The Spare Key on Dad’s Hook

Brent

Brent came out of the pole barn door with a tape measure still clipped to his belt.

He saw the truck running, saw me behind the wheel and Dad in the passenger seat, and he walked over fast across the gravel.

He is a big man, Brent. Forty-seven, broad through the shoulders, with forearms like fence posts from twenty years of hanging siding. He stopped at my open window and put one hand on the door.

“Merilee, what are you doing?”

“Taking Dad’s truck home,” I said. My voice came out even, which surprised me. “He gave me the spare key this morning. It’s his truck and his key.”

“I’ve got a job starting Monday morning. Forty squares of siding on a house outside Ramsey. I need that truck to pull the trailer.”

“Dad needed it too, Brent. For three months. He’s been walking to the cafe in the frost.”

Brent looked past me at Dad. Dad had his hand still resting on the dash.

He looked back at Brent the way he used to look at a load ticket that did not add up, patient and steady, waiting for it to make sense.

“Clarence,” Brent said. “You know I’m only looking out for you. You’re eighty-five. You’ve got no business on the road.”

Dad was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Brent, I lent it to you for a week. You said a week. I took you at your word, because that’s what men do.”

Brent opened his mouth and closed it again.

“I’m not angry with you, son,” Dad said. “I know you had a bad summer. But a week is a week.”

Brent took his hand off the door. He looked over at his crew, and his crew looked anywhere else. One of them found something very interesting about a box of starter strip.

“My truck’s dead,” Brent said, and his voice had dropped. “The rebuilt engine is twenty-eight hundred dollars I don’t have. I figured the old man wasn’t using it much anyway.”

There it was, the honest version, and I believed him. He was not a thief in his heart. He was a man with a dead truck who had let himself believe a convenient thing.

But he had also told his wife and our whole family that Dad was getting rides.

He had let an eighty-five-year-old man walk two miles a day in the cold so he would not have to make a hard phone call to a mechanic.

I did not say any of that. I put my hand on the gearshift.

That was when a car turned in off the county road.