The Day I Towed My Son’s Truck Home

The Lot

Lonnie’s lot sits on four acres behind a six foot chain link fence with barbed wire on top.

The office is a single wide trailer at the front with a set of wooden steps and a window unit air conditioner. Behind it, the cars sit in rows on gravel, some of them for months, some for years.

His three drivers were sitting on the tailgate of a service truck by the fence eating their lunch out of paper sacks when I turned in.

I knew all three of them. One of them I had gone to school with. They watched the rollback come through the open gate, and they stopped chewing.

Cale was waiting just inside the gate in his red feed store T-shirt, hands shoved in his pockets, his brown hair flattened from the cap he wore at work.

It had warmed to sixty by noon, and he had left his jacket on the dock. He looked about twelve years old to me just then, and he also looked like a man.

I could see his truck from the gate. It was in the second row, nose out, the front end still a little high where the wheel lift had set it down rough.

The driveshaft was lying in the bed of the truck on top of his mowing tarp. And through the windshield I could see my daddy’s cap, hanging crooked from the mirror where the tow had swung it.

I parked the rollback, set the brake, and got out. I put on my work jacket, the navy one with the reflective stripe, and my leather gloves.

I put my hair up out of my face. I took the folder with the title and the rate sheet from the seat.

“Come on,” I said to Cale.