The Day I Towed My Son’s Truck Home

What Was Underneath

My daddy married Lonnie’s mother when I was eight and Lonnie was thirteen. My own mother had passed when I was four. Lonnie’s daddy had left.

We were two halves of two families pushed together in a little brick house on the edge of town, and for a while it was hard, and then for a long while it was just family.

Lonnie taught me to throw a baseball. I taught him to make gravy, because his mother never could and mine had taught me before she died.

He drove me to my first dance in his old Ford. When I married Boyd, Lonnie stood at the back of the church in a borrowed jacket and shook Boyd’s hand like he meant it.

Lonnie started his towing outfit at twenty four with one used wrecker and a gravel lot his mother co-signed for. He worked hard. I will say that for him every day of my life.

He built that business into four trucks, three drivers, and the town’s impound contract, and for twenty years he was the only call anybody made.

Boyd and I started ours eleven years ago. One medium-duty wrecker, one rollback, a pole barn on six acres outside of town, and me on the phone.

We did not set out to compete with Lonnie. There was more than enough work in Christian County for two outfits, with the parkway and the state roads and the farm traffic in harvest.

Then last spring the sheriff’s office changed the highway rotation. For years Lonnie had gotten nearly every wreck call on the county roads.

The new list split them by turns among every licensed outfit in the county that kept a truck on call around the clock. Boyd kept ours on call. Boyd got about half the highway calls.

It was not rigged. It was a list on a clipboard in the dispatch office, the same list for everybody, and anybody could go look at it.

But Lonnie told the men at the coffee shop on the square that it was rigged, and that Boyd had friends at the sheriff’s office, and that a man who had been there twenty years ought to come first.

He stopped coming to Sunday dinner at his mother’s in May. He stopped waving when our trucks passed on the highway.

I understood some of it. A man’s living is a man’s pride, and his had been cut in half by a clipboard.

But understanding a thing and excusing it are two different roads, and I knew which one I was on the second he said the word nephew back to me with nothing in his voice.