The Day I Towed My Son’s Truck Home

The Truck

You have to understand what that truck was, to understand what I did next.

Cale started mowing yards the summer he turned fifteen. He had a used push mower and a string trimmer he bought at a yard sale for twenty dollars.

By the end of that first summer he had nine yards. By the end of the second he had fourteen, at thirty five dollars a yard most weeks, and a used zero turn he had paid off himself.

He saved nearly every dollar. He put it in an envelope in the gun safe and counted it every Sunday after church at the kitchen table, out loud, while I washed the dishes and pretended not to listen.

In October he found the Silverado on a lot outside Hopkinsville. A 2004, extended cab, two wheel drive, the 4.8 V8, a little over two hundred and twelve thousand miles, maroon paint gone pink on the hood from twenty summers of sun.

The man wanted thirty five hundred. Cale got him to thirty one hundred after Boyd crawled under it and pointed out the leaking rear main seal.

He was seventeen, so the clerk at the county put the title in both our names. He paid for it in twenties and fifties, counted out on the hood of the truck.

I watched the man count it back, and I watched my son’s face, and I will not forget that face.

The first thing Cale did when he got it home was hang his grandpa’s cap from the rearview mirror.

That cap was my daddy’s. He loaded feed at the same feed store across from Lonnie’s lot for thirty one years, and the cap was green, gone soft and gray at the bill, with the store’s name stitched on the front.

Daddy wore it every working day until his heart quit on him three winters ago. Cale was fourteen. He took the cap off the hook by the back door the week after the funeral and nobody ever asked him to give it back.

So when Harlan, who owns the feed store now, hired Cale to load sacks and stack tubs after school and every other Saturday, it meant more to that boy than a paycheck.

He was going to work where his grandpa worked. He drove there that first morning with his grandpa’s cap swinging from the mirror.

And Lonnie knew whose cap it was. Lonnie had seen my daddy wear it ten thousand days. My daddy had raised Lonnie from thirteen on, put braces on his teeth, and co-signed his first truck loan.

Why I Did Not Just Call Somebody

People have asked me since why I did not call the police chief, or the town, or a lawyer. It is a fair question, and I asked it myself, sitting at that desk.

Here is the plain answer. The town’s impound rate was posted on the board at city hall: one hundred twenty five dollars for a non-consent tow inside the city limits, and that included the hook, the tow and the first twenty four hours of storage.

A fight about the other five hundred and twenty five dollars would have taken weeks.

And my son did not have weeks. He had a job he had held for three hours, a boss who had told him plain that he needed a boy who showed up, and no other way to get to that job after school.

Boyd and I are both on call. Some days we do not see the house before dark.

If that truck sat in Lonnie’s lot while the town sorted out an argument, Cale would be calling in or catching rides, and Harlan would be a kind man about it for about one week. I knew Harlan. Kind does not stack mineral tubs.

So I did not want a fight. I wanted my son’s truck out of that lot by the time his lunch break was over, and I wanted to pay exactly what the town said a person owed, not one dollar more and not one dollar less.