The Day I Towed My Son’s Truck Home

The phone on the dispatch desk rang at 9:41 on a Tuesday morning, and I knew from the first breath on the line that it was my son and that something was wrong.

“Mom,” Cale said. “My truck’s gone.”

I was sitting in the corner of our pole barn where Boyd had built me a desk out of a solid core door and two filing cabinets.

The radio was turned low to the county channel.

“Gone how,” I said. “Gone stolen, or gone hooked?”

“Hooked,” he said. “Mr. Harlan says he saw one of Uncle Lonnie’s trucks pull it out about nine. It’s sitting across the road in his lot. I can see it from the dock.”

I closed my eyes. I did not have to ask whose lot.

There is only one impound lot in our town, and it belongs to my stepbrother, Lonnie Fetterhoff, and it sits right across the state highway from the feed store where my son had started his first job at seven o’clock that morning.

“Did you park where Harlan told you?” I asked.

“I parked where everybody parks,” Cale said. “In the feed store gravel lot, the strip by the old tire shop. The other two guys park there. Mr. Harlan parks there half the time.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he cleared it hard, the way his daddy does. “Mom, I’m supposed to be stacking mineral tubs. I can’t stand out here on the phone.”

“Then go stack them,” I said. “I’ll call you back on your break. You did nothing wrong. Go do your job.”

He hung up. I sat there a second with the phone in my hand, and then I dialed the number I knew better than my own, because I had been dialing it most of my life.

The Price

Lonnie answered on the fourth ring, which is how he answers when he knows who is calling.

“Fetterhoff Towing and Recovery.”

“Lonnie, it’s Shay. You’ve got Cale’s truck. The maroon Silverado from the feed store.”

“I’ve got an abandoned 2004 Chevrolet that was parked on private property posted for towing,” he said. I could hear him leaning back in his chair. I could hear the squeak of it. “Owner of that strip by the old tire shop signed a standing order with me two years ago. Sign’s on the fence plain as day.”

“He parked it there at quarter till seven,” I said. “It was there two hours. That is not abandoned, and you know it.”

“Two hours, two days. Unauthorized is unauthorized.” He let that sit. “Release is six hundred and fifty. Cash or card, card’s three percent extra.”

I wrote the number on the call log without meaning to. My hand just did it. Six fifty. Then I asked him, very calmly, what it was for.

He was ready. He had it written down already, and that told me more than anything else did. “Two fifty for the tow. One fifty driveshaft labor, because that truck was locked and in park and I had to drop the shaft to pull it. Hundred admin. Seventy five gate fee. Seventy five storage.”

“Storage,” I said. “It’s been in your lot forty minutes.”

“Minimum one day.”

“Lonnie,” I said. “That’s your nephew’s first truck. He paid for it himself. He’s been at that feed store three hours.”

There was a little quiet on the line, and in that quiet I heard the thing underneath. Then he said it, slow, like he had been saving it.

“Maybe the boy learns where to park,” he said. “Maybe his daddy learns something too.”

And he hung up on me.