The Truck Waiting at the Curb

They put a hand on the fender and said nothing much. The man in the Vietnam cap from the airport had driven over from Tulsa, and he stood by the toolbox a long while.

Dale Ostrander came, too. I had not told him. He had read about it in the paper and shut his lot for the morning.

He stood at a respectful distance in his thin tie, looked at the truck, then at Cody, and gave one short nod.

“Good-looking truck,” he said.

“Thank you for keeping her,” Cody said.

“She kept herself.” He turned to me. “Ma’am. I’d have sold her to anybody. I’m glad it was you.”

Rick did not come to the fairgrounds. Gwen did, in the passenger seat of our truck, and afterward she drove home alone in the car she had left behind my house.

She came to my carport that evening with an envelope. She would not come in. She stood at the edge of the concrete in her parade coat and held it out to me.

“It’s the first of it,” she said. “Eighty-two hundred dollars. I’ve moved the checking account into my name and I’ve got the card. Lonnie has been paid and he has been told that’s the end of it. This is out of my paycheck, Margo, and it will come every month whether anybody likes it or not.”

“Gwen, he’s your husband.”

“He’s sleeping in the barn, and he’ll sit in a church basement in Tulsa on Tuesday nights, because I found the meeting and told him the time. He’s doing every bit of it. I’m just not making it easy to do it where I can’t see.”

Her chin shook. “I won’t have this family be a place where somebody takes a thing from a child and everybody shrugs. Take it.”

I took it. I put it in the kitchen drawer with the pencil stubs and the rubber bands, and in the spring I had my roof done.

I will not tell you my brother and I became what we had been. We did not. He stayed in the barn through Christmas.

I saw his truck pass at the end of my road more than once that winter, slow, and not turn in.

I did not wave. I did not look away, either.

There is a way of watching a man go by that lets him know the door is a door, and that he is the one who has to knock.

Cody went back after his leave. Every Sunday, his time, a text came through. Start her up for me, Mom? So I did.

That first Sunday I went out to the carport in my robe, with the frost still white on the grass. I turned the key. The engine caught on the first try.

I let her run ten minutes while the oil circulated. Then I turned her off and sat in the quiet, in the cab that still smelled of Old Spice, and I opened the glove box.

The handkerchief was back in it, folded in quarters, the faded blue stripe turned up. Cody had slipped it in the night before he left, the way you leave a thing for luck.

I closed the glove box and got out. I laid my hand flat on the hood, and it was warm, and this time I took it off when I was ready.