The Eight Tires I Took Back

Royce came out of his shop with a white foam coffee cup in his hand and stopped dead at the edge of the gravel, the way a man stops when he sees a snake on the step.

It was eight in the morning on a Saturday in early November, clear and cold, the kind of Sandhills morning where the sun comes in low and every fence post throws a shadow forty feet long.

I was already on my knees beside his truck with the floor jack set under the drive axle and Lyle’s yellow impact gun in my hand.

I had on my gray hooded sweatshirt under the orange safety vest Lyle keeps in the truck, faded jeans, black work gloves, my hair pulled back in a low ponytail. The compressor was chugging behind me on the flatbed.

“Darla,” he said. “What in the world are you doing?”

I didn’t answer him. I fitted the 33mm socket onto the first lug nut, squeezed the trigger, and let the gun answer for me. It rattled that nut loose in about two seconds.

I want to say up front that I am not a woman who goes looking for trouble. I keep books. I run a yard.

I bake for funerals. I had never in my life walked onto another person’s property to take something off his truck.

But those were our tires on his truck, and I had the numbers to prove it, and his cattle run started Monday.

If I waited, our tires were going to roll out of that lot under a load of calves and never come back the same.

So let me back up and tell it the way it happened.

My husband, Lyle Ostrander, drove truck for the same outfit out of North Platte for nineteen years.

Good company, fair boss, and every one of those nineteen years he drove a truck that belonged to somebody else.

He never complained about it. Lyle is not a complainer. But every so often, usually at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, he would say, “One of these days, Darla,” and I knew exactly what he meant.

I started a savings account for it when our son was in eighth grade.

A little out of every paycheck, a little out of what I earned keeping books for two of the ranches out our way, and every dollar of the calf check from my dad’s old cows after he passed.

In September we finally did it. We financed a 2019 Kenworth with a little over four hundred thousand miles on it from a dealer in Grand Island.

Red, clean, a sleeper, with an engine the dealer’s mechanic swore by and Lyle’s own mechanic checked twice.

The payment is $1,410 a month. I know that number the way some women know their dress size.

I have it written on the inside cover of my ledger, and I look at it every time I open the book.

The truck came off the lot with drive tires that were legal but tired, maybe a third of their tread left. Lyle said he could run them through the winter. I said no.

I said a man starting his own business does not start it on somebody else’s worn-out rubber.

I said if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right from the first mile.

So the week before his first load, we took the Kenworth to a tire shop in North Platte and had eight new drive tires mounted on his wheels. Size 11R22.5, a budget brand, $575 apiece, mounted and balanced, out the door.