The Spare Key on Dad’s Hook

The yard

Brent’s two crew boys were loading the work trailer for a Monday job.

They were young, maybe twenty, in sweatshirts with their hoods down, and they stopped when they saw an old man and a woman walking across the gravel toward the pickup.

The truck bed was full of siding scraps, a bucket of bent nails, and a coil of extension cord. I started pulling scraps out and stacking them on the gravel beside the siding pile.

One of the crew boys set down the box he was carrying and came over. He did not say a word.

He just started lifting scraps out beside me, and in two minutes the bed was empty.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Yes ma’am,” he said. He looked at Dad standing by the passenger door and touched the bill of his own cap. Then he went back to the trailer.

I opened the driver’s door, in my red plaid flannel, with my gray-blond hair blowing across my face. The cab smelled like cigarettes, which Dad has never once smoked, and fast food, and wet sawdust. There were coffee cups on the floor and a clipboard on the seat.

I set the clipboard on the roof of the cab, gathered up the cups, and opened the glove box. Dad’s spiral notebook was still there, under a stack of gas receipts that were not his.

I opened it to the last page with writing on it. In Dad’s square pencil numbers, the last entry was dated the second week of August.

One hundred forty-one thousand, two hundred and six miles. Eleven point four gallons.

I put the key in the ignition and turned it to accessory, so the dash lit up. The odometer read one hundred forty-five thousand, two hundred eighty-three.

That was four thousand and seventy-seven miles in three months, on a truck my father drives maybe three thousand miles in a whole year.

Up in the corner of the windshield was the little oil change sticker from the station on Main.

It said the next change was due at one hundred forty-four thousand. The truck was more than twelve hundred miles past due.

I sat there a minute with my hands on the wheel. Then I turned the key the rest of the way, and the old engine caught on the first try and settled into its low, steady idle.

Dad opened the passenger door and climbed in, one hand on the grab handle, the way he has climbed into trucks his whole life. He pulled the door shut and sat there.

Then he reached out and laid his hand flat on the dash, palm down, the way you would rest your hand on the neck of a horse you had not seen in a while.

“There’s my girl,” he said quietly.

I had to look out my own window for a moment. I rolled it down to let the cold air in and the smell out, and I waved to my husband at the end of the lane. He flashed his lights and pulled away toward town.