The Truck Waiting at the Curb

I drove her home myself, slow, with a dealer’s temporary tag in the back window and my father’s handkerchief on the seat beside me.

I parked her in my carport under a gray tarp, and I went to work Monday morning as if nothing had happened.

Dale kept his word. The title came in the mail on Wednesday, signed over by a man who could not tell him one thing about the truck, and I took it down to the tag agency in Claremore.

I put it in Cody’s name. Not mine, and not my brother’s.

The woman at the counter had known me nineteen years from the tire shop, and she looked at the old signature and then at me and stamped it without a word.

I did not tell Rick. For two days I said nothing to anyone. Gwen called on the third.

We have always gotten along, Gwen and I. She is a quiet, steady woman who teaches second grade and grows tomatoes the size of softballs.

“Margo,” she said. “Have you talked to Rick this week?”

“Not since the first Sunday.”

“I think something’s wrong.” Her voice was thin. “He’s not sleeping. Last night I found him out in the barn at two in the morning, sitting on a bucket. And the checking account is short.

There’s nearly seven thousand dollars I can’t account for. I asked him, and he said it was a truck repair. But we didn’t have a truck repair.” She took a breath. “Margo, do you know something?”

I looked at the carport through the kitchen window. A gray tarp. The corner of a white roof.

“Gwen,” I said, “I think you need to ask him again. And I think you should sit down when you do.”

“What is it?”

“It isn’t mine to tell.” I want to be fair about that. I did not send Gwen to him with a weapon. I sent her with a chair.

She called back the next night, and this time she did most of the talking.

A man had phoned the house that afternoon, someone named Lonnie, and told her to tell Rick the first of the month was still the first of the month.

Rick had carried the phone out to the barn and shut the door. When he came back in, he told her it was a man from the gravel yard about a delivery.

“It’s cards, Margo,” Gwen said. “I’ve been standing in my own kitchen for an hour putting it together. A garage in Catoosa. The men from the plant. Two years of Tuesday and Thursday nights I thought were overtime.”

I sat down. I had not known the reason until that minute, and it came to me all at once, the way a flat tire does. Dale had been right, and so had the stocking feet.

“There’s something else,” Gwen said. “The parade.”

“What parade?”

“Claremore’s Veterans Day parade, the Saturday before. Rick chairs the committee. Last month at the post he stood up and told every man there that Cody’s truck would lead it. He ordered a banner. Welcome Home Lance Corporal Cody Hale.”

She laughed, and it was not a good sound. “He told them that, and the truck was already gone. He must have thought he could win it back before anybody asked.”