The Truck Waiting at the Curb

I did not say a word to her about the carport. I only said, “Gwen, I’m sorry,” and I meant it for her as much as for me.

She had married a man who lied to her across the supper table for two years, and she had found out from a phone call.

Rick never came to my door that week. He did not call.

I understood then that he was waiting to see whether the truck would turn up by itself and spare him the sentence. People do that. I have done it.

So I made no speech and set no trap.

I went to work, and I wrote up flats and rotations, and on Saturday morning I put on my good denim jacket and drove my father’s truck to the Tulsa airport.

His unit had come home to its base in California that week, and the Corps had given him thirty days of leave.

It was a clear, bright day without a cloud in it. The truck ran like a clock. All the way up Highway 169 I kept glancing at the dash, where Cody had put in every gauge himself.

At the arrivals curb an officer in a reflective vest walked straight at me with his hand up. “Ma’am, you can’t leave that here.”

I rolled down the window. “Officer, my son is a Marine. Eleven months over there. His plane just landed, and I wanted this to be the first thing he saw. Please. I’ll stay with it. Ten minutes.”

The officer looked at the truck, and at the toolbox in the bed, and at me. He was a heavyset man with a gray mustache, about my age.

“My boy’s in the Guard,” he said. “I’ll give you ten. If somebody complains, you were never here.”

“Thank you.”

“Fine-looking truck,” he said, and walked away. I stood beside it on the sidewalk with the terminal doors sliding open and shut.

People went by along the walkway with rolling suitcases and car seats and bouquets of balloons.

A man in a ball cap slowed down and read the initials on the toolbox. “Nice work,” he said.

“My son did it.”

“He should be proud.”

“He doesn’t know yet.” The man grinned, tipped his cap, and went on. By the time the doors opened again, three or four strangers had slowed down to look, and none of them knew why.

At 11:58 a tall young man walked out with a duffel bag on his shoulder. He was thinner than when he left, and his hair, shaved to nothing on the ride out, had already started to grow back.

He wore a plain olive green T-shirt and jeans. For a second I did not know him, and then I did, because I would know that walk in the dark.

He saw me, and the grin took over his whole face. “Mom!” Then he saw what was standing behind me, and the grin stopped.

He did not run. He stood stock-still on the curb with the duffel hanging from his shoulder and his mouth slightly open.

“Mom,” he said, very quietly. “That’s my truck.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Uncle Rick said it was in the barn. He sent me a picture last month. It was in the barn.”

“It was in the barn,” I said. “Then it wasn’t.”