The Truck Waiting at the Curb

I did not yell. I have never been able to yell at Rick.

When we were kids he blamed things on me and Mama believed him, and I learned that the quieter I got, the sooner it was over. I picked up my rag and drove home.

I sat at my kitchen table a long while and did not call Cody. This is the part people ask about when I tell it.

Why not call the sheriff? Why not call Gwen? Why not tell Cody and let the Marine Corps send him home?

I had reasons, and none of them were noble.

The title still had Rick’s name on it.

When Daddy died, Rick handled the paperwork, and Cody was under eighteen, so it was easier to leave the old title as it was and promise to sign it over when the boy came of age.

Then Cody left, and nobody ever got around to it. Everyone in the family had said for years that the truck was Cody’s.

On paper it was Rick’s. The sheriff would have taken one look at the title and called it a family matter.

And Cody was on the far side of the world with a few weeks of his deployment left.

If I told him, he would spend those weeks sick with it, and he had a job where a distracted mind can get somebody hurt.

More than any of that, I would not hand my son a fight to carry off the plane. I decided I would not tell him until I had the truck.

That was the plan, and I want you to see how thin it was. I did not know where the truck was.

I had no idea what I would do when I found it. I had about two weeks.

For six nights, after the shop closed and the supper dishes were done, I searched every used lot and classified listing between Claremore and Tulsa. I typed “1978 Ford F-150” and “sky blue and white” and “351.”

There are more 1978 Fords in the middle of Oklahoma than you would believe.

I found a rusted one in Collinsville, a dark green one in Catoosa, and a lifted monster with a lightning bolt on the tailgate.

On the sixth night I clicked on a listing from a lot off Sheridan Road in Tulsa. The picture was crooked, the way a salesman takes one in a hurry.

The truck sat under a string of plastic flags, and in the bed of it, plain as day, was a steel toolbox with a pair of initials welded into the lid.

I turned the phone off. I turned it back on. The price was eighty-two hundred dollars. The next morning was Saturday.

I called the lot the minute it opened, told my boss I would be late, and drove to Tulsa.

Dale Ostrander turned out to be a thick man in his sixties, in a short-sleeved shirt and a tie that had seen better decades. He sold used trucks and made no apology for it.

“You’re the lady who called,” he said. “Marcus says you went quiet on the phone.”

“It’s my son’s truck,” I said. Dale looked at the truck, and then at me. “Come on in the office. I want to tell you something, and I’d rather you were sitting down.”