The Spare Key on Dad’s Hook

Annette

It was my sister’s gray sedan. Annette brings Brent his lunch on Saturdays, a sandwich and a thermos of soup in a paper sack.

She has done it for as long as they have been married, which is eleven years this spring.

She parked beside the pickup and got out with the paper sack in her hand. She saw Dad first, sitting in the passenger seat with his cap on, and her face changed.

“Dad? What are you doing out here?”

“Getting my truck, honey,” Dad said. “Merilee’s driving.”

Annette came to my open window. She looked at me, and then she looked at Brent, standing with his hands in his jacket pockets.

Then she looked past me at the dash, because the odometer was right there, lit up green.

She leaned in. I held the spiral notebook open on the seat so she could see Dad’s last entry from August. She read the number in his pencil. She read the number on the odometer.

Annette works the drive-up window at a bank in Vandalia. She counts money for a living. She did the subtraction in her head in about two seconds, and I watched it land.

“Four thousand miles,” she said.

Nobody answered her. The engine idled. Up in the bare trees a crow said something and flew off.

“Brent.” She did not raise her voice. Annette has never raised her voice in her life. “You told me Dad was getting rides with Purvis. You told me that at my own table.”

“Annette, I figured…”

“Purvis doesn’t drive. Purvis hasn’t driven in two years. I’d have known that if I’d thought about it for one minute instead of taking your word.” She looked at Dad. “Dad, have you been walking?”

“It’s good for the heart,” Dad said. “Doc says so.”

Annette shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she looked at the windshield, at the oil change sticker up in the corner. She read that too.

Then she turned around and looked at her husband for a long moment. His crew had stopped pretending to load the trailer.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Annette said, very quietly. “Merilee is going to drive Dad to the station on Main in St. Elmo. You and I are going to follow them in my car.”

She did not take her eyes off him. “And you are going to fill that truck with gas, and pay for the oil change it should have had a thousand miles ago, and put new wipers on it, because I can see from here those are shot.”

“Annette, the crew…”

“The crew can eat my soup.” She handed the paper sack to the nearest crew boy, who took it like it might be hot. “Get in the car, Brent.”

Brent stood there a moment longer. Then he took his hands out of his pockets, walked around to the passenger side of my sister’s sedan and got in.

The station on Main

It is twenty-some minutes from Brent’s shop to St. Elmo. I drove slow, with Dad beside me and Annette’s gray sedan behind us the whole way, and the November sun bright on the stubble fields.

Dad did not say much. Somewhere past the river he started humming, low, and it took me a mile to place it.

It was the hymn they sang at Mom’s funeral, the one about the morning breaking.

“You all right, Dad?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m better than fine. This old girl pulls a little left. I’ll have them check the front end.”

The station on Main sits right across the street from the cafe.

It is the old kind, two pumps out front and one service bay, and the man who owns it has changed the oil in Dad’s truck since 2006.

I pulled up to the pump. Annette pulled in behind me. It was a quarter past one on a Saturday, and the cafe across the street was full of the noon crowd, farmers in from the fields and widows in their church coats and a table of retired men by the front window.

Purvis was at that table. I saw him see us. I saw him set his cup down and say something to the man beside him, and I saw the whole table turn and look out the window.