talk to Annette. We’ll figure it out after the holidays.”

After the holidays. That was another six weeks of walking in the dark mornings, and no Sunday drives to the cemetery until spring if the snow came early.

I did not argue. I said, “All right, Brent,” and hung up, and sat in the bus barn lot watching the drivers walk out to their buses with their thermoses.

I do not think Brent is a bad man. I want to say that plainly.

His truck was dead, his crew needed paying, and he had talked himself into a story where taking an old man’s pickup was the responsible thing to do.

But a man can talk himself into a lot of things. That does not make them so.

Saturday

My husband, Elroy, works the Saturday half shift at the plant in Vandalia. He offered to take the day off when I told him.

I said no, this needed to be quiet, but I would take a ride.

We picked Dad up at half past eleven. It was a bright, cold day with a hard blue sky, the kind of November noon where the sun is low but strong and everything has a sharp edge to it.

Dad was waiting on the porch in his tan barn coat and his brown corduroy cap. He had shaved. He had his reading glasses in his shirt pocket and the spare key in his hand.

“I’m coming,” he said, before I could tell him he did not have to. “It’s my truck. I’ll not send my daughter to fetch it like I’m laid up.”

My husband got out and opened the back door of his car for Dad. Dad climbed in and set his cap square and said, “Son, you’ve got a good woman.” My husband said, “Yes sir, I know it.”

The drive out took twenty minutes. We went up through Vandalia and out past the river, then north on a county road where the bean fields were cut down to stubble and the ditches were full of brown foxtail.

Dad watched the fields go by the whole way. He named who farmed each one, and whose father had farmed it before them, and which ones he had hauled grain out of in what year.

Brent’s shop sits back off the road behind a stand of bare trees.

There is a gravel yard, a pole barn with the big door rolled open, a work trailer, and a stack of siding at one end.

And there, parked beside the siding stack with its tailgate down, sat Dad’s faded green pickup.

He pulled in at the end of the lane and stopped. “You want me to stay?” he asked.

“Stay till I get it started,” I said. “Then go on to work. We’ll be fine.”

He nodded, and I could tell he did not like it, but that man has been married to me for twenty-six years and knows when to wait at the end of a lane.